Trouble in My Head: A Young Girl's Fight with Depression By Mathilde Monaque. Vermillion. 2007. 176pp. £7.99 (pb). ISBN 9780091917239 - Monochrome Days: A Firsthand Account of One Teenager's Experience with Depression By Cait Irwin with Dwight L. Evans & Linda Wasmer Andrews. Oxford University Press. 2007. 184pp. £17.99 (hb). ISBN 9780195310047

Abstract

these were, in fact, two men who did inhabit the same world and walk the same streets. For Freud, the Nazis were not a 'special invention of the Germans' (p. 83), but a particular manifestation of an inevitable human drive. What Edmunsen could have made more apparent is that while they were not a special invention of the Germans, the Nazis were an invention, a technology that was, like the radio or the automobile or the theory of relativity or psychoanalysis itself, particular to a certain culture and point in time. Freud was not surprised that the Nazis came to be a force in Europe because he understood human nature, and also because he understood his age. That Freud's ideas are relevant today should also not come as a surprise to anyone, and really should hardly need restating, since Freud's world is our world too: a world of fascism and fundamentalism. We flatter ourselves if we think that our world, our problems, our fascists and fundamentalists are so different from his. That all of this is not made immediately apparent in The Death of Sigmund Freud is, I think, at least in some part due to the Freud with which Edmunsen presents us. In any biography the subject is reconstructed by the author, though this is truer for no-one more than Sigmund Freud. Edmunsen's chosen Freud is the romantic hero, the man who often stands apart and rebels against the petty restrictions and regulations of his culture. Since Freud, or at least a part of Freud, liked to see himself in this way, Edmunsen's portrayal is not unjust, and it is certainly a character with whom we have become familiar over the century of Freudian scholarship. It is just that this portrayal of Freud somewhat clouds our understanding of the historical Freud, and an appreciation of how his ideas work, then and now. Further danger of indulging too much in the romantic view of Freud is that it opens the door to exactly the sort of tyranny that Freud warns us to avoid, and which Edmunsen otherwise intelligently addresses: the overinvestment in the hero and the abandonment of ambivalence for the easy comforts of authority. Edmunsens's conclusion is somewhat confused, mirroring too often I think Freud's naïve and vain belief in Enlightened 'civilisation' with Edmunsen's own naïve and vain belief in 'democracy', and I suppose that it is unfair to expect Edmunsen to provide a thorough consideration of the socioeconomic bases for modern fundamentalism, but his conclusion offers narrow views of some more potently difficult and complex issues. I would dearly have liked to have loved this book, but I do not because it does not sufficiently challenge my understanding of Freud, psychoanalysis, a certain historical moment or the modern world. However, as an introduction to Freud, Freudian theory and Freudian thinking on group behaviour, it is exceptional: clear, accessible and intriguing. This book about the death of Sigmund Freud will make Freud come alive, and provide a good launching point to go and then read Fromm and Winnicott. Or, even better, to go and read more Fr...