TO DIE ONE’S OWN DEATH
Thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic
I want to know why we, like upside-down sunflowers, turn to the dark side rather than to the light.
—Rachel Berdach, The Emperor, the Sages and Death (1938)
WHAT IS LEFT OF the inner life when the world turns more cruel, or appears to turn more cruel, than ever before? When it reels from inflicted blows—pandemic, war, starvation, climate devastation or all these together—what happens to the fabric of the mind? Is its only option defensive—to batten down the hatches, to haul up the drawbridge (to use the common figures of speech for a subject under assault), or simply to survive? And does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the shards, the broken pieces and muddled fragments of the human heart that make us who we are? Barely six months after the outbreak of the First World War, on Christmas Day 1914, Freud wrote to Ernest Jones lamenting that the psychoanalytic movement ‘is now perishing in the strife of nations’ (the two men were on opposite sides in the war). ‘I do not delude myself,’ he wrote. ‘The springtime of our science has abruptly broken off … all we can do is to keep the fire flickering in a few hearths, until a more favourable wind makes it possible to light it again to full blaze.’ At a time of pandemic, is there room for anything like the complex reckoning with life and with death that is the unique domain of psychoanalysis?
As our screens flicker daily with the toll of the dead, it is hard not to be overcome by the scale of a tragedy that has left people we love dying in isolation, funerals pared back beyond decency, the rituals of family commemoration that make death manageable, or almost manageable, outlawed. Not to speak of the interminable counting that reduces humans to abstractions, robbing us a second time of each individual loss, even while, in the words of the British palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke, the pandemic ‘unfolds one death at a time’. ‘When the statistics threaten to throw me off balance,’ she wrote of her struggle to restore dignity to those dying in hospital, ‘I try to keep things as small as I can.’
In such moments, it is perhaps even harder to allow ourselves to admit our emotional ambivalence towards the dead as much as the living, which, in our non-pandemic existence—if such a world can be imagined again—is our daily psychic fare. Truth, they say, is the first casualty of war, but psychic truth is not what is being talked about. War and pandemic strip the mind bare. They share a brute ability to smother our psychic repertoire. Just for a second, and if only in the public mind, they make grief seem pure. We cheer soldiers off to battle and weep when they fall; we stand gut-wrenched and helpless as a pandemic ravages its way through the homes that allowed us to cherish the illusion of safety. ‘You have, my poor child, seen death break into the family for the first time, or heard about it,’ Freud wrote to his eldest daughter, Mathilde, when Heinrich Graf—her uncle, his brother-in-law—died suddenly in 1908, ‘and perhaps shuddered at the idea that for none of us can life be made any safer.’ He offered no false consolation. We do not live in a safe world. But he did insist that, for old people like him, an awareness of the inevitable end gives life its special value—Freud was about to turn fifty-two, one of several points during his life when he was convinced he would die.
On 25 January 1920, Freud’s favourite daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud (whom he called his ‘Sunday child’), died during her third pregnancy from complications arising from Spanish flu, which had wiped out millions across Europe since the first recorded case on 4 March 1918. His daughter was one of its late casualties, falling like a soldier killed just when peace is declared—a bitter irony given that the final wave which killed her was by no means the most deadly of the three. In fact, according to some analysts, this was a fourth wave exclusive to northern countries, many of whose citizens had wrongly believed themselves to be free of the disease by December 1918, when there had been time to recover from the surge in infections following the Armistice celebrations in the streets. Beyond the fact of their historical coincidence, the plague and the war were two piled up disasters. The destiny of one was bound to the fate of the other. Erich Ludendorff, the commander of the German forces, declared that the Spanish flu had robbed him of victory. Things had started to go downhill for the Central Powers in April 1918, when the disease made its first appearance in the trenches: until March that year they had believed they could win the war.
The Spanish flu is barely included in lists of the world’s modern afflictions, even though its death toll came close to the combined toll of the two world wars. Laura Spinney—whose book about the Spanish flu, Pale Rider, was published a couple of years before the onset of Covid-19—suggests that what can fairly be described as the worst ‘massacre’ of the twentieth century has been rubbed out of history. Censorship also tracked the course of the disease, the extent of whose devastation was, just like today, silenced or palmed off from one country to the next. It was only called ‘Spanish’ flu because Spain—neither the country of origin nor the most stricken—was the only nation not to suppress the truth of its virulent nature. Freud himself barely mentions it, though it claimed the lives of 15,000 Viennese. By autumn 1918, schools and theatres in the city were being intermittently closed to reduce the risk of infection. In 1919, the year before Sophie’s death, three of Freud’s other children, Anna, Ernst and Mathilde, had fallen ill. In May that year his wife, Martha, after years of undernourishment as she tried to manage caring for the whole family through the war, went down with a case of ‘grippe-pneumonie’, with recurrent waves of high fever, from which she took two months to recover.
