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‘Some seventy-seven years after Sigmund Freud's death, I had the tremendous privilege of meeting him for coffee’. As first sentences go, this one is certainly arresting. We know at once that this is no ordinary book about psychotherapy. This novel and creative idea, of a ‘posthumous interview’, is the uniquely captivating premise of this book. Brett Kahr whets our appetite with this startling remark, and the unfolding of the interview brings layer upon layer of information, insight and interpretation, as any good psychoanalytic endeavour should.
This is a book of opposites: on the one hand, it is erudite, well-researched, thorough and scholarly - just what you might want and expect from an academic book by a highly respected psychotherapeutic clinician and writer. On the other, it is all invention. Brett Kahr has done something extraordinary: he has imagined what it would be like to arrange a meeting with Freud now, in the present, in Freud's favourite coffee house in Vienna, Cafe Landtmann, and he has written a ‘transcript’ of the conversations that ensued. These range from a description of Freud's taste for Viennese pastries and Trabuco cigars to a detailed examination of his life, his work, his milieu, his discoveries and their genesis and his attitudes towards them.
Artistic licence abounds. Brett Kahr imagines how Freud responds to being brought back to life now, having been dead since 1939; how he is both gratified and amazed that he is so profoundly famous, that his ideas have become disseminated so widely, that they are a part of popular culture, not just of academic discourse and clinical treatment. In doing so, Kahr is himself reflecting on the far-reaching currency of psychoanalytic thinking, and brings home to the reader the astonishing changes wrought by Freud in our attitudes to the mind and to the treatment and understanding of mental illness.
Kahr's lifelong study of Freud, the man and his work is evident throughout this highly entertaining volume, but