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Like others, I have long known of Freud the conquistador, the intellectual tyrant, the biologist, the lonely explorer, the exhorter, the pater familias, and the promoter. I had imagined that his grizzled visage had been studied from every possible angle, that a fresh portrait was no longer possible. That was before I read Matthew von Unwerth's remarkable book, Freud's Requiem.
Aptly titled as a dirge for the repose of the souls of Freud's dead, von Unwerth's is a portrait of the discoverer of psychoanalysis as seen through his experiences of personal loss and through “his preoccupation with the eventual disposition of the dead” (p. 53). It is a unique, important, beautifully rendered portrayal of a Freud heretofore familiar to only a few: Freud as a man of sorrow. From von Unwerth's achievement we come to know a new Freud, not so much because this author brings us novel information about his subject, but by the meticulous way he has arranged so much of what has long been known but never before grasped as a whole. We come to know a sentimental, melancholic, even Romantic Freud—a Freud struggling above all with his impulse to detach himself from deeply emotional experience in order to minimize the pain that inevitably follows separation and loss. We are all visitors, and this is the problem of human transience.
In a brief paper titled “On Transience,” composed for a 1915 Festschrift honoring Goethe, Freud imagines himself on a mountain walk with his friend Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). The Alpine meadows are ablaze with wild-flowers, yet Rilke cannot experience the beauty of the scene because of his awareness that, with the coming of winter, the flowers will die. Freud offers, interpretively, that the poet's and his friend's inability to feel the beauty of the moment is due to the “revolt in their minds against mourning” (p. 85)1 the grief will be too painful for Rilke and Andreas-Salomé to risk attachment. Grief is painful,