Book Description
A thought-provoking meditation on grief, mortality, and the soul, through a reading of Freud's argument about creativity with poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Matthew von Unwerth, a young Freudian analyst, explores Freud's provocative ideas on the connections between creativity and mortality in this elegant literary musing.

Taking as his starting point Freud's essay "On Transience," in which the analyst describes a walk with two unnamed companions (poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Rilke's lover, writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé), Unwerth examines the origins of human creativity from a psychoanalytic standpoint, tracing the arc of Freud's beliefs on the subject from his passionately curious teenage years to his death in 1939 after a long struggle with cancer.

Drawing on a variety of literary and historical sources-from The Odyssey to Goethe to Freud's earliest letters-Freud's Requiem is both an intimate personal drama and an absorbing intellectual debate. In the spirit of books by Alain de Botton, Lesley Chamberlain, and Dava Sobel, it begins with a meeting of the minds among three of Europe's great intellects-an event Freud may have significantly reimagined for his essay-and weaves a delicate and moving treatise on art, love, death, and the way the three are inextricably linked.

About the Author
Matthew von Unwerth is director of the Abraham A. Brill Library of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and a coordinator of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination. He is an advanced candidate in psychoanalytic training in New York City, where he is in private practice.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A thought-provoking meditation on grief, mortality, and the soul, through a reading of Freud's argument about creativity with poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Matthew von Unwerth, a young Freudian analyst, explores Freud's provocative ideas on the connections between creativity and mortality in this elegant literary musing.

Taking as his starting point Freud's essay "On Transience," in which the analyst describes a walk with two unnamed companions (poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Rilke's lover, writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé), Unwerth examines the origins of human creativity from a psychoanalytic standpoint, tracing the arc of Freud's beliefs on the subject from his passionately curious teenage years to his death in 1939 after a long struggle with cancer.

Drawing on a variety of literary and historical sources-from The Odyssey to Goethe to Freud's earliest letters-Freud's Requiem is both an intimate personal drama and an absorbing intellectual debate. In the spirit of books by Alain de Botton, Lesley Chamberlain, and Dava Sobel, it begins with a meeting of the minds among three of Europe's great intellects-an event Freud may have significantly reimagined for his essay-and weaves a delicate and moving treatise on art, love, death, and the way the three are inextricably linked.