Freud's Requiem

Matthew von Unwerth explores Sigmund Freud''s provocative ideas on the connections between creativity and mortality in this elegant literary musing. Taking as his starting point the essay On Transience, Von 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 after a long struggle with cancer in 1939. 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.