Grenfell of Labrador: A Biography Book

Completely bowled over. Here is the letter I wrote to the author, Mark Edmundson:

Dear Professor Edmundson,

I recently read Elisabeth Roudinesco's book on Freud, in which she referred to yours on Freud's death.  I have just finished reading it and am so bowled over.  I have long had a feeling of affinity for Freud without quite knowing why--nor having ever studied Freud in any serious way.  My age (69) and the current state of the world (and retirement, I suppose), have led me to try to understand, in a less haphazard way, the mysteries of existence and other mysteries such as the election of Donald Trump and his command over so many people, in and out of government.

Your book has contributed more to my sense of understanding something of these varied strands than anything I have read in a long time.   I have had a hunch about Freud's thought, that although he meant it to be scientific it was art, literature, philosophy.  I also perceived that he was never of less than two minds about his ideas however much he might protest--which is a quality I share and appreciate.  As you say, about reading Freud, that he brought to his ideas "irony, humor, detachment, and due openness," as his writings changed and evolved. 

The ideas about Fascism, its "emphatic eye-intensity" and mass rallies, and gold-plated elevators all make so much sense out of Trump-era, as well as the notion that peace is boring, tedious and than we humans harbor a great sense of deprivation that needs to be filled with intoxications.  "The hero of civilization ... knows how to live with the anxiety that conflicting and unresolved wishes bring and he takes this anxiety as a condition of life, rather than as something for which he needs to find a personal or cultural remedy."  I also find so fruitful the discussion of authority, both positive and toxic, the need to discriminate between the two, and the need for a new kind of authority, for a hero of sublimation, who is "a divided being who achieves his authority not be being self-willed and appetitive, but by intelligently rechanneling his impulses and teaching others to do the same."

The story your book tells is vivid and heartbreaking--Freud's sisters destroyed by the Nazis, the hole in Freud's jaw.  But also funny:  I loved the encounter between Dali and Freud.  In the end, I find so much to admire in Freud and feel a great--if not transferential--affection for him.  I will be working through these ideas for a while.  Thank you for a marvelous book.