Monday, January 13, 2014

The Absolute Mystery of Good and Evil

“In the late autumn of 1909, two men who would each transform the world were living in Vienna, Austria. They were in almost every way what the poet William Blake called ‘spiritual enemies.’ One was Sigmund Freud, the creator of psychoanalysis, who would become the most renowned and controversial thinker of the twentieth century. In 1909, Freud was in vigorous middle age, fifty-three years old and at the height of his powers. The other man, whose impact on humanity would be yet greater, was young.
          The young man had come to Vienna in hopes of making his fortune as an architect and an artist….People who met the man sometimes had doubts about his sanity: none of them imagined that Adolf Hitler, for that, of course, is who the young man was, would ever be of consequence in the world.”

From, The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days, by Mark Edmundson

This excellent biography reads like a novel. And a thrilling one at that. Edmundson captures the peculiar personalities of Freud and Hitler with amazing clarity and offers some ghastly yet warm surprises about both their lives. Adolph Hitler loved animals. Sigmund Freud smoked 20 cigars a day. Do we ever really get to know all there is about anyone? Both men poured their lives into their work until there wasn't anything left of either of them. The consequences, of course, were dramatically different.

Even if you are not at all interested in psychology or Freud or Hitler, that’s okay; this book is about humanity and how people often do the most extraordinary and sometimes shocking things in the pursuit of ambition and need. And it’s also about how every person is fundamentally shaped by all of their experiences, especially the experiences of childhood. Those experiences could not have been more contrasting for these two powerful and perplexing men.


This is a book I will read again.


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