Matthew Von Unwerth

A workout for the mind, an invitation to consider the nature of experience, of interior life, of art and death. An elegantly written essay about Freud, Rilke, their mutual friend Lou Andreas-Salome, and their respective inquiries into the nature of art, the mind, mortality and grief, with appropriate references to Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Keats, and Romain Rolland, who posed to Freud the question of “oceanic feeling." Freud thought, essentially, that the making and appreciation of art was a mystery. He declared himself insensitive to music. He collected antiquities, but his interest in them was “archeological” rather than artistic. His uncovering of feeling is archeological in its nature. The book explores the nature of beauty. Freud: it’s beautiful because it’s transitory. Rilke: It can’t be enjoyed because it’s transitory and all things are headed for oblivion. Also explains the guilt inextricably woven into grief. If you refuse to mourn, you are stuck; unable to move on to life. If you do mourn, the letting go of the beloved is another killing, for which you feel guilt.… (mere)

Freud’s Requiem
Matthew von Unwerth

Subtitled “Mourning, memory and the invisible history of a summer walk”, von Unwerth writes an extended essay on Freud’s brief contribution to a publication intended to raise money for German libraries in 1915. Freud’s contribution to Das Land Goethes was a brief essay entitled “On Transience”. The essay opens with a recounting of a summer walk with a poet and a “taciturn friend” that von Unwerth identifies as Ranier Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas Salome. The poet and friend find their enjoyment of the beauty of the Dalmation Alps tarnished by the remembrance that all of the experiences are temporary. Freud, reflecting on his own experiences with loss of a love from his adolescence, thinks that transience enhances the beauty, and that the regret of the others is due to failure to do the work of mourning.
Rilke is an uninteresting character; I do not like self-styled poets who can do nothing but dream. Lou Salome is a very interesting woman, lover of Rilke, jilted Nietzsche, and an associate of Freud in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is now a literary confection, no longer the science that Freud thought it was, but the philosophical concepts of mind and self he wrote about are valid and interesting.… (mere)