Freud, as we know, did not hate America, he regretted it, an altogether more generous and sophisticated response, or so it may seem at first. If the Herr Professor never quite rose to the waggish hauteur of Oscar Wilde — who declared, “America was the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between” — he was certainly not without his mots. “Yes, America is gigantic,” he once confided to his disciple and hagiographer, Ernest Jones, “but a gigantic mistake.” Or again: “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”

What’s not to like, we may wonder — and Freud is more than willing to tell us: “The Americans are really ‘too bad’…Competition is much more pungent with them, not succeeding means civil death to everyone and they have no private resources apart from their profession, no hobby, games, love, or other interests of a cultured person.” What is more, the political life of America is inevitably debased, suffering as it does from “the psychological poverty of groups,” that is, the tendency of the rabble to sap all subtlety and scruple from the patrician gentlemen whose job it is to govern. Perhaps toward the end of his life, Freud disliked America simply because he realized that, unlike himself, it was not going away; that, indeed, it was the future.

Mark Edmundson possesses somewhat more faith in the promise of American life, and much of the vigor and fascination of his new book, “The Death of Sigmund Freud” (Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $25.95), arises from the sense one gets that he is attempting to broker some kind of rapprochement between the ideals (if not the reality) of this country and the incurable skepticism of the great thinker. Freud believes that the most we could hope for was the replacement of neurotic misery with ordinary human unhappiness. We can imagine what he would have thought about the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Mr. Edmundson, to be sure, does not propose any straightforward reconciliation; rather, it is quietly implied that America, a nation founded on a desire to learn from and thereby avoid repeating the blunders of the Old World, might be more compatible with the goals of psychoanalysis than Freud was willing to admit.

No doubt the father of psychoanalysis would have been rather less than sanguine, but it remains the case that Mr. Edmundson is expanding and adapting the ideas of his master, for as he puts it: “At the core of Freud’s humanism, measured as it generally is, there lies the belief that if a person can describe his inner life with some accuracy— apply words where before there has only been silence and compulsion — then he can be just a little bit freer, and maybe (dare one say it?) a little bit happier than he has been in the past.” Democracy allows one the freedom to put such a vision into action. Fascism, on the other hand, provides considerably less elbow room, and it is Freud’s speculative forays into the totalitarian mind that lay at the pulsing center of Mr. Edmundson’s book.

According to Freud, human beings are attracted to the authority of strong leaders because these deformed gods have the power to finesse our excruciating sense of self-division into wholeness. Mr. Edmundson proves himself a deft and genial explicator: “The leader takes the place of the over-I, and for a variety of reasons, he stays there. What he offers to individuals is a new psychological dispensation. Where the individual superego is inconsistent and often inaccessible because it is unconscious, the collective superego, the leader, is clear and absolute in his values.” And, of course, with the dictator, the problem of our supererogatory aggression is neatly solved: It gets directed at whatever unfortunate minority happens to be available at the time.

Freud was an old man, patiently succumbing to cancer of the jaw, when Hitler’s brigade of cretinous musclemen lumbered into Vienna and began looting and murdering Jews. He was dismayed but he was not surprised. Thanks to some powerful friends, including Marie Bonaparte, great-grandniece of the Emperor, and those no-goodniks, the American government, he and his family were able to flee to London. Freud’s conduct during his last year and a half — and, of course, the work to which he devoted his life — represents a picture of genuine greatness of which Hitler’s preening demagoguery was the grotesque caricature. Freud, that is, possessed true authority, that superiority of intellect or ability that we recognize in others and do our best to emulate. It is the upward-tending force in life, which, to take one well-known example, Rilke saw in the archaic torso of Apollo and understood as saying to him: You must change your life.

Freud’s greatness lies in the tenacious lucidity with which he hailed and embraced experience. His mind, as Mr. Edmundson reminds us, was ample and hospitable: Reality was always welcome there. It is deeply galvanizing, for example, to hear an 82-year-old man speak of “my dear old cancer with which I have been sharing my existence for sixteen years. At that time naturally no one could predict which of us would prove the stronger.” Even as his mouth was being colonized by what proved to be an inexorable tumor, Freud refused to take anything more potent than an aspirin, not wanting to impair in the least his mental faculties. Such was his thirst for life, even to the bitter lees.

“The Death of Sigmund Freud” is a superb meditation on two kinds of authority, and in its sober, qualified reverence for Freud — a man not without what George Eliot would call his “spots of commonness,” as his reflexive anti-Americanism suggests — Mr. Edmundson provides an example of the kind of relationship to greatness that he is advocating. Without elevating him to the status of a secular godhead — indeed, by underlining his limitations — Mr. Edmundson presents us with a figure who still has the power to rouse us from our complacency, whose stern, exacting eyes continue to remind us what we are apt to forget: that we must work to change our lives.

Mr. Harvey is on the staff of the New York Review of Books. He last wrote for these pages on Ann Wroe’s “Being Shelley.”