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Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk
A meditation on Sigmund Freud's theories about the link between creativity and mortality is based on the essay "On Transience" as well as other literary works, in an analysis that places Freud's beliefs against the backdrop of his teen years, struggle with cancer, and death. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
- GenresPsychology
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 30, 2016
A physician once wrote of an encounter he had with a young poet and his quiet friend. They spent one summer afternoon walking through the countryside, looking through the beauty of nature and the passing landscapes and Dolomites. He observed that the poet who, despite admiring the beauty of the surroundings, expressed that he felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the fact that all this was fated to extinction, and that this landscape and its lush vegetation will vanish when winter came, just like human beauty and life, and ‘all that he would otherwise have loved and admired’ are losing their worth by the inevitable doom which is the fate of all.
The doctor, in an attempt to console the poet, told him that the worth of things or people is not diminished by virtue of its ephemeral nature; rather, it increases its worth. He said, ‘Transience value is scarcity value in time’. That the beauty of nature after it was destroyed by winter comes back each spring; that a flower that blooms only once is not on any account less lovely, that a work of art or an intellectual achievement does not lose worth because of its temporal limitation.
To him, these were convincing arguments, but he noticed that his attempts to console the poet and his sympathetic friend did not make a remarkable impression upon them. He soon realized that there was an emotional factor which was affecting the two, and this is the revolt in their minds against mourning. They were expressing this view to avoid the pain or despair of having to accept the loss of something or someone, like in this case, the beauty of the summer landscape - which eventually through the transition to another season, will change or vanish. This emotion or thought prevents them from expressing joy, despite their admiration of it. The summer landscape in itself is representative to many other realities, goals, or beings which individuals have the capacity to admire, to be attached to, and sometimes, by all means, would secure and protect from being taken away from them.
But what causes the pain that results in mourning that these two individuals are wanting to avoid? According to the doctor (whom I will identify as we go on), at the earliest stages of life, human beings’ capacity for love is directed to their own selves. Later, still at those early stages, that love is directed to other objects or people significant in their lives like parents or immediate family members. If the objects or people with whom that love had been directed to, are destroyed or lost, that love is freed and then either directed towards other objects, pursuits or people, or return once again to the self. He says that ‘why this detachment’ of love from objects or people lost be such a painful process is a mystery. When that love clings to the beloved, and will not accept the loss or parting – that is the painful process of mourning.
But why are the two companions of the doctor refuse to ‘mourn’ by expressing their ‘lack of joy’ despite their admiration of the beautiful landscape? This brings us to another event in the physician’s life which, at some point will shed light to the mystery of why pain in loss and parting is an accompaniment of mourning.
The doctor learned the death of the daughter of a colleague of his. In expression of condolences, he shared his own experience that after losing his daughter and grandson, he ‘became tired of life permanently’. After proposing to his colleague a project which would serve as a ‘distraction’ to alleviate his grief, he told him, ‘one has the choice of dying oneself or acknowledging the death of the loved one, which again comes very close to your expression that one kills the person.’ This statement came after the doctor responded to his friend’s meditation on his own grief, which the latter described as a second killing of his child. Both thus expressed their belief that ‘every act of mourning conceals a betrayal, a kind of killing of the loved person by letting the person go; and that guilt over this murder endows mourning with its nearly bottomless agony, and explains why so many refuse, unconsciously, to mourn’. In mourning, by letting go of the dead, one kills again what one misses most; yet the sense of guilt for this ‘murder’ brings with it a renewal of life, because otherwise, swallowed by grief, the mourner would turn his back on life.
The doctor whom I had been referring to is Sigmund Freud. The events described in the idyllic summer walk with his two companions were written on a brief essay ‘On Transience’ which was intended as a contribution for a publication called ‘Das Land Goethes’. The essay in itself is a metaphorical representation of his encounters with people, including his patients, poets, friends, family members, a princess, and his daughter; it addresses a very important existential question: what value does life hold in the face of extinction?
What is most surprising is that the summer walk described on the essay, did not occurred at all. The conversation he had with his two companions, were likely to have been exchanged under chandeliers and crowded halls, during the fourth international psychoanalytical congress. His two companions were the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and a psychoanalyst and writer, Lou Andreas Salome. What was described on the essay is a metaphor, a kind of literary remembering to make sense of troubling existential questions, to combine the summary of his encounters with people and their views, and the joy he felt in exploring nature and visiting the summer countryside with his family.
***
This book is a meditation of Freud's conceptualization of existential pain, loss, mourning, and making meaning of these awareness of human finitude, both individual and collective, personal and historical. It is accompanied with biographical tidbits of three personalities: Freud, Andreas-Salome and Rilke. The interpretations of loss and mourning found on this book resonates with another work, Mourning and Melancholia.