Conditions were not alleviated at the end of the war, when a defeated Austria was left, in the words of Stefan Zweig, ‘a mutilated rump, bleeding from all arteries’. By then Freud, far from his earlier, exhilarated support for the Central Powers, welcomed the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire: ‘I weep not a single tear for this Austria or this Germany.’ (‘All my libido is given to Austro-Hungary,’ he had pronounced in 1914 in response to the declaration of war.) ‘We are all of us slowly failing,’ he wrote to Jones in January 1919, ‘in health and bulk.’ By April, he wrote to Ferenczi, his family was subsisting on a ‘starvation diet’ (‘Hungerkost’). A year later, Freud and his wife were unable to get to their sick daughter because there were no trains—‘not even a children’s train’, he wrote on 27 January 1920 to the Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister, referring to the trains of the international children’s association that were ferrying children out of starving Austria.
Over the preceding years, Freud’s greatest anxiety had been for his sons Martin and Ernst, who had eagerly enlisted when war began (a third son, Oliver, rejected for active service, served as an army engineer). The dangers they faced at the front troubled his dreams. A nightmare in 1915 had as its manifest content ‘very clearly the death of my sons, Martin first of all’ (he called it a ‘prophetic dream’). All his sons would outlive their father’s night-time prophecy, but he was right to tremble on their behalf. Martin, a prisoner of war on the Italian front, eventually returned home in April 1919, but he was one of the lucky ones. More than a million Austro-Hungarian soldiers died either in battle or from disease. At no point did Freud have the slightest intimation—why would he?—that it was the fate of his daughter at the mercy of the Spanish flu which he should most dread.
It was in response to Covid-19 that the date of the Freud Memorial lecture on which this chapter is based had to be moved from 6 May, the anniversary of Freud’s birth, to 23 September, the anniversary of the day he died in 1939—a switch which echoed the tension between affirmation and destruction, between life and death, that from 1919 onwards was increasingly at the core of Freud’s work. It was no doubt in response to this pressing context that I found myself newly alert to the wretchedness of the hour as it closed around Freud’s family in Vienna—around the walls of what is now the Freud Museum where I should have been speaking—first during the First World War and its aftermath, and then on the cusp of the even more deadly Second World War. I became acutely aware, that is, of the way the disasters of history penetrate, float in and out, ricochet and are repudiated by the mind—including my own since, during a lifelong preoccupation with Freud, I had not fully grasped the scope of this reality before.
Psychoanalysis begins with a mind in flight, a mind that cannot take the measure of its own pain. It begins, that is, with the recognition that the world—or what Freud sometimes referred to as ‘civilization’—makes demands on human subjects that are too much to bear. Rereading the famous biographies—Jones, Peter Gay, Max Schur—I was now struck by just how exposed and vulnerable Freud was to the ills, major and petty, of the times, and by the fierce contrasts in his moods between blindness and insight, equanimity and dismay. Freud was articulate about what he personally found most insufferable: debt was his greatest fear (by the end of the war he had lost 95 per cent of his cash savings); to those afflicted by poverty he responded with a mix of compassion and dread; he hated rationing; there were no lengths he would not go to in order to secure the precious cigars that were killing him. For all the privilege of this Viennese family, they skirted penury and floundered in wellbeing and health. As we have recently seen only too clearly, disaster uncovers the material and racial fault-lines of a society, but it also unforgivingly exposes the truth that no human subject is spared, in Freud’s words, ‘the perplexity and helplessness of the human race’.
To read Freud against this backdrop is to observe someone capable of the wildest fluctuations, covering the entire range of moods to which everyone I know, affected by today’s pandemic, has at one point or another succumbed. ‘We are suffering under no restrictions, no epidemic, and are in good spirits,’ he wrote to Jones at the start of the war, before his misplaced faith in the cause of the Central Powers began to wane. ‘Curiously,’ he wrote to the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in February 1917 (when food was scarce and lack of heating froze his fingers, making anything apart from letter-writing impossible), ‘my spirits are unshaken’—‘proof’, he continued, of ‘how little justification in reality one needs for inner wellbeing’. In August 1918 he wrote to Karl Abraham to say that he could once again venture to ‘join in the world’s pleasure and the world’s pain’. He was citing Goethe, although the German word ‘tragen’ is less ‘join in’ than ‘bear’ or ‘endure’ (‘der Erde Lust, der Erde Leid zu tragen’), as if in the world he was living, pleasure, no less than pain, had become a burden.
