accurate portrait of the human psyche, it did give an accurate portrait of Freud’s personal conflict.
Even though Sophie’s death did not feed into the creation of the theory, the analysts and biographers may have been right in their instinct that Freud was in some other, more obscure way writing about himself. Is it possible that there was an extravagant longing for death, a positive desire for it that had begun to fascinate him? Freud wrote of the life and death drives, “life itself is a battle and constant compromise between these two urges,” and it seems entirely possible that this battle was something he lived through, something he felt very much at work in his own days.
He did sometimes articulate a fairly straightforward wish for death. He wrote to Stefan Zweig: “Although I have been uncommonly happy in my house…I cannot reconcile myself to the wretchedness and helplessness of being old, and look forward to the transition into nonbeing with a kind of longing.”
Was he, then, both the good patient trying to gain more time for his work and life and the bad patient smoking himself to death? Were both those drives equally irresistible, irrepressible? Take Freud, sitting in his leather armchair, enveloped in a cloud of smoke; take this erratic, stubborn, glorious pocket of misbehavior, the match moving toward the cigar: It would be too simple to say that Freud wanted to die, but it would also be too simple to say that he did not want to die. He would write later, “Only the collaboration and the conflict between both primal drives, Eros and death drive, explain the colorful variety of life’s phenomena, never one of them alone.”
For Freud, smoking would represent the choice, the exertion of will on unpromising circumstances. Part of his smoking was a resistance, a rebellion, a declaration of himself. He wrote, “annoyed that the discomfort will not give way, I am again sinning more.” He could do nothing about his declining health, but he could smoke. He could assert his power over the long hours of an afternoon. He wrote in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” “What we are left with is that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”
Whether or not this is true of the “organism,” it was certainly true of Freud. He was increasingly focused on the issue of control,a control so expansive and consuming it encompassed even the mode or method of one’s dying. Freud wanted to choose when and how to die. When Anna suggested that they should poison themselves if they couldn’t get out of Vienna because of the Nazis, he was irritated and snapped, “Why, because they want us to?” Freud was in no way opposed to suicide in extremis, but he did not want to be forced to die by Fascists or nature; he wanted to choose when he would die. He wrote, while waiting for his visa out of Austria, that he wanted to “die in freedom,” which meant, ostensibly, that he wanted to die in England, away from the minor and major persecutions of the Nazis. But he also meant: “the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”
For a long time Anna thought he might recover. She was used to his heroic recoveries. She wrote later, “It is really not so that we had known for a long time that he would die. He was very ill, but then he had been very ill many times before.”
Freud, however, was thinking about death in increasingly pragmatic terms. In December of 1936, he wrote to Marie Bonaparte: “If you, at the youthful age of fifty-four, can’t help thinking so often of death, are you surprised that at 80 ½ I keep brooding on whether I shall reach the age of my father and brother, or even that of my mother, tortured as I am by conflict between the desire for rest, the dread of renewed suffering…and by the anticipation of sorrow at being separated from everything to which I am still attached?”
Marie Bonaparte wrote a note to herself at the bottom of the letter. “M.: How beautiful everything is
Even though Sophie’s death did not feed into the creation of the theory, the analysts and biographers may have been right in their instinct that Freud was in some other, more obscure way writing about himself. Is it possible that there was an extravagant longing for death, a positive desire for it that had begun to fascinate him? Freud wrote of the life and death drives, “life itself is a battle and constant compromise between these two urges,” and it seems entirely possible that this battle was something he lived through, something he felt very much at work in his own days.
He did sometimes articulate a fairly straightforward wish for death. He wrote to Stefan Zweig: “Although I have been uncommonly happy in my house…I cannot reconcile myself to the wretchedness and helplessness of being old, and look forward to the transition into nonbeing with a kind of longing.”
Was he, then, both the good patient trying to gain more time for his work and life and the bad patient smoking himself to death? Were both those drives equally irresistible, irrepressible? Take Freud, sitting in his leather armchair, enveloped in a cloud of smoke; take this erratic, stubborn, glorious pocket of misbehavior, the match moving toward the cigar: It would be too simple to say that Freud wanted to die, but it would also be too simple to say that he did not want to die. He would write later, “Only the collaboration and the conflict between both primal drives, Eros and death drive, explain the colorful variety of life’s phenomena, never one of them alone.”
For Freud, smoking would represