This thoughtful and engaging book concentrates on the last two years of Freud’s life, when he fled Nazi-occupied Vienna for London. Edmundson traces the twin trajectories of Freud and Hitler, whose rise dismayed but did not surprise the father of psychoanalysis; he had long been studying the allure of the charismatic, despotic leader offering the illusory promise of peace and plenitude. It was, he believed, intrinsic to human nature. He grapples with the demise of Freud’s ideas and the rise of fundamentalism – a different kind of intellectual seduction.