He would also plunge into mental darkness. ‘One has to use every means possible to withdraw from the frightful tension in the world outside,’ he wrote to Ferenczi in 1916. ‘It is not to be borne.’ In November 1914, as the full horror of the war was beginning to emerge, he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé: ‘I and my contemporaries will never again see a joyous world. It is too hideous.’ Mankind was a doomed experiment and did not deserve to survive. ‘We have to abdicate,’ he continued, ‘and the Great Unknown, he or it, lurking behind Fate, will one day repeat such an experiment with another race.’ In an extraordinary gesture of radical self-abnegation—not the type of gesture for which he is best known—Freud was willing to sacrifice humanity, as we might say these days, to save the planet (he could not of course have foreseen today’s Voluntary Human Extinction Movement whose motto is ‘May we live long and die out’). Later, in the 1930s, with the next war on the horizon, he again speculated that the human race was approaching its end, now that the ‘perfection of the instruments of destruction’ allowed two enemies to exterminate each other. Our great failing, he suggested, was the gulf which ‘earlier periods of human arrogance had torn too wide apart between mankind and the animals’. Freud’s despair was global and multi-species in its reach (a fact that seems to have received virtually no commentary, given the common travesty that his concerns were restricted to the small, privileged elite of Vienna). But it was the tragedy closer to home, Sophie’s death, that ushered his grief into a new phase—though it would not be until the death from tuberculosis of his grandson Heinele, Sophie’s second child, three years later, at the age of four, that he would declare all his joy in the world gone for ever. ‘I myself was aware,’ he wrote to his Hungarian friends Katà and Lajos Lévy, ‘of never having loved a human being, certainly never a child, so much.’ Years later he would write to his friend Ludwig Binswanger, after Binswanger’s son had died: ‘We shall remain inconsolable and never find a substitute.… It is the only way of perpetuating the love which we do not wish to renounce’—an idea that could not be further from his best-known writing on mourning as a task to be completed.
* * *
So what, on the hundredth anniversary of the death of Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, did the loss of the daughter do to her father, Sigmund Freud? And how might this story help us confront the awfulness of our own time, when unimaginable deaths—Freud described the war as ‘inconceivable’—are again legion? In 1924, Fritz Wittels, Freud’s first biographer, suggested that there was a link between Sophie’s death and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which Freud introduced the idea of the death drive. Freud’s rebuttal came fast. The suggestion was implausible, he said. He wrote the first draft in 1919, when Sophie was still alive. It turns out that Freud had pre-empted Wittels; in July 1920, four years before the biography appeared, he had written to Max Eitingon: ‘You will be able to certify that it was half-finished when Sophie was alive and flourishing.’ This is already bizarre—‘half-finished’ leaves plenty of room for additions after her death. Why, we might ask, would the fact that it was completed before she died be presented as something which, in an unspecified future, would need to be certified (‘sie werden bestätigen können’)? Today, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of the Freud scholar Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, who first brought the early manuscripts of his writing to light, we know that he was being evasive (she describes these ‘hitherto neglected and silent’ documents as ‘rough-hewn and overwhelming’). An entirely new sixth chapter, the longest by far, was added to a later draft, making up almost a third of the published text. The new chapter contained the first appearance in print of the term ‘death drive’. Its only earlier appearance was in two letters to Eitingon of February 1920, just weeks after Sophie’s death. I think it would, therefore, be fair to say that Freud owes the genesis of this unprecedented concept to her.
In his response to Wittels, Freud is dismissive—the word Grubrich-Simitis uses is ‘laconic’—acknowledging only a single addition to the text: a ‘discussion concerning the mortality or immortality of protozoa’. He surely displays here what he called the ‘kettle logic’ of the unconscious, in which a defendant offers a run of arguments, each invalidating the next: he had finished the text already; there is nothing significant in the additions he made; the only new material concerned the immortality and/or mortality of biological life (as if such a topic could have no bearing on the death of a child). In his letter to Pfister after Sophie died, he described her as being ‘snatched away … as if she had never been’. ‘The undisguised brutality of our time,’ he continued, ‘weighs heavily on us.’ Nothing, surely, conveys the pain of a life being snuffed out forever more than loved ones in the prime of their lives dying in the midst of a war or pandemic (in this historic moment of Freud’s life, both more or less at the same time). How do you hold on to any intimation of futurity beyond death—whether in the shape of the immortal germ plasm or the eternal soul—when people all around you are dying like flies?
