Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk

This absorbing, thoughtful narrative explores Sigmund Freud's provocative ideas on creativity and mortality and their roots in his history, while searching for broader lessons about love, memory, mourning, and creativity. Written in 1915 during winter and wartime, Freud's little-known essay 'On Transience' records an afternoon conversation with 'a young but already famous poet' and his 'taciturn friend' about mortality, eternity, and the 'sense' of life. In 'Freud's Requiem', the philosophical disagreement between Freud and his companions - who may have been the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his muse and former lover Lou Andreas-Salomé - becomes a prism through which to consider Freud's creativity as a response to his own experiences, from his passionately curious, lovestruck teenage years to his death after a long struggle with cancer in 1939. Drawing on a variety of literary and historical sources - Homer, Goethe, as well as Freud's own writings, including his letters - 'Freud's Requiem' is both an intimate personal drama and a spirited intellectual inquiry.