face of illness and the explicit prohibitions of doctor after doctor. He seemed to be living the idea that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
There is some question about whether Freud actually ever made this legendary comment in a speech he gave to students at Clark University in 1909. He did, however, carve off cigars as a private matter, something to be kept apart from the interpretive digging of his method, in a letter to Ernest Jones: “If someone should reproach you with my Fall into Sin, you are free to reply that my adherence to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking, and…inessential for psychoanalysis.” Smoking, then, is in a special, separate category: He does not want it to be analyzed. It is something he does beyond analysis. It is his own mystery.
In a slender, controversial book, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” which came out in 1920, Freud raised the possibility of a silent drive toward death, a secret desire for annihilation animating each of us. He wrote a line many analysts would resist, finding it too extreme, too sweeping, too unsettling: “The aim of all life is death.” And in this strange, speculative work, he began to address the irrational draw toward death, the desire for it, the mysterious attraction of undoing oneself.
In his own life, he occasionally alluded to a despair (or, as he often called it, “indifference”) that pulled him in that direction.When his favorite grandson, Heinerle, died at the age of four and a half of tuberculosis, he hinted at a grief so wild and consuming that he couldn’t enjoy life. “It is the secret of my indifference—people call it courage—toward the danger to my own life.”
In Freud’s lifetime, biographers and other analysts tried to connect his theories of Thanatos—an innate attraction to death—to his own grief or morbidity during this period. They argued that he had dreamed up the death instinct in grief after his daughter Sophie died suddenly of influenza in 1920, out of some sort of depression or excessive mourning, but Freud quickly pointed out that he had shown drafts of the book to colleagues long before Sophie caught the influenza that would kill her, and so they were mistaken.
Still, there was always an undercurrent, an attraction, a despondency that every now and then found voice in his letters and work. There was something in the theory of a death instinct that flickered through his personal writing over many decades, that had already appeared in traces, in shadows. The formal postulation of a “death instinct” is in some sense the culmination of a romantic notion, much like his nexus of romantic notions surrounding smoking. There is a perverse beauty to the idea of the death drive; there is a poetry to this disturbing theory, just as there is a poetry to Freud’s reflections on smoking. He found the “death instinct” beautiful, seductive.
Freud conceived of the death drive as a force one is powerless against: “The dangerous death drives are dealt with in a varietyof ways…but in the main they undoubtedly continue their inner activities unchecked.” The author of these words is the Freud who shrugged when Max Schur showed him the doctors’ report saying he should quit smoking, the Freud who lit a cigar in spite of the doctors advising him not to exacerbate his cancer. There is a sense, in his smoking, in this untouchable, unanalyzable subject, of the death drive continuing its “inner activities unchecked.” Indeed, Freud saw himself as powerless to quit, even if he had wanted to, which he may not have in any sustained or convincing way.
Other analysts were uncomfortable with the idea of the death drive. Was it too extreme, too overblown, the idea that everyone is propelled or driven toward extinction? Could it be anything more than a majestic or mythic fantasy? But in a certain sense it doesn’t matter. Whether or not the model of the death drive comprises an
There is some question about whether Freud actually ever made this legendary comment in a speech he gave to students at Clark University in 1909. He did, however, carve off cigars as a private matter, something to be kept apart from the interpretive digging of his method, in a letter to Ernest Jones: “If someone should reproach you with my Fall into Sin, you are free to reply that my adherence to telepathy is my private affair like my Jewishness, my passion for smoking, and…inessential for psychoanalysis.” Smoking, then, is in a special, separate category: He does not want it to be analyzed. It is something he does beyond analysis. It is his own mystery.
In a slender, controversial book, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” which came out in 1920, Freud raised the possibility of a silent drive toward death, a secret desire for annihilation animating each of us. He wrote a line many analysts would resist, finding it too extreme, too sweeping, too unsettling: “The aim of all life is death.” And in this strange, speculative work, he began to address the irrational draw toward death, the desire for it, the mysterious attraction of undoing oneself.
In his own life, he occasionally alluded to a despair (or, as he often called it, “indifference”) that pulled him in that direction.When his favorite grandson, Heinerle, died at the age of four and a half of tuberculosis, he hinted at a grief so wild and consuming that he couldn’t enjoy life. “It is the secret of my indifference—people call it courage—toward the danger to my own life.”
In Freud’s lifetime, biographers and other analysts tried to connect his theories of Thanatos—an innate attraction to death—to his own grief or morbidity during this period. They argued that he had dreamed up the death instinct in grief after his daughter Sophie died suddenly of influenza in 1920, out of some sort of depression or excessive mourning, but Freud quickly pointed out that he had shown drafts of the book to colleagues long before Sophie caught the influenza that would kill her, and so they were mistaken.
Still, there was always an undercurrent, an attraction, a despondency that every now and then found voice in his letters and work. There was something in the theory of a death instinct that flickered through his personal writing over many decades, that had already appeared in traces, in shadows. The formal postulation of a “death instinct” is in some sense the culmination of a romantic notion, much like his nexus of romantic notions surrounding smoking. There is a perverse beauty to the idea of the death drive; there is a poetry to this disturbing theory, just as there is a poetry to Freud’s reflections on smoking. He found the “death instinct” beautiful, seductive.
Freud conceived of the death drive as a force one is powerless against: “The dangerous death drives are dealt with in a varietyof ways…but in the main they undoubtedly continue their inner activities unchecked.” The author of these words is the Freud who shrugged when Max Schur showed him the doctors’ report saying he should quit smoking, the Freud who lit a cigar in spite of the doctors advising him not to exacerbate his cancer. There is a sense, in his smoking, in this untouchable, unanalyzable subject, of the death drive continuing its “inner activities unchecked.” Indeed, Freud saw himself as powerless to quit, even if he had wanted to, which he may not have in any sustained or convincing way.
Other analysts were uncomfortable with the idea of the death drive. Was it too extreme, too overblown, the idea that everyone is propelled or driven toward extinction? Could it be anything more than a majestic or mythic fantasy? But in a certain sense it doesn’t matter. Whether or not the model of the death drive comprises an
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