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is one of the most important works of the second half of Freud’s life. It is the culmination of his thinking on the topography of the mind and it introduces the new dualism of the drives (it was also the first of his works to be published as an individual monograph). It has excited passionate enthusiasm and virulent hostility in equal measure. In his biography of Freud, Max Schur goes to considerable lengths to discredit it, which may seem odd given that his own book is devoted to understanding the place of death in Freud’s life and work. But the idea of an unconscious demonic principle driving the psyche to distraction could be said to sabotage once and for all the vision of man in control of his mind—and for Schur, as for many others, it was therefore anathema.
I am not exaggerating. Schur was Freud’s physician in his dying years. When the pain of Freud’s cancer left his life without value or meaning, Schur—on the basis of a spoken agreement between them—administered the fatal dose of morphine. It was unquestionably Freud’s wish, and Schur is eloquent on the dignity with which he approached the end of his life after sixteen years of suffering. But at the risk of wild analysis—analysis outside the consulting room—my reading is that Schur could only live with what he had done so long as he could trust in man’s ability to subordinate his will to his reason, and—contrary, one might say, to the entire spirit of psychoanalysis—always to do what is best for himself.
Who does death belong to? If this has become a question during today’s pandemic it is because the lack of state provision, the missing medical supplies, the dearth of equipment and isolation from human touch have made it feel to many for the first time that death is something of which a person—the one dying, and those closest to her or him—can be robbed. Freud and his wife could not reach their sick daughter because there was no transport, not even the trains getting children out of a starving country in the aftermath of war. They could not be with her when she died. This may help us to understand these remarkable lines from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, from what we now know to be its new sixth chapter: ‘If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime ἀνάγκη [necessity], than to a chance that might perhaps have been escaped.’ In the preceding chapter, Freud had been elaborating on the repetition compulsion, which he had first identified in soldiers returning from battle who found themselves reliving their worst experiences in night-time and waking dreams. Slowly tracing this tendency from the front to the consulting room (patients wedded to their symptoms), Freud concludes that such a compulsion is a property of all living matter. The urge of all organic life is to restore an earlier state of things. What follows is a considerable downgrade in the status of the drives of self-preservation and mastery that were key to his earlier topography of the mind, as they are all now seen to be working in the service of the organism’s need to follow the path to its own death: ‘The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.’ ‘The aim of all life,’ Freud states in perhaps one of his most counterintuitive affirmations, ‘is death.’
In this theoretical trajectory—by Freud’s own account one of his most speculative—he is moving between elegy and treatise, between sorrow and science: ‘We are strengthened in our belief,’ he says, ‘by the writings of our poets.’ But what stood out here for me this time was a dimension that seemed to enter his thought with the death of Sophie, to which we can now confidently say this whole chapter came in response. Better death as a silent companion than a death that falls out of the skies. A remorseless law of nature is preferable to a death that should—might—not have taken place. The resonance during the Covid-19 pandemic could not be more striking, as one person after another is confronted with the intolerable idea that their loved ones died through the sheer, reckless inefficiency of political scoundrels whose behaviour, in the words of one Guardian newspaper columnist, ‘is often indistinguishable from deliberate destructiveness’.
We know that all Freud’s writing coils out of his inner world, but I can think of no other moment when he lays his psychological cards on the table with such transparency. Nothing worse than the idea of death as part of a string of accidents. Hence the numerous cases of negligence which are being brought against the UK government on behalf of some of the twenty thousand victims of Covid-19 who, if lockdown had been declared one week earlier in March 2020, would not have died: care workers in their twenties, young, predominantly BIPOC nurses and doctors, dementia sufferers who, once their families could no longer visit, lost the will to live. Through the merciless nature of their deaths, the victims of pandemic and war are being deprived of the essence of life. This is what Freud is trying to give back to his daughter, restoring her rightful inheritance. To put it simply: without the belief that life should move along its path to its own end, her sudden death—five days after falling ill—would have been too much for him to bear: ‘easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature … than to a chance that might perhaps have been escaped’. ‘Perhaps,’ he adds, ‘we have adopted the belief because there is some comfort in it.’ ‘It may be,’ he adds, citing Schiller, ‘that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions which we have created “um die Schwere das Daseins zu ertragen” [“to bear the burden of existence”].’ He was warding off her destiny, naming it for the outrage it was. Today, for all the glaring differences of class and race in how, where and whom the pandemic strikes, this prospect of sudden and random death has to include just about everyone. Freud is offering a philosophy of grief. He helps us understand why what is happening among us now can feel as much an internal as an external catastrophe. Death in a pandemic is no way to die.
