The Denial of Death (19 page)

From this point of view, when Freud talked about “the feminine side of his nature” he could just as well have been speaking from the strength of his ego rather than its weakness, from his own single-minded determination to engineer his own immortality. It is common knowledge that sexual relations between Freud and his wife came to an end around the age of forty-one and that he was strictly monogamous so far as we know. This behavior would be all of a piece with his
causa-sui
project: the narcissistic self-inflation that denies dependency on the female body and on one’s species-given role and
the control and harboring of the power and meaning of one’s individuality. As Roazen points out, in Freud’s own words he saw his hero as:

… a man whose sexual need and activity were exceptionally reduced, as if a higher aspiration had raised him above the common animal need of mankind.
⁵⁵

Evidently Freud poured his whole passion into the psychoanalytic movement and his own immortality. They were his “higher aspiration,” which could also reasonably include a spiritual homosexuality that offered no threat as an “animal need.”

The Conceptual Ambivalence of
Causa Sui

So far we have been talking about emotional ambivalence, but there is also a conceptual side to the matter. It is one thing to face up to and admit an emotional reaction to the experience of fading away; it is still another thing to justify that fading. Freud could admit dependency and helplessness, but how give h
is own death any meaning? He either had to justify it from within his
causa-sui
project, the psychoanalytic movement, or somewhat from outside that project. Here is the ambivalence of
causa sui
on a conceptual level: how can one trust any meanings that are not manmade? These are the only meanings that we securely know; nature seems unconcerned, even viciously antagonistic to human meanings; and we fight by trying to bring our own dependable meanings into the world. But human meanings are fragile, ephemeral: they are constantly being discredited by historical events and natural calamiti
es. One Hitler can efface centuries of scientific and religious meanings; one earthquake can negate a million times the meaning of a personal life. Mankind has reacted by trying to secure human meanings from beyond. Man’s best efforts seem utterly fallible without appeal to something higher for justification, some conceptual support for the meaning of one’s life from a transcendental dimension of some kind. As this belief has to absorb man’s basic terror, it cannot be merely abstract but must be rooted in the emotions, in an inner feeling that one is secure in something stronger, larger, more important th
an one’s own strength and life. It is as though one were to say: “My life pulse ebbs, I fade away into oblivion, but “God” (or “It”) remains, even grows more glorious with and through my living sacrifice.” At least, this feeling is belief at its most effective for the individual.

The problem of how far a life has to reach to earn secure heroic meaning obviously bothered Freud very much. According to psychoanalytic theory, the child meets the terror of life and aloneness first by asserting his own omnipotence and then by using the cultural morality as the vehicle for his immortality. By the time we grow up, this confident, delegated immortality becomes a major defense in the service of the equanimity of our organism in the face of danger. One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that deep down each of them feels sorry for the man
next to him who will die. Each protects himself in his fantasy until the shock that he is bleeding. It is logical that if you are one of the few who admits the anxiety of death, then you must question the fantasy of immortality, which is exactly the experience of Freud. Zilboorg affirms that the problem troubled Freud all his life. He yearned for fame, anticipated it, hoped that through it he co
uld create his own immortality: “Immortality means being loved by many anonymous people.” This definition is the Enlightenment view of immortality: living in the esteem of men yet unborn, for the works that you have contributed to their life and betterment.

But it is an entirely “this-worldly” immortality—there’s the rub. It must have rubbed Freud very gratingly. His views on immortality were charged with a “severe ambivalence, even multivalence.”
⁵⁶
Even early in life he told his fiancée that he had destroyed all the letters he had received, adding ironically and triumphantly that his future biographers would be hard put to find data about him after he had gone from this earth. Later in life he said a similar thing about his letters to Fliess: if he had gotten hold of them instead of one of his disciples, he would have destroyed them ra
ther than letting “so-called posterity” have them. Zilboorg seems to think that this oscillation between desire for immortality and scorn for it reflects Freud’s unfortunate habit of forming polarities in his thought; but to me it seems like more magical toying with reality: As you fear that life in this dimension may not count, may not have any real meaning, you relieve your anxiety by being especially scornful of the very thing that you wish for most, while underneath your writing desk you have your fingers crossed.

