The Denial of Death (15 page)

not that [faith] annihilates dread, but remaining ever young, it is continually developing itself out of the death throe of dread.
⁴⁸

In other words, as long as man is an ambiguous creature he can never banish anxiety; what he can do instead is to use anxiety as an eternal spring for growth into new dimensions of thought and trust. Faith poses a new life task, the adventure in openness to a multidimensional reality.

We can understand why Kierkegaard had only to conclude his great study of anxiety with the following words which have the weight of an apodictic argument:

The true autodidact [i.e., the one who by himself goes through the school of anxiety to faith] is precisely in the same degree a theodidact … So soon as psychology has finished with dread, it has nothing to do but to deliver it over to dogmatics.
⁴⁹

In Kierkegaard, psychology and religion, philosophy and science, poetry and truth merge indistinguishably together in the yearning of the creature.
⁵⁰

Let us now turn to the other towering figure in the history of psychology who had the same yearning, but for whom these things did not consciously merge. Why is it that probably the two greatest students of human nature could hold such diametrically opposed opinions of the reality of faith?

I have tried in a few pages to show that Kierkegaard understood the problem of human character and growth with an acuity that showed the uncanny mark of genius, coming as it did so long before clinical psychology. He anticipated some of the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory and pushed beyond that theory to the problem of faith and so to the deepest understanding of man. This statement has to be defended, which is one of the tasks of this book. Inevitably, part of that defense must be some kind of sketch of the problem of Freud’s character as I see it. Freud also pushed ps
ychoanalytic theory to its limits but did not come out at faith; his character should tell us at least some of the reason.

Psychoanalysis as a Doctrine about Mans Creatureliness

One of the striking things about the Freudian revolution in thought is that we still haven’t been able to digest it, nor have we been able to ignore it. Freudianism stands over and against contemporary man like an accusing specter. In this sense, as many have remarked, Freud is like a Biblical prophet, a religious iconoclast who spoke a truth that no one wants to hear and no one may ever want to hear. And that truth is, as Norman O. Brown reminded us, that Freud had no illusions about man’s
basic creatureliness;
he even quoted St. Augustine.
²
On the problem of man’s basic creat
ureliness Freud evidently felt an affinity with a religion that he otherwise had no high opinion of—to put it mildly. He had no high opinion of any religion and yet, in a matter as fundamental as the basic nature of man, we could stand him shoulder to shoulder with the Augustinian Kierkegaard.

This is a crucial matter; it explains why Freud’s very pessimism and cynicism is still the most contemporary thing about his thought: it is a pessimism grounded in reality, in scientific truth. But it explains much more. Freud’s dogged insistence on man’s creatureliness explains almost all by itself why he insisted on an instinctual view of man, that is, it explains what is
wrong
with psychoanalytic theory. At the same time, with a slight twist to that theory, such as was given first by Rank and now by Brown, the psychoanalytic emphasis on creatureliness emerges as the lasting insight
on human character.

On the first point, Freud’s insistence on creatureliness as instinctive behavior, there has been no better revelation than in Jung’s autobiography. Jung recalls the two occasions, in 1907 and 1910, when he discovered that he could never be friends with Freud because he could never follow the bias of his sexual theory. Let me use Jung’s own words at some length to report on this critical encounter in the history of thought at the 1910 meeting in Vienna:

I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable b
ulwark.” He said that to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, “And promise me this one thing, my dear son: that you will go to church every Sunday.” In some astonishment I asked him, “A bulwark—against what?” To which he replied, “Against the black tide of mud”—and he hesitated for a moment, then added—“of occultism.” … What Freud seemed to mean by “occultism” was virtually everything that philosophy and religion, including the rising contemporary science of parapsychology, had learned about the psyche.

And about the earlier 1907 meeting. Jung reveals:

Above all, Freud’s attitude toward the spirit seemed to me highly questionable. Wherever, in a person or in a work of art, an expression of spirituality (in the intellectual, not the supernatural sense) came to light, he suspected it, and insinuated that it was repressed sexuality. Anything that could not be directly interpreted as sexuality he referred to as “psychosexuality.” I protested that this hypothesis, carried to its logical conclusion, would lead to an annihilating judgment upon culture. Culture would then appear as a mere farce, the morbid consequence of repressed sexuality.
“Yes,” he assented, “so it is, and that is just a curse of fate against which we are powerless to contend.” … There was no mistaking the fact that Freud was emotionally involved in his sexual theory to an extraordinary degree. When he spoke of it, his tone became urgent, almost anxious… . A strange, deeply moved expression came over his face… .
³

For Jung, such an attitude was unacceptable because it was not scientific. Freud seemed to him to have abandoned his normally critical and skeptical manner:

To me the sexual theory was just as occult, that is to say, just as unproven an hypothesis, as many other speculative views. As I saw it, a scientific truth was a hypothesis which might be adequate for the moment but was not to be preserved as an article of faith for all time.
⁴

Jung was confused and put off by this aspect of Freud, but today it is very clear to us what was at stake. Freud evidently had the most intense belief that his authentic talent, his most private and cherished self-image and his mission for that talent, was that of a truth-teller on the unspeakables of the human co
ndition. He saw these unspeakables as instinctive sexuality and instinctive aggression in the service of that sexuality. “Won’t they get a surprise when they hear what we have to say to them!” he exclaimed to Jung as they sighted the New York skyline in 1909.
⁵
The “occult” was anything that lied about man’s basic creatureliness, anything that tried to make out of a man a lofty, spiritual creator, qualitatively different from the animal kingdom. This kind of self-deluding and self-inflating “occultism” was ingrained in the human spirit, a matter of smug social agreement; it had been preached in all climates an
d from all pulpits, both religious and secular, for too long, had obscured man’s real motive. It was now up to psychoanalysis all alone to attack this age-old mask, smash at it with a counter-dogma securely placed on an unshakable bulwark. Nothing weaker would do; nothing less could attack so ancient and formidable an enemy as human self-deception. And so we have the emotion of Freud’s earliest entreaties to Jung, as well as the serious and measured scientific debunking of his very last writings, as in the epigraph of this chapter. His life identity was single and unbroken.

It is clear to us today, too, that Freud was wrong about the dogma, just as Jung and Adler knew right at the beginning. Man has no innate instincts of sexuality and aggression. Now we are seeing something more, the new Freud emerging in our time, that he was right in his dogged dedication to revealing man’s creatureliness. His emotional involvement was correct. It reflected the true intuitions of genius, even though the particular intellectual counterpart of that emotion—the sexual theory—proved to be wrong. Man’s body
was
“a curse of fate,” and culture was built upon repression—not beca
use man was a seeker only of sexuality, of pleasure, of life and expansiveness, as Freud thought, but because man was also primarily an avoider of death.
Consciousness of death
is the primary repression, not sexuality. As Rank unfolded in book after book, and as Brown has recently again argued, the new perspective on psychoanalysis is that its crucial concept is the repression of death.
⁶
This
is what is creaturely about man,
this
is the repression on which culture is built, a repression unique to the self-conscious animal. Freud saw the curse and dedicated his life to revealing it with all the
power at his command. But he ironically missed the precise scientific reason for the curse.

This is one of the reasons that his life until the very end was a dialogue with himself on the mainsprings of human motives. Freud tugged at his work, tried to get the truth to emerge more clearly and starkly, and yet always it seemed to become more shaded, more complex, more elusive. We admire Freud for his serious dedication, his willingness to retract, the stylistic tentativeness of some of his assertions, his lifelong review of his pet notions.
^*
We admire him for his very deviousness, his hedgings, and his misgivings, because they seem to make of him more of an honest scientist, reflecting
truthfully the infinite manifold of reality. But this is to admire him for the wrong reason. A basic cause for his own lifelong twistings was that he would never cleanly leave the sexual dogma, never clearly see or admit that the terror of death was the basic repression.

The First Great Reluctance of Freud:
the Idea of Death

It would take us into too much complexity to try to trace this problem using the writings of Freud as evidence. We mentioned earlier that in his later work he moved away from narrow sexual formulations of the Oedipus complex and turned more to the nature of life itself, to the general problems of human existence. We might say that he moved from a father-fear theory of culture to a nature-terror one.
⁷
But, as always, he hedged. He never became frankly an existentialist but remained bound to his instinct theory.

There seems to have been a certain reluctance in Freud, and without attempting to probe minutely into his writings, I think that this reluctance can be revealed by one key idea. This is the most important idea that emerged in his later writings, the “death instinct.” After reading his introduction of this idea in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
the conclusion seems to me inescapable that the idea of a “death instinct” was an attempt to pa
tch up the instinct theory or libido theory that he did not want to abandon but that was becoming very cumbersome and questionable in explaining human motivation. It was becoming difficult to maintain the casuistry of the dream theory that all dreams, even anxiety dreams, are fulfillments of wishes.
⁸
It was becoming difficult to maintain the fundamental assertion of psychoanalysis that man is purely a pleasure-seeking animal.
⁹
Also, man’s terrors, his struggles with and against himself and others, were not easily explainable as an instinctual conflict between sexuality and aggression—especially when the i
ndividual was thought to be animated by Eros, by the libido, by the raw life force that seeks its own satisfaction and expansion.
¹⁰
Freud’s new idea of the “death instinct” was a device that enabled him to keep intact the earlier instinct theory, now by attributing human evil to a deeper organic substratum than merely ego conflict with sexuality. He now held that there was a built-in urge toward death as well as toward life; and thereby he could explain violent human aggression, hate, and evil in a new—yet still biological—way: Human aggressiveness comes about through a fusion of the l
ife instinct and the death instinct. The death instinct represents the organism’s desire to die, but the organism can save itself from its own impulsion toward death by redirecting it outward. The desire to die, then, is replaced by the desire to kill, and man defeats his own death instinct by killing others. Here then was a simple new dualism that tidied up the libido theory, that allowed Freud to keep it as the bulwark of his main prophetic task: to proclaim man firmly embedded in the animal kingdom. Freud could still keep his basic allegiance to physiology, chemistry, and biology and his hopes f
or a total and simple reductionist science of psychology.
¹¹

Admittedly, by talking about defusing the instinct to die by killing others, Freud did get at the connection between one’s own death and the butchery practiced by mankind. But he got at it at the price of continually intruding instincts into explanations of human behavior. Again, we see how the fusion of truthful insight with fallacious explanation has made it so difficult to untangle Freud. He seems to have been unable to reach for the really direct existentialist level of explanation, to establish both man’s continuity and his difference from the lower animals on the basis of his
protest
against death rather than his built-in instinctive urge toward it. The fearfulness of human aggression, the ease with which the animal governed by Eros slaughters other living things, would be explained by such a theory even more simply and directly.
¹²
Killing is a symbolic solution of a biological limitation; it results from the fusion of the biological level (animal anxiety) with the symbolic one (death fear) in the human animal. As we will see in the next section, no one explained this dynamic more elegantly than Rank: “the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing,
the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.”
¹³

Freud’s tortuous formulations on the death instinct can now securely be relegated to the dust bin of history. They are of interest only as the ingenious efforts of a dedicated prophet to maintain intellectually intact his basic dogma. But the second conclusion that we draw from Freud’s labors on that problem is much more important. Despite all his leanings toward the idea of death, the hopeless situation of the child, the real terror of the external world, and the like, Freud did not need to give them a central place in his thought. He did not need to rework his vision of man from that of prim
arily a pleasure-seeker of sex to that of the terrified, death-avoiding animal. All he had to do was to say that man carried death within him unconsciously as part of his biology. The fiction of death as an “instinct” allowed Freud to keep the terror of death outside his formulations as a primary human problem of ego mastery. He did not have to say that death was
repressed
if the organism carried it naturally in its processes.
¹⁴
In this formulation, it is not a general human problem, much less
the
primary human problem, but is magically transformed, as Rank so succinctly put it, “from an unwish
ed-for necessity to a desired instinctual goal.” He adds that “the comfort-giving nature of this ideology could stand neither logic nor experience for long.”
¹⁵
In this way, as Rank says, Freud disposed of the “death problem” and made it into a “death instinct”: