An account of the final two years in the life of Sigmund Freud and their legacy describes how, in 1938, the elderly, ailing, Jewish Freud was rescued from Nazi-occupied Vienna and brought to London, where he finally found acclaim for his achievements, battled terminal cancer, and wrote his most provocative book, Moses and Monotheism.

When Hitler invaded Vienna in the winter of 1938, Sigmund Freud, old and desperately ill, was among the city's 175,000 Jews dreading Nazi occupation. Here Mark Edmundson traces Hitler and Freud's oddly converging lives, then zeroes in on the last two years of Freud's life, during which he was rescued and brought to London. Edmundson probes Freud's ideas about secular death and the rise of fascism and fundamentalism, and grapples with the demise of psychoanalysis after Freud's death now that religious fundamentalism is once again shaping world events.

A convincing critique of the neglect of death in psychoanalytic theory, arguing that death has been a repressed subject in psychoanalysis.

Killing Freud takes the reader on a journey through the 20th century, tracing the work and influence of one of its greatest icons, Sigmund Freud. A devastating critique, Killing Freud ranges across the strange case of Anna O, the hysteria of Josef Breuer, the love of dogs, the Freud industry, the role of gossip and fiction, bad manners, pop psychology and French philosophy, figure skating on thin ice, and contemporary therapy culture. A map to the Freudian minefield and a masterful negotiation of high theory and low culture, Killing Freud is a witty and fearless revaluation of psychoanalysis and its real place in 20th century history. It will appeal to anyone curious about the life of the mind after the death of Freud.

The “gripping” true story of the founder of psychoanalysis—and how he made it out of Austria after the Nazi takeover (The Independent). Sigmund Freud was not a practicing Jew, but that made no difference to the Nazis as they burned his books in the early 1930s. Goebbels and Himmler wanted all psychoanalysts, especially Freud, dead, and after the annexation of Austria, it became clear that Freud needed to leave Vienna. But a Nazi raid on his house put the Freuds’ escape at risk. With never-before-seen material, this biography reveals details of the last two years of Freud’s life, and the people who helped him in his hour of need—among them Anton Sauerwald, who defied his Nazi superiors to make the doctor’s departure possible. The Escape of Sigmund Freud also delves into the great thinker’s work, and recounts the arrest of Freud’s daughter, Anna, by the Gestapo; the dramatic saga behind the signing of Freud’s exit visa and his eventual escape to London; and how the Freud family would have an opportunity to save Sauerwald’s life in turn. “Full of fascinating insights and anecdotes . . . Cohen draws copiously on the correspondence between Freud and [his nephew] Sam to paint a vivid picture of their complex and deeply troubled family.” —Daily Mail “An illuminating look at the end of the life of a giant of psychology.” —Kirkus Reviews

Compares and contrasts the beliefs of two famous thinkers, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, on topics ranging from the existence of God and morality to pain and suffering.

These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past and 'civilized' modernity. In Totem and Taboo he explores institutions of tribal life, tracing analogies between the rites of hunter-gatherers and the obsessions of urban-dwellers, while Mourning and Melancholia sees a similarly self-destructive savagery underlying individual life in the modern age, which issues at times in self-harm and suicide. And Freud's extraordinary letter to Einstein, Why War? - rejecting what he saw as the physicist's naïve pacifism - sums up his unsparing view of history in a few profoundly pessimistic, yet grimly persuasive pages.

(Dover thrift editions).

The book consists of three essays and is an extension of Freud’s work on psychoanalytic theory as a means of generating hypotheses about historical events. Freud hypothesizes that Moses was not Hebrew, but actually born into Ancient Egyptian nobility and was probably a follower of Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian monotheist. Freud contradicts the biblical story of Moses with his own retelling of events, claiming that Moses only led his close followers into freedom during an unstable period in Egyptian history after Akhenaten (ca. 1350 BCE) and that they subsequently killed Moses in rebellion and later combined with another monotheistic tribe in Midian based on a volcanic God, Jahweh. Freud explains that years after the murder of Moses, the rebels regretted their action, thus forming the concept of the Messiah as a hope for the return of Moses as the Saviour of the Israelites. Freud said that the guilt from the murder of Moses is inherited through the generations; this guilt then drives the Jews to religion to make them feel better.

A collection of some of Freud's most famous essays, including ON THE INTRODUCTION OF NARCISSISM; REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING THROUGH; BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE; THE EGO AND THE ID and INHIBITION, SYMPTOM AND FEAR.