The doctor, in an attempt to console the poet, told him that the worth of things or people is not diminished by virtue of its ephemeral nature; rather, it increases its worth. He said, ‘Transience value is scarcity value in time’. That the beauty of nature after it was destroyed by winter comes back each spring; that a flower that blooms only once is not on any account less lovely, that a work of art or an intellectual achievement does not lose worth because of its temporal limitation.
To him, these were convincing arguments, but he noticed that his attempts to console the poet and his sympathetic friend did not make a remarkable impression upon them. He soon realized that there was an emotional factor which was affecting the two, and this is the revolt in their minds against mourning. They were expressing this view to avoid the pain or despair of having to accept the loss of something or someone, like in this case, the beauty of the summer landscape - which eventually through the transition to another season, will change or vanish. This emotion or thought prevents them from expressing joy, despite their admiration of it. The summer landscape in itself is representative to many other realities, goals, or beings which individuals have the capacity to admire, to be attached to, and sometimes, by all means, would secure and protect from being taken away from them.
But what causes the pain that results in mourning that these two individuals are wanting to avoid? According to the doctor (whom I will identify as we go on), at the earliest stages of life, human beings’ capacity for love is directed to their own selves. Later, still at those early stages, that love is directed to other objects or people significant in their lives like parents or immediate family members. If the objects or people with whom that love had been directed to, are destroyed or lost, that love is freed and then either directed towards other objects, pursuits or people, or return once again to the self. He says that ‘why this detachment’ of love from objects or people lost be such a painful process is a mystery. When that love clings to the beloved, and will not accept the loss or parting – that is the painful process of mourning.
But why are the two companions of the doctor refuse to ‘mourn’ by expressing their ‘lack of joy’ despite their admiration of the beautiful landscape? This brings us to another event in the physician’s life which, at some point will shed light to the mystery of why pain in loss and parting is an accompaniment of mourning.
The doctor learned the death of the daughter of a colleague of his. In expression of condolences, he shared his own experience that after losing his daughter and grandson, he ‘became tired of life permanently’. After proposing to his colleague a project which would serve as a ‘distraction’ to alleviate his grief, he told him, ‘one has the choice of dying oneself or acknowledging the death of the loved one, which again comes very close to your expression that one kills the person.’ This statement came after the doctor responded to his friend’s meditation on his own grief, which the latter described as a second killing of his child. Both thus expressed their belief that ‘every act of mourning conceals a betrayal, a kind of killing of the loved person by letting the person go; and that guilt over this murder endows mourning with its nearly bottomless agony, and explains why so many refuse, unconsciously, to mourn’. In mourning, by letting go of the dead, one kills again what one misses most; yet the sense of guilt for this ‘murder’ brings with it a renewal of life, because otherwise, swallowed by grief, the mourner would turn his back on life.
The doctor whom I had been referring to is Sigmund Freud. The events described in the idyllic summer walk with his two companions were written on a brief essay ‘On Transience’ which was intended as a contribution for a publication called ‘Das Land Goethes’. The essay in itself is a metaphorical representation of his encounters with people, including his patients, poets, friends, family members, a princess, and his daughter; it addresses a very important existential question: what value does life hold in the face of extinction?
What is most surprising is that the summer walk described on the essay, did not occurred at all. The conversation he had with his two companions, were likely to have been exchanged under chandeliers and crowded halls, during the fourth international psychoanalytical congress. His two companions were the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and a psychoanalyst and writer, Lou Andreas Salome. What was described on the essay is a metaphor, a kind of literary remembering to make sense of troubling existential questions, to combine the summary of his encounters with people and their views, and the joy he felt in exploring nature and visiting the summer countryside with his family.
***
This book is a meditation of Freud's conceptualization of existential pain, loss, mourning, and making meaning of these awareness of human finitude, both individual and collective, personal and historical. It is accompanied with biographical tidbits of three personalities: Freud, Andreas-Salome and Rilke. The interpretations of loss and mourning found on this book resonates with another work, Mourning and Melancholia.
December 10, 2007
A meditation on Freud's grappling with mortality, mourning, and grief. Since the founding of psychoanalysis can be traced to Freud's personal depression after the death of his father, this topic is tremendously important on several levels. Since Freud lived to the age of eighty-three, he had to mourn many friends and loved ones, including his first chow, Jo-Fie. He understood, however, that a refusal to mourn was also a refusal to appreciate life on its own terms. Von Unwerth is least interesting when discussing Freud's ties to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Von Unwerth's point seems to be that artists and psychoanalysts have very different ways of conceptualizing death and mourning, which is not an idea I find very compelling or meaningful. Overall, though, Freud's Requiem is tremendously moving--and painful, since Von Unwerth's portrayal of Freud shows how none of us can ever be fully prepared to accept death.
