Books by Mark Edmundson

In a culture of the Self that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, we spare little thought for the great ideals--courage, contemplation, and compassion--that once gave life meaning. Here, Mark Edmundson makes an impassioned attempt to defend the value of these ancient ideals and to resurrect Soul in the modern world.

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. This book 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.

In a brilliant assessment of American culture on the eve of the millennium, Mark Edmundson asks why we're determined to be haunted, courting the Gothic at every turn-and, at the same time, committed to escape through any new scheme for ready-made transcendence.

Presents the psychoanalyst's therapeutic directives against his more visionary impulses in a magisterial comparative study of such writers as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Keats. Cross-fertilizing psychological doctrine with the literary canon, this volume offers an understanding of Freud's writings on the self.