On the one hand you make psychoanalysis your private religion, your own royal road to immortality; on the other you are unique and isolated enough to question the whole career of man on this planet. At the same time you cannot abandon the project of your own creation of immortality, because the religious promise of immortality is a pure illusion, fit for children and for the credulous man in the street. Freud was in this terrible bind; as he confessed to the Reverend Oskar Pfister:

I can imagine that several million years ago in the Triassic age all the great -odons and -therias were very proud of the development of the Saurian race and looked forward to heaven knows what magnificent future for themselves. And then, with the exception of the wretched crocodile, they all died out. You will object that … man is equipped with mind, which gives him the right to think about and believe in his future. Now there is certainly something special about mind, so little is known about it and its relation to nature. I personally have a vast respect for mind, but has
nature? Mind is only a little bit of natur
e, the rest of which seems to be able to get along very well without it. Will it really allow itself to be influenced to any great extent by regard for mind?

Enviable he who can feel more confident about that than I.
⁵⁷

It is hard for a man to work steadfastly when his work can mean no more than the digestive noises, wind-breakings, and cries of dinosaurs—noises now silenced forever. Or perhaps one works all the harder to defy the callous unconcern of nature; in that way one might even compel her to defer to the products of mysterious mind, by making words and thoughts an unshakable monument to man’s honesty about his condition. This is what makes man strong and true—that he defies the illusory comforts of religion. Human illusions prove
that men do not deserve any better than oblivion. So Freud must have reasoned as he made psychoanalysis the competitor of religion. Psychoanalytic science would establish the true facts of the moral world and would reform it—if anything could. We see why psychoanalysis itself was a religion for Freud, as so many authoritative thinkers from Jung and Rank to Zilboorg and Rieff have remarked.

All this can be put another way: that Freud set out to defy nature by redoubling efforts to make true the lie of
causa sui
. Zilboorg, in his penetrating assessment of Freud and religion, closed on these remarks:

Ever since man started his so-called “conquest of nature,” he has tried to fancy himself the conqueror of the universe. In order to assure himself of the mastery of a conqueror, he grabbed the trophy (nature, universe). He had to feel that the Maker of the trophy was annihilated, or his own fantasied sovereignty over the universe would be endangered. It is this trend that is reflected in Freud’s unwillingness to accept religious faith in its true meaning… . It is no surprise, therefore, to find that in the field of human psychology a man, no matter how great—a man like Freud—
had constantly before him the vision of a man who is always unhappy, helpless, anxious, bitter, looking into nothingness with fright, and turning away from “so-called posterity” in anticipatory … disgust.
⁵⁸

Zilboorg says that Freud was driven into a rigid, almost solipsistic intellectual attitude by “his need to rid himself of any suspicion of intellectual dependence on others or spiritual dependence on a personal God.”
⁵⁹
The lie of
causa sui
becomes especially d
riven because of what one will not or cannot acknowledge; then the very truth with which one seeks to defy nature suffers.

Jung, who would agree with Zilboorg, offers what to me seems the briefest and most apt summary of Freud’s characterological life-problem:

Freud never asked himself why he was compelled to talk continually of sex, why this idea had taken such possession of him. He remained unaware that his “monotony of interpretation” expressed a flight from himself, or from that other side of him which might perhaps be called mystical. So long as he refused to acknowledge that side, he could never be reconciled with himself… .