February 5, 2022
Very interesting stuff about Sigmund Freud and some of his thoughts on death. The first 90 pages were unremarkable but set the stage for the remainder, from which come these quotes...
"To a person of Freud's time, Goethe was the German Shakespeare, a vernacular literary genius in an age that gloried in the protean capacities of the individual. Like Shakespeare before him, Goethe was regarded not only as the poet most representative of his culture and language, but also as having been a principal force in the creation and transformation of German into a European, literary language."
"As with Richard Wagner later, Goethe's early popularity was cult-like, an early version of celebrity, and as with modern celebrity, it held up a singular, distorted image of the poet."
"Thus the final poetic lines of 'Faust' stage a battle between faith and skepticism, implying that human life may be a symbol for something else - the 'undescribable' - that is realized here on earth, led on by the puzzling Eternal Feminine, and thus tantamount to a religion; and at the same time that existence stands for nothing at all, and man's soul is nothing but an empty, deceitful mirage."
""Goethe's lines reprise a struggle with which Freud grappled throughout his life, and which he spoke of in his Goethe Prize address - the struggle between artistic and scientific says of knowing, between intuition and reason."
"But in his letter to Rolland in which he excused his doubts about the 'oceanic feeling,' he had concluded that he was as ' closed to mysticism as to music.' Lumping art and spirituality together, Freud underscored their common roots in a realm beyond reason - an irrational underworld more akin to the primitive urges of our ancestors - more akin, perhaps, to madness."
"It is the emblem of all human striving against the inevitable decline and extinction we face, individually and as a race; it is, to borrow another of Freud's favorite lines, from Goethe, 'the best of what you know, which cannot, after all, be told to boys' - to the innocent - for it is a knowledge won only by the experience of loss and the intimation that death alone conveys. The bell stands, in a word, for poetry, by which an artist shoulders both the burden of creation and the even heavier knowledge of the transient fate of that creation - and yet takes it up anyway."
"For Freud, as for Schiller, poetry and life were bound together inescapably in time. It is eternity, and the 'eternal' nature of art, that is illusory. What gives both meaning, sense, and vitality is the certainty of death."
"The moment one inquiries about the sense of value of life one is sick, since objectively neither of them has any existence. IN doing so one is only admitting a surplus of unsatisfied libido, and then something else must happen, a sort of fermenting, for it to lead to grief and depression. These explanations of mine are certainly not on a grand scale, perhaps because I am too pessimistic. There is going through my head an advertisement which I think is the boldest and most successful American one I know of. 'Why live, when you can be buried for ten dollars?"
"Freud himself marveled at dogs' most unhuman capacity for loyalty and unencumbered affection, the freedom from ambivalence that made them the enviable picture of good mental health."
"In its short chapters, the Princess imagines Topsy's world, free of human concerns about the past and future, grounded firmly in the delights of life, and burdened neither by painful memory nor by fear of death. Anchored in the present, Topsy draws no conclusions from experience other than the pleasure or the pain of the present; she has no intimation of a time when 'now' will cease to be."
"Likewise, Freud believed, the power of memories dissipated when those memories were brought to light, into consciousness. Only in the unconscious did memories have the power that moved one to neurosis, or to dreams. It was the work of the analyst, like that of the archaeologist, to disinter the buried memories, restore to them the voice their repression had denied them, and so deprive them of their dangerous influence."
"Despite the larger crisis looming over Europe - including the uncertain future of his four sisters in Austria, who would eventually perish in Nazi concentration camps - Freuds' statues mattered to him."
"This is 'Werther's' urgent theme, and with it that of all Romanticism: that the world of feeling must triumph over that of reason, though this triumph may be realized only in death."
"To a person of Freud's time, Goethe was the German Shakespeare, a vernacular literary genius in an age that gloried in the protean capacities of the individual. Like Shakespeare before him, Goethe was regarded not only as the poet most representative of his culture and language, but also as having been a principal force in the creation and transformation of German into a European, literary language."
"As with Richard Wagner later, Goethe's early popularity was cult-like, an early version of celebrity, and as with modern celebrity, it held up a singular, distorted image of the poet."
"Thus the final poetic lines of 'Faust' stage a battle between faith and skepticism, implying that human life may be a symbol for something else - the 'undescribable' - that is realized here on earth, led on by the puzzling Eternal Feminine, and thus tantamount to a religion; and at the same time that existence stands for nothing at all, and man's soul is nothing but an empty, deceitful mirage."
""Goethe's lines reprise a struggle with which Freud grappled throughout his life, and which he spoke of in his Goethe Prize address - the struggle between artistic and scientific says of knowing, between intuition and reason."
