Matthew Von Unwerth, Freud's Requiem

Freud's Requiem

Matthew Von Unwerth

Riverhead, Jul 2005, $23.95, 256 pp.

ISBN: 157322247X

Psychoanalyst Dr. Matthew Von Unwerth jumps off Sigmund Freud's poetic essay "On Transience" written in 1915, but apparently rarely evaluated especially in light of the massive volumes on the works of the "father of psychoanalysis." The appendix provides the entire short work in which Freud describes a walking talk on life and death, mortality and grief with two friends (Unwerth makes a case they are lovers Lou Andreas Salome and Rainer Maria Rilke). The tome provides information on the pair including their break-up and makes an argument that Freud had more of a fatherly relationship with the pair. However, the prime focus of the tome is Freud, brilliant and troubled, sentimental and detached, emotional and intellectual. In other words the doctor is also the patient.

This is an engrossing look at Dr. Freud built mostly from a psychoanalytical speculation of the state of mind of the sixty something doctor as war is all over the continent. In some ways it feels like an insightful treatise, but very entertaining as Freud has rarely been seen as more intriguing than with Dr. Unwerth's placing him on the couch for the audience to observe.

Harriet Klausner