There was nothing to be done about this one-sidedness of Freud’s. Perhaps some inner experience of his own might have opened his eyes. … He remained the victim of the one aspect he could recognize, and for that reason I see him as a tragic figure; for he was a great man, and what is more, a man in the grip of his daimon.
⁶⁰

What, actually, does it mean to be a tragic figure firmly in the grip of one’s daimon? It means to possess great talent, to relentlessly pursue the expression of that talent through the unswerving affirmation of the
causa-sui
project that alone gives it birth and form. One is consumed by what he must do to express his gift. The passion of his character becomes inseparable from his dogma. Jung says the same thing beautifully when he concludes that Freud “must himself be so profoundly affected by the power of Eros that he actually wished to elevate it into a dogma … like a religious numen.”
⁶¹
Eros is precisely the natural energy of the child’s organism that will not let him rest, that keeps propelling him forward in a driven way while he fashions the lie of his character—which ironically
permits
that very drivenness to continue, but now under the illusion of self-control.

Conclusion

Now as we draw the circle on the very beginning of our discussion of Freud, we can see that his two great reluctances, as we have called them, are related, and in fact merge into one. On th
e one hand he refused to move away cleanly from his instinct theory to the more blanket idea of a death fear. In the second place he refused to move into a yielding posture toward external nature; he was unable to give large expression to the mystical, dependent side of himself. It seems to me that the two reluctances are related in his refusal to abandon the
causa-sui
project, which would have led to a larger problematic view of human creatureliness. But such a view is the seeding-ground of faith, or at least brings the person right up to faith as an experiential reality and not an illusion. Fr
eud never allowed himself to step upon this ground. Eros is a narrowing down, in Freud, of a broader experiential horizon. Or, put another way, in order to move from
scientific
creatureliness to
religious
creatureliness, the terror of
death
would have to replace
sex,
and inner
passivity
would have to replace obsessive Eros, the drive of the creature. And it was just this twofold yielding—inner emotional and conceptual—that Freud could not quite manage. For to do so, as Jung judged with understanding, would mean to abandon his own diamon, his whole unique passion as a genius, the very gift
that he had fashioned for mankind.

For ages men have reproached themselves for their folly—that they gave their loyalty to this one or that, that they believed so blindly and obeyed so willingly. When men snap out of a spell that has very nearly destroyed them and muse on it, it doesn’t seem to make sense. How can a mature man be so fascinated, and why? We know that all through history masses have followed leaders because of the magic aura they projected, because they seemed larger than life. On the surface this explanation seems enough because it is reasonable and true to fact: men worship and fear power and so give their l
oyalty to those who dispense it.

But this touches only the surface and is besides too practical. Men don’t become slaves out of mere calculating self-interest; the slavishness is in the soul, as Gorky complained. The thing that has to be explained in human relations is precisely the
fascination of the person
who holds or symbolizes power. There is s
omething about him that seems to radiate out to others and to melt them into his aura, a “fascinating effect,” as Christine Olden called it, of “the narcissistic personality”
³
or, as Jung preferred to call him, the “mana-personality.”
⁴
But people don’t actually radiate blue or golden auras. The mana-personality may try to work up a gleam in his eye or a special mystification of painted signs on his forehead, a costume, and a way of holding himself, but he is still
Homo sapiens
, standard vintage, practically indistinguishable from others unless one is especially interested in him. The mana of the mana
-personality is in the eyes of the beholder; the fascination is in the one who experiences it. This is the very thing that has to be explained: if all people are more or less alike, why do we burn with such all-consuming passions for some of them? What are we to make of the following report by a winner of the Miss Maryland contest who describes her first meeting with Frank Sinatra (a crooner and film star who gained wealth and notoriety in the middle decades of the 20th century in the United States):

He was my date. I got a massage, and I must have taken five aspirins to calm myself down. In the restaurant, I saw him from across the room, and I got such butterflies in my stomach and such a thing that went from head to toe. He had like a halo around his head of stars to me. He projected something I have never seen in my life… . when I’m with him I’m in awe, and I don’t know why I can’t snap out of it… . I can’t think. He’s so fascinating… .
⁵

