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The pandemic has left us with weird remnants and artefacts. Many of us still work in buildings where intermittent ‘one-way system’ floor stickers are wearied and frazzled reminders of the measures we all took to simply not see each other face to face. Funny how, in some instances, these stickers, stamped into the ground by so much foot traffic, have become almost fused to the surface and are now difficult to remove. The deep marks from the covid-19 pandemic are likewise still there in our institutions and organisations and as parts of the strange and new constructions we all now inhabit and are getting used to in our own minds. Remote work, for example, has been adopted now by many practitioners, whereas in the past it might have been regarded with more suspicion. It is fascinating, then, to think of what Freud would have made of all this, and Brett Kahr’s book goes some way to exploring how the founder of Psychoanalysis would have responded to our current situation.
Split into five chapters and leavened throughout by an array of surprising references and anecdotes, the book looks towards the profound dislocations and sufferings Freud had to endure himself. Readers will already be aware of the violent anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution that caused Freud and his family to flee Austria for a home in Hampstead in North West London, where his statue still stands outside the nearby Tavistock Clinic. Less known, perhaps, are the lacerating personal and professional attacks Freud withstood from his medical colleagues, the sudden death of his daughter Sophie Halberstadt-Freud during the Spanish Flu, and the inoperable cancer that robbed him of his energy and made it difficult for him to speak. One gets a sense of this great man’s forbearance from a scene Kahr paints in a chapter fittingly titled ‘Freud’s recipe for creativity and survival’. Freud and a colleague are speaking about Franz Rosenzweig, a German philosopher and theologian, who, due to the devastating consequences