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The Guardian -- Saturday April 29, 2006 -- Walking
with Freud -- By Frances Wilson -- In Freud's Requiem, Matthew
von Unwerth speculates on a summer walk that never happened, a bond
of friendship never forged, and the transience of material
existence. In this sense his book is about non-events, which makes
it a witty variation on the current vogue for biographical
"micro-history", in which the author selects an actual event - such
as a dinner party, a shipwreck or an untimely death - in order to
reflect more deeply on the life and times of his subject...
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American Journal of Psychiatry -- February 2006 --
Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a
Summer Walk -- PAUL ROAZEN, Ph.D., Cambridge, Mass. -- Matthew
von Unwerth, Director of the Brill Library of the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute as well as a candidate in psychoanalytic
training, has written a beautiful and moving account of the
intellectual and philosophic implications of Freud’s brief pre-World
War I contact with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Unwerth reconstructs
as best as possible the facts of the Freud-Rilke relationship, even
though they turn out to be not always fully in accord with what
appears in...
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Forward -- October 28, 2005 -- Freud's Requiem:
Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk --
Matthew von Unwerth Riverhead, 256 pages, $23.95. -- Mourning with
Freud -- By DINAH M. MENDES -- Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory,
and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk" by Matthew von Unwerth
is a meditation, a fugue — conceivably a psychoanalytic novel that
has at its nexus Freud's brief essay "On Transience," written in
1915 for a commemorative volume in tribute to Goethe. In the essay,
Freud described a "summer walk through a smiling countryside in the
company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous
poet." The poet and friend cannot be reconciled with the
simultaneous awareness of transience and mortality...
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History News Network -- October 11, 2005 --
Review of Matthew von Unwerth's Freud’s Requiem (Riverside/Putnam,
2005) -- By Leslie Kitchen -- Sigmund Freud, a child of the
nineteenth century, and a giant of the twentieth, continues to
discomfit us. Although his bits and pieces, such as the unconscious,
repression, resistance, projection, and sublimation have become part
of the cultural armamentarium of nearly every educated person, the
value of the body of his work is more deeply contested now than it
was at the time of his death in 1939. Although warmly defended by
loyalists of psychoanalysis, Freud has become a punching bag for
critics. Some of the objections have been acute and penetrating,
concentrating...
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The Anniston Star – August 28, 2005 -- Freud's Requiem by Matthew von Unwerth
-- Author Matthew von Unwerth tells us that, while still an
adolescent, Sigmund Freud was so hungry to learn English that he
took up Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and "memorized the text in its
original language." Anyone with cursory knowledge of Freud knows the
man possessed an amazing memory. What they might not know is the
full glory of his imagination.
"One can only surmise the joy he felt as he mouthed the words, in
that strange, wonderful tongue, thrilled by the grace, precision,
and lofty power of its cadence," writes Unwerth. "He might have
almost believed himself president of the United States, standing
humbly on a field of grief." Relying as much on Freud's
imagination...
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The Providence Journal – August 14, 2005 --
Freud's emphasis on mourning gets a close, supple look -- BY SAM
COALE -- This beautifully written, evocative and lyrical book by an
apprentice psychoanalyst and coordinator of the Philoctetes Center
for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination focuses on a little
known essay by Freud, "On Transience," written in 1915, which deals
with the experience and necessity of human mourning. From this piece
Von Unwerth conjures up and gracefully reproduces Freud's
psychoanalytical theories, linking them to Freud's own life...
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Speakeasy/The Loft -- Summer 2005 -- Freud’s
Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer
Walk -- Matthew von Unwerth, Riverhead Books/$23.95 -- Invisible
Attachments -- By Patrice Clark Koelsch -- AN OLDER MAN recounts the
story of a summer walk in the country with a young poet and their
mutual friend. Tainted by the knowledge of its seasonal brevity, the
poet derives no joy in the idyllic scenery. The narrator takes the
dolor of the poet as the symptom of an immature longing for
immortality: In constrast, he argues that the evanescence of beauty
is essential to one’s appreciation of it. The narrator is Sigmund
Freud, the poet is Rainer Maria Rilke, the mutual friend...
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New York Times Book Review -- August 7, 2005 -- Freud's Requiem by Matthew von Unwerth
-- In 1915, Sigmund Freud jotted down some thoughts "On Transience"
that had supposedly struck him during a walk with the poet Rainer
Maria Rilke and Rilke's former lover, the writer and Freud disciple
Lou Andreas-Salome. For von Unwerth, this obscure musing becomes the
occasion for an elegantly meandering essay about Freud's life and
the intellectual world he moved in.
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Library Journal -- July 2005 -- Starred Review --
Freud's Requiem by Matthew von Unwerth -- During the summer of
1913, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud, and their mutual
friend Lou Andreas-Salome took a walk, which allowed Freud to
crystallize his thinking about mortality, nature, art and life’s
meaning into the short but remarkable essay “On Transience”
(included as an appendix). This requiem by von Unwerth, director of
the A.A. Brill Library of the New York Psychoanalytic [Society and]
Institute and a candidate in psychoanalytic training, is delicate,
powerful, and full of beauty...
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Kirkus Reviews – June 15, 2005 -- A thoughtful
riff on Sigmund Freud's brief 1915 essay "On Transience," in which
he considers death and mourning -- Von Unwerth, director of the
Abraham A. Brill Library of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute &
Society, takes us back to 1913 when Freud began a brief relationship
with poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a meeting that occasioned "On
Transience" (text appears in appendix). After a brief account of the
meeting with Rilke, von Unwerth traces the careers of both men-and
of their mutual friendship with Lou Andreas-Salome, who met Rilke in
1897 and who became his lover...
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Publishers Weekly -- May 23, 2005 -- Freud's
Requiem by Matthew von Unwerth -- Psychoanalyst Von Unwerth's
lyrical meditation focuses on an obscure and largely unexamined
essay of Freud's, "On Transience," which he wrote in 1915, when he
was almost 60. Unwerth mines the brief piece (reprinted in an
appendix) for its biographical content. In the essay Freud describes
talking about mortality on a walk in the countryside with friends
whom Unwerth identifies as the writer Lou Andreas Salome and her
former lover...
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