Imagine a scientific theory that could explain human slavishness by getting at its nexus; imagine that after ages of laments about human folly men would at last understand exactly why they were so fatally fascinated; imagine being able to detail the precise causes of personal thralldom as coldly and as objectively as a chemist separates elements. When you imagine all these things you will realize better than ever the world-historical importance of psychoanalysis, which alone revealed this mystery. Freud saw that a patient in analysis developed a peculiarly intense attachment to the
person of the analyst. The analyst became literally the center of his world and his life; he devoured him with his eyes, his heart swelled with joy at the sight of him; the analyst filled his thoughts even in his dreams. The whole fascination has the elements of an intens
e love affair, but it is not limited to women. Men show the “same attachment to the physician, the same overestimation of his qualities, the same adoption of his interest, the same jealousy against all those connected with him.”
⁶
Freud saw that this was an uncanny phenomenon, and in order to explain it he called it “transference.” The patient transfers the feelings he had towards his parents as a child to the person of the physician. He blows the physician up larger than life just as the child sees the parents. He becomes as dependent on him, draws protection and power from him just as th
e child merges his destiny with the parents, and so on. In the transference we see the grown person as a child at heart, a child who distorts the world to relieve his helplessness and fears, who sees things as he wishes them to be for his own safety, who acts automatically and uncritically, just as he did in the pre-Oedipal period.
⁷

Freud saw that transference was just another form of the basic human suggestibility that makes hypnosis possible. It was the same passive surrender to superior power,
⁸
and in this lay its real uncanniness. What, after all, is more “mysterious” than hypnosis, the s
ight of adults falling into instant stupors and obeying like automatons the commands of a stranger? It seems like some truly supernatural power at work, as if some person really did possess a mana that could enmesh others in a spell. However, it seemed that way only because man ignored the slavishness in his own soul. He wanted to believe that if he lost his will it was because of someone else. He wouldn’t admit that this loss of will was something that he himself carried around as a secret yearning, a readiness to respond to someone’s voice and the snap of his fingers. Hypnosis was a mystery onl
y as long is man did not admit his own unconscious motives. It baffled us because we denied what was basic in our nature. Perhaps we could even say that men were all too willingly mystified by hypnosis because they had to deny the big lie upon which their whole conscious lives were based: the lie of self-sufficiency, of free self-determination, of independent judgment and choice. The continuing vogue of vampire movies may be a clue to how close to the surface our repressed fears are: the anxiety of losing control, of coming completely under someone’s spell, of not really being in command of ourse
lves. One intense look, one mysterious song, and our lives may be lost forever.

All this was brought out beautifully by Ferenczi in 1909, in a basic essay that has not been much improved upon in a half-century of psychoanalytic work.
^9
*
Ferenczi pointed out how important it was for the hypnotist to be an imposing person, of high social rank, with a self-confident manner. When he gave his commands the patient would sometimes go under as if struck by “
coup de foudre
.” There was nothing to do but obey, as by his imposing, authoritarian figure the hypnotist took the place of the parents. He knew “just those ways of frightening and being tender, the efficacy of w
hich has been proved for thousands of years in the relations of parent to child.”
¹⁰
We see the same technique used by revivalists as they alternatingly harangue their audiences with a shrieking voice and then immediately soothe them with a soft one. With a heart-rending scream of agony and ecstasy one throws himself at the revivalist’s feet to be saved.

As the highest ambition of the child is to obey the all-powerful parent, to believe in him, and to imitate him, what is more natural than an instant, imaginary return to childhood via the hypnotic trance? The explanation of the ease of hypnosis, said Ferenczi, is that “In our innermost soul we are still children, and we remain so throughout life.”
¹¹
And so, in one theoretical sweep Ferenczi
could destroy the mystery of hypnosis by showing that the subject carries in himself the predisposition to it:

… there is no such thing as a “hypnotising,” a “giving of ideas” in the sense of psychical incorporating of something quite foreign from without, but only procedures that are able to set going unconscious, pre-existing, auto-suggestive mechanisms… . According to this conception, the application of suggestion and hypnosis consists in the deliberate establishment of conditions under which the tendency to blind belief and uncritical obedience present in everyone, but usually kept repressed … may unconsciously be transferred to the person hypnotising or suggesting.
¹²

I am lingering on Ferenczi’s unlocking of the secret of hypnosis for a very important reason. By discovering a universal predisposition at the heart of man, Freudian psychology itself gained the key to a universal underlying historical psychology. As not everyone undergoes formal hypnosis, most people can hide and disguise their inner urge to merge themselves with power figures. But the predisposition to hypnosis is the same one that gives rise to transference, and no one is immune to that, no one can argue away the manifestations of transference in everyday human affairs. It
is not visible on the surface: adults walk around looking quite independent; they play the role of parent themselves and seem quite grown up—and so they are. They couldn’t function if they still carried with them the childhood feeling of awe for their parents, the tendency to obey them automatically and uncritically. But, says Ferenczi, although these things normally disappear, “the need to be subject to someone remains; only the part of the father is transferred to teachers, superiors, impressive personalities; the submissive loyalty to rulers that is so wide-spread is also a transference of this sort.”
¹³

Freud’s Great Work on Group Psychology

With a theoretical background that unlocked the problem of hypnosis and that discovered the universal mechanism of the transference, Freud was almost obliged to provide the best insights ev
er into the psychology of leadership; and so he wrote his great work
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
a book of fewer than 100 pages that in my opinion is probably the single most potentially liberating tract that has ever been fashioned by man. In his later years Freud wrote a few books that reflected personal and ideological preferences; but
Group Psychology
was a serious scientific work that consciously placed itself in a long tradition. Early theorists of group psychology had tried to explain why men were so sheeplike when they functioned in groups. They developed ideas like “
mental contagion” and “herd instinct,” which became very popular. But as Freud was quick to see, these ideas never really did explain what men did with their judgment and common sense when they got caught up in groups. Freud saw right away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again, blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came to them under the hypnotic spell of the leader. They abandoned their egos to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
¹⁴
It is this alone that can explain the “uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formations.” The chief is a “dangerous personality, toward whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one’s will has to be surrendered,—while to be alone with him, ‘to look him in the face,’ appears a hazardous enterprise.” This alone, says Freud, explains the “paralysis” that exists in the link between a person with inferior power to one of superior power. Man has “an
extreme passion for authority” and “wishes to be governed by unrestricted force.”
¹⁵
It is this trait that the leader hypnotically embodies in his own masterful person. Or as Fenichel later put it, people have a “longing for being hypnotized” precisely because they want to get back to the magical protection, the participation in omnipotence, the “oceanic feeling” that they enjoyed when they were loved and protected by their parents.
¹⁶
And so, as Freud argues, it is not that groups bring out anything new in people; it is just that they satisfy the deep-seated erotic longings that people constantly ca
rry around unconsciously. For Freud, this was the life force that held groups together. It functioned as a kind of psychic cem
ent that locked people into mutual and mindless interdependence: the magnetic powers of the leader, reciprocated by the guilty delegation of everyone’s will to him.

No one who honestly remembers how hazardous it could be to look certain people in the face or how blissful to bask trustingly in the glow of another’s power can accuse Freud of psychoanalytic rhetoric. By explaining the precise power that held groups together Freud could also show why groups did not fear danger. The members do not feel that they are alone with their own smallness and helplessness, as they have the powers of the hero-leader with whom they are identified. Natural narcissism—the feeling that the person
next to
you will die, but not you—is reinforced by trusting depe
ndence on the leader’s power. No wonder that hundreds of thousands of men marched up from trenches in the face of blistering gunfire in World War I. They were partially self-hypnotised, so to speak. No wonder men imagine victories against impossible odds: don’t they have the omnipotent powers of the parental figure? Why are groups so blind and stupid?—men have always asked. Because they demand illusions, answered Freud, they “constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.”
¹⁷
And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembl
ing animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way. Who transmits this illusion, if not the parents by imparting the macro-lie of the cultural
causa sui?
The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory. Furthermore, he makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behavior anything goes because the leader okays it.
¹⁸
It is like being an omnipotent infant again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully, or like being in psychoanalytic therapy where the analyst doesn’t censure you for anything you feel or think. In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father. And so we understand the terrifying sadism of group activity.