Book description
When Hitler invaded Vienna in the winter of 1938, Sigmund Freud,
old and desperately ill, was among the city's 175,000 Jews dreading
Nazi occupation. Here Mark Edmundson traces Hitler and Freud's oddly
converging lives, then zeroes in on the last two years of Freud's
life, during which he was rescued and brought to London. Edmundson
probes Freud's ideas about secular death and the rise of fascism and
fundamentalism, and grapples with the demise of psychoanalysis after
Freud's death now that religious fundamentalism is once again shaping
world events.
Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of
Virginia. A prize-winning scholar, he has published a number of works
of literary and cultural criticism, including Literature Against
Philosophy, Plato to Derrida, and Teacher: The One Who Made
the Difference. He has also written for such publications as
the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the
Nation, and Harper's, where he is a contributing editor.