Freud’s dismissal, in his exchange with Wittels, of his own ruminations on the immortality of the germ plasm should give us pause. As if immortality were not something you were likely to find yourself thinking about after the death of a child. This perhaps partly explains the reason why, in a letter to Ferenczi written two weeks after Sophie died, grief-stricken as he was, he described her loss as a ‘narcissistic injury’, to be uncovered deep beneath the daily duties through which he was finding his way back into his life. ‘I do as much work as I can,’ he had written to Pfister two days after she died, ‘and am grateful for the distraction. The loss of a child seems to be a grave blow to one’s narcissism.’
A closer look at Chapter Six of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which sees Freud on the trail of biological death, can perhaps guide us here (although, as he notes, in the writing of biologists, the whole concept of death ‘melts away in their hands’). His question is whether biology will confirm his conviction that death is an inherent property of all organic life, or whether there is something in living substance that is immortal. According to the evolutionary biologist August Weismann, death belongs solely to multicellular organisms whose soma dies at the moment of reproduction when the germ plasm enters a new living form. Unicellular organisms, on the other hand, do not appear to die but eternally reproduce themselves. Or you could argue, as Max Hartmann did in Death and Reproduction (1906), that death cannot be reduced to the appearance of a dead body, but describes the moment when a cell comes to the end of its individual development as it mutates and gives itself over to the next stage of life.
What matters here is not whether biology can actually give backing to Freud’s troubled concept of a human drive to death. As is so often the case in his work, the issue is what these preoccupations generate, what they allow him to go on thinking about. ‘In this sense,’ Freud writes with more than a hint of satisfaction, ‘protozoa too are mortal; in their case death always coincides with reproduction, but it is to some extent obscured by it, since the whole substance of the parent animal may be transmitted directly into the young offspring.’ The only thing that saves the organism from dying is its passage, entire, into its offspring—perish the thought, one might say. Transpose this into human life, and the death of a biological child becomes a narcissistic injury because it is only through the existence of children that the parent has a stab at eternity. What Freud is saying here is as chilling as it is simple. The only thing that keeps a parent alive is their child.
Freud’s death drive seems, therefore, to lose itself in the minutiae of organic life. But at the same time it reaches into the external political world: contrary to what is often suggested, the two realms of Freud’s thinking work in tandem. Remember that the war was the essential backdrop to the concept of the repetition compulsion as returning soldiers were reliving the dangers inflicted by the outside world (the very concept of trauma which, according to an influential misreading, Freud—from the 1890s onwards—had definitively left behind). Freud’s preoccupation with organic life and with the perils of the world, with inmost biological process and external hardship, become increasingly tied up in his thought, just as the question of what we inherit without knowing it (our predisposition), and what the world rains down on us (the accidents of life) begin to come together on the same page. I have no doubt that it is Covid-19 that has newly alerted me to these strange alliances, not least as I struggle, like so many, to bring into some psychic alignment the pain of my inner life and the tragedy unfolding outside my door.
How to link these domains becomes the preoccupation of the second phase of Freud’s working life. This is what war does to theory. At a symposium on ‘The Psychoanalysis of the War Neuroses’, delivered at the Fifth International Psychoanalytical Congress held in Budapest in 1918, Freud refuses the distinction between war neuroses and peacetime neuroses, which pits the external threat of the former against the internal libidinal conflict of the latter. Freud wants to unite them. The difficulties in doing so, he concludes, cease to be insuperable if one ‘described repression, which lies at the basis of every neurosis, as a reaction to a trauma—as an elementary traumatic neurosis’. Repression, which is the foundation of all neuroses, is a trauma in and of itself. No one escapes. In the midst of the war, trauma, we might say, has been reinstated, straddling the division between inner and outer worlds. By his own account, a traumatized soldier is torn between the two: between the demands of loyalty to his ego—which tells him to avoid danger at any cost—and loyalty to his nation, which requires that he be prepared to die.
Copyright © 2023 by Jacqueline Rose