"But in his letter to Rolland in which he excused his doubts about the 'oceanic feeling,' he had concluded that he was as ' closed to mysticism as to music.' Lumping art and spirituality together, Freud underscored their common roots in a realm beyond reason - an irrational underworld more akin to the primitive urges of our ancestors - more akin, perhaps, to madness."
"It is the emblem of all human striving against the inevitable decline and extinction we face, individually and as a race; it is, to borrow another of Freud's favorite lines, from Goethe, 'the best of what you know, which cannot, after all, be told to boys' - to the innocent - for it is a knowledge won only by the experience of loss and the intimation that death alone conveys. The bell stands, in a word, for poetry, by which an artist shoulders both the burden of creation and the even heavier knowledge of the transient fate of that creation - and yet takes it up anyway."
"For Freud, as for Schiller, poetry and life were bound together inescapably in time. It is eternity, and the 'eternal' nature of art, that is illusory. What gives both meaning, sense, and vitality is the certainty of death."
"The moment one inquiries about the sense of value of life one is sick, since objectively neither of them has any existence. IN doing so one is only admitting a surplus of unsatisfied libido, and then something else must happen, a sort of fermenting, for it to lead to grief and depression. These explanations of mine are certainly not on a grand scale, perhaps because I am too pessimistic. There is going through my head an advertisement which I think is the boldest and most successful American one I know of. 'Why live, when you can be buried for ten dollars?"
"Freud himself marveled at dogs' most unhuman capacity for loyalty and unencumbered affection, the freedom from ambivalence that made them the enviable picture of good mental health."
"In its short chapters, the Princess imagines Topsy's world, free of human concerns about the past and future, grounded firmly in the delights of life, and burdened neither by painful memory nor by fear of death. Anchored in the present, Topsy draws no conclusions from experience other than the pleasure or the pain of the present; she has no intimation of a time when 'now' will cease to be."
"Likewise, Freud believed, the power of memories dissipated when those memories were brought to light, into consciousness. Only in the unconscious did memories have the power that moved one to neurosis, or to dreams. It was the work of the analyst, like that of the archaeologist, to disinter the buried memories, restore to them the voice their repression had denied them, and so deprive them of their dangerous influence."
"Despite the larger crisis looming over Europe - including the uncertain future of his four sisters in Austria, who would eventually perish in Nazi concentration camps - Freuds' statues mattered to him."
"This is 'Werther's' urgent theme, and with it that of all Romanticism: that the world of feeling must triumph over that of reason, though this triumph may be realized only in death."
May 3, 2019
I can't get this image out of my head of Freud as a cute old man collecting little ancient statues. Whenever he got a new one he would keep it on his desk for weeks. Also he would bring it with him to put on the table when he ate dinner.
When he had to leave Vienna because of the Nazis he could only bring one of them with him.
This isn't at all what the book is about by the way.
When he had to leave Vienna because of the Nazis he could only bring one of them with him.
This isn't at all what the book is about by the way.
December 22, 2008
I really enjoyed this book. It was an intro to Freud for me and an enjoyable one. Have had interesting dreams ever since I put it down.
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June 2, 2018In his obscure essay "On Transience", Freud writes of a summer walk in 1913 in the company of a "young but already famous poet" - assumed to be Rainier Maria Rilke - and his reserved friend, assumed to be Rilke's former lover Lou Andreas-Salome. In reality, this walk probably never happened, but in his essay about it, Freud talks about grief, death, mourning and melancholy. What "Freud's Requiem" does is it takes this little known work as a chance to talk about those things in detail, while also examining all three characters and tackling subjects like creativity and psychoanalysis (Rilke never wanted to go into analysis as he feared it would harshly correct his creative spark with red pen), friendship both real and imagined (including Freud's relationship to Jung, and the impossibility of a connection between Freud and Rilke), muses and romanticism (Lou Andreas-Salome escaped Rilke's smothering affection and later kept her distance even as his friend). A refreshing idea to start a biography from such a small and completely speculative event such as this walk - and very well executed.
December 4, 2018
A workout for the mind, an invitation to consider the nature of experience, of interior life, of art and death. An elegantly written essay about Freud, Rilke, their mutual friend Lou Andreas-Salome, and their respective inquiries into the nature of art, the mind, mortality and grief, with appropriate references to Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Keats, and Romain Rolland, who posed to Freud the question of “oceanic feeling." Freud thought, essentially, that the making and appreciation of art was a mystery. He declared himself insensitive to music. He collected antiquities, but his interest in them was “archeological” rather than artistic. His uncovering of feeling is archeological in its nature. The book explores the nature of beauty. Freud: it’s beautiful because it’s transitory. Rilke: It can’t be enjoyed because it’s transitory and all things are headed for oblivion. Also explains the guilt inextricably woven into grief. If you refuse to mourn, you are stuck; unable to move on to life. If you do mourn, the letting go of the beloved is another killing, for which you feel guilt.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews