The Denial of Death (16 page)

… even when he finally stumbled upon the inescapable death problem, he sought to give a new meaning to that also in harmony with the wish, since he spoke of death instinct instead of death fear. The fear
itself he had meantime disposed of elsewhere, where it was not so threatening… . [He] made the general fear into a special sexual fear (castration fear) … [and then sought] to cure
this
fear through the freeing of sexuality.
¹⁶

This is a superb critique of psychoanalysis still today. As Rank lamented,

If one had held to the phenomena, it would be impossible to understand how a discussion of the death impulse could neglect the universal and fundamental death fear to such an extent as is the case in psychoanalytic literature.
¹⁷

The psychoanalytic literature remained almost silent on the fear of death until the late 1930’s and World War II. And the reason was as Rank revealed: how could psychoanalytic therapy
scientifically cure
the terror of life and death? But it could cure the problems of sex, which
it itself posited
.
¹⁸

But more to the point of our discussion is whether the fiction of the death instinct revealed anything in Freud’s personal attitude toward reality. Rank intimates that it did, by mentioning the “threatening” nature of the death fear—threatening, one must assume, not only to Freud’s systematic theory. Another writer also says that it is highly probable that the idea of death as a natural goal of life brought some peace to Freud.
¹⁹
And so we are back to Freud’s personal character and whatever edification we can get from it, specifically in relation to the most fundamental and terrifying pro
blem of a human life.

Fortunately, thanks largely to Ernest Jones’s biographical labor of love, we have a well-documented picture of Freud the man. We know about his lifelong migraines, his sinus, his prostate trouble, his lengthy constipations, his compulsive smoking of cigars. We have a picture of how suspicious he was of people around him, how he wanted loyalty and recognition of his seniority and priority as a thinker; how ungenerous he was toward dissenters like Adler, Jung, and Rank. His famous comment on Adler’s death is absolutely cynical:

For a Jew-boy out of a Viennese suburb a death in Aberdeen is a
n unheard-of heard-of career in itself, and a proof how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service of contradicting psychoanalysis.
^†

In his early years especially, Freud worked like a frenzy. This kind of frenzy requires a certain kind of work atmosphere—and Freud didn’t hesitate to structure his family relations around his work in a truly patriarchal way. At the noonday meal after his psychoanalytic interviews he observed a strict silence but required everyone to be there; if there were an empty chair he would gesticulate questioningly with his fork to Martha about the absence. The completely rapt and slavish attitude of his daughter Anna alarmed even him, and he sent her to be analyzed; it is as though he was unaware of
how his own staging of his greatness in the family could not fail to mesmerize those around him. We know he took his long vacation trips with his brother but never with his wife and in dozens of ways arranged his life to reflect his own sense of mission and historical destiny.

None of this is unusual: it is just interesting gossip about a great man. I mention it merely to show that Freud was neither better nor worse than other men. He seems to have had more narcissism than most, but his mother had raised him that way, as the special focus of attention and of her high hopes; she called him “my golden Sigi” until her death. His whole life style was of a dramatistic piece with the way he had always been treated. Certainly his mother’s attitude had given him some added strength, as he remarked; and he carried his incurable cancer, with its horrible and painful
effects, with an admirable dignity and patience. But is this, t
oo, so truly out of the ordinary? Someone once lauded to him Franz Rosenzweig’s courageous tolerance of his total paralysis, and Freud responded “What else can he do?” The same remark can be turned on Freud, as it can on all of us who suffer from illness. As for his dedication to his work, writing to the end with as little use of drugs as possible despite his pain—didn’t Georg Simmel also continue to the end with his cancer, also refusing medication because it dulled his thought? Yet no one thinks of Simmel as a particularly strong character. This kind of courage is not unusual in men who see the
mselves as historical figures; the self-image marshals the necessary dedication to the work that will give them immortality; what is pain next to that? I think we can fairly conclude that in all this there was hardly anything about Freud that would mark him off from other men. Freud in his self-centeredness; Freud at home ruling the roost and revolving family life around his own work and ambitions; Freud in his interpersonal life, trying to influence and coerce others, wanting special esteem and loyalty, mistrusting others, lashing out at them with cutting and denigrating epithets; in all these things
Freud is everyman, at least everyman who has the talent and style to be able to pull off the scenario that he would like.

But Freud was hardly the “immediate” man, dashing headlong into life without reflection. In the ways we just sketched he was ordinary; in one great way he was extraordinary—and it was this that fed directly into his genius: He was extremely self-analytic, lifted the veil from his own repressions, and tried to decipher his deepest motivations to the very end of his life. We remarked previously on what the death instinct might have meant to Freud personally, and this subject is out in the open. Unlike most men, Freud was conscious of death as a very personal and intimate problem. He was haunt
ed by death anxiety all his life and admitted that not a day went by that he did not think about it. This is clearly unusual for the run of mankind; and it is here, I think, that we can justifiably fish around for some hints about Freud’s special orientation to reality and about a “problem” unique to him. If we get hints of such a problem, I think we can use it to throw light on the overall structure of his work and its possible limits.

Freud’s experiences seem to show two different approaches
to the problem of death. The first is what we might call a fairly routine compulsiveness, a magic: toying with the idea. For example, he seems to have played with the date of his death all his life. His friend Fliess played mystically with numbers, and Freud believed in his ideas. When Fliess predicted Freud’s death at 51, according to his calculations, Freud “thought it more likely he would die in the forties from rupture of the heart.”
²⁰
When the age of 51 passed uneventfully, “Freud adopted another superstitious belief—that he had to die in February, 1918.”
²¹
Freud often wrote an
d spoke to his disciples about his growing old, that he had not long to live. He especially feared dying before his mother because he was terrified at the thought that she might have to hear of his death, which would cause her grief. He had similar fears about dying before his father. Even as a young man he was in the habit of taking leave of friends by saying “Goodbye, you may never see me again.”

What are we to make of all this? I think it is a fairly routine and superficial way of handling the problem of death. All these examples seem to boil down to “magical control games.” Freud’s concern for his mother seems like transparent displacement and rationalization: “My death does not terrify me, what terrifies me is the thought of the grief it would cause her.” One is frightened by the emptiness, the gap that would be left by one’s disappearance. One can’t cope easily with it, but one can cope with someone else’s grief over one’s disappearance. Instead of experiencing t
he stark terror of losing oneself as a disappearing object, one clings to the image of someone else. There is nothing complicated in Freud’s use of these intellectual devices.

But there is another side to Freud’s response to the problem of death that is very confused. According to his biographer Jones, Freud was subject to periodic anxiety attacks in which the anxiety was localized as a real dread of dying and of traveling by rail.
²²
In his attacks of dread of dying he had images of himself dying and of farewell scenes.
²³
Now this is quite a different matter than compulsive, magical games with the idea of death. Here Freud seems to have unrepressed the thought of his own fading away and to have responded to it with full emotional anxiety. The train
anxiety is of course a slight displacement, but not as uncontrolled as a phobia would be, as Jones agrees.
²⁴

Now, right away we see problems with this line of speculation. It is impossible to be clear about these things when you are dealing with them at such a distance, with printed words and not the living man. We don’t know exactly how the mind works in relation to emotion, how deeply words go when dealing with reality or with repressions. Sometimes just to admit an idea to consciousness is to experience that idea vitally. At other times to admit even a deep anxiety may not mean the actual experience of that anxiety, at least not the deep experience of it, as something else may be
troubling the person. Psychoanalysts talk about anxiety without affect. Can one admit the terror of death and still not experience it on deeper levels? Are images of dying and farewell as deep as the real feeling that one has absolutely no power to oppose death? To what extent can there be a partial rationalization of even the deepest anxiety? Or do these relationships change according to the period in one’s life, the stress one is under?

There is no way to be clear about these subjects in the case of Freud. Jones himself is quite puzzled by Freud’s different ways of reacting to the problem of death—on the one hand, anxiety attacks, on the other, heroic resignation. And in his attempt to understand them he says:

Freud always faced with complete courage any real danger to his life, which proves that the neurotic dread of dying must have had some other meaning than the literal one.
²⁵

Not necessarily: one can face up to the real danger of a known disease, as Freud did, because it gives one an
object,
an adversary, something against which to marshal one’s courage; disease and dying are still
living
processes in which one is engaged. But to fade away, leave a gap in the world, disappear into oblivion—that is quite another matter.

Yet Jones’s statement offers us a real clue about Freud because, it seems to me, he is saying that there is a difference between the fact of death and the justification of it. As one’s whole life is a style or a scenario with which one tries to deny oblivion and to extend oneself beyond death in symbolic ways, one is often untouched by the fact of his death because he has been able to surro
und it by larger meanings. On the basis of this distinction we can say some intelligible things about Freud’s death anxiety. We can try to get at what bothered him by clues from the larger style of his life, instead of by the fruitless method of trying to speculate about how deeply his thoughts made contact with his emotions.

The Second Great Reluctance of Freud

The first thing that seems to emerge clearly about Freud’s stance toward reality is that, like many men, he had great trouble yielding. He could submit neither to the world nor to other men. He tried to keep a center of gravity within himself and not to let go of himself and place that center elsewhere, as is clear from his relationship to his disciples, to dissenters, and to external threats of all kinds. When at the time of the Nazi invasion his daughter wondered why they did not all just kill themselves, Freud characteristically remarked, “Because that is exactly what they want us to do.”

But Freud was ambivalent about yielding. There is a lot to suggest that he toyed with the idea. A very telling anecdote is his remark when the superstitious date he had set for his death, February of 1918, passed uneventfully. He remarked: “That shows what little trust one can place in the supernatural.”
²⁶
This is a marvelous example of how one can toy with the idea of submission to larger laws and powers, but only in one’s mind, dishonestly, while remaining emotionally aloof and unyielding. But there are other reports that suggest that Freud not only played with yielding but actually lon
ged to be able to shift his center elsewhere. Once while discussing psychic phenomena, Jones made the remark: “If one could believe in mental processes floating in the air, one could go on to a belief in angels.” At which point Freud closed the discussion with the comment: “Quite so, even
der liebe Gott
.” Jones goes on to say that the words of Freud were said in a jocular, slightly quizzical tone. But Jones was clearly put off by the master’s broaching the problem of a belief in God without a firmly negative stance. He reports: “… there was something searching also in the g
lance, and I went away not entirely happy lest there be some more serious undertone as well.”
²⁷

On another occasion Freud met a sister of a former patient who had died some time earlier. The sister bore a resemblance to her dead brother, and a spontaneous thought passed through Freud’s mind: “So after all, it is true that the dead may return.” Zilboorg, in his important discussion of Freud and religion, makes the following comment on this episode, as well as on Freud’s whole ambivalent stance toward supernaturalism:

Even though Freud related that this thought was followed at once by a sense of shame, the fact remains undeniable that there was a strong emotional “streak” in Freud which bordered now on superstition, then on belief in the physical immortality of man here on earth.