Sigmund Freud photographed by Max Halberstadt

• ON Andrew Nagorski’s intriguing Saving Freud: A Life in Vienna and an Escape to Freedom in London, (The ego and I, Review, September 21) it’s worth noting Mark Edmundson’s The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days (2007) quoting, for any brave writers today, Freud’s subversive challenge: “Everything I write is bound to cause misunderstanding and indignation.”

Indeed, the ritual of psychoanalytical therapy had, as its central objective, analysing all figures of authority, and Freud predicted the rise of tyranny (to account for humanity’s revolt against its own better interests), and the birth of the fundamentalist’s urge.

Centuries had seen the rise of patriarchal religions in Islam and Christianity.

From the Freudian perspective, authoritarian religion and authoritarian politics were interlinked, fed off each other, borrowed techniques, modes of persuasion and iconography, and trafficked in the same sorts of miracle and mystery.

To Freud, the self-aware person is continually in the process of deconstructing various “god replacements”.

Let’s acknowledge and confront that scenario.

MIKE BOR
St George’s Fields, W2