On Redeeming Freud

In this Literary Hub essay, Stephen O’Connor reflects on the origins of his new novel, We Want So Much to Be Ourselves, and traces how memory, family history, psychoanalysis, and the Holocaust entered the book’s imaginative world. The novel began with a painful anecdote told to him by a German Jewish friend about a woman who, in the 1930s, was about to leave Europe for Palestine but turned back to Berlin, where she later faced the fate prepared by the Nazis. For O’Connor, the anecdote became fiction when the protagonist changed in his mind into a psychoanalyst father figure, eventually imagined as a student of Sigmund Freud living through Nazi Germany. The essay is also a personal meditation on O’Connor’s own father, a Freudian psychoanalyst who taught him as a child that people often do not understand the reasons behind their own actions. That insight shaped O’Connor’s lifelong fascination with the unconscious, even as his father’s later alcoholism and personal collapse made him skeptical of psychoanalysis. O’Connor explains how researching psychoanalysis under the Nazis and visiting Auschwitz Birkenau changed his view of Freud’s theory of the death drive. Rather than simply defending Freud, the essay asks how fiction can connect private memory, historical trauma, and difficult questions about violence, self deception, and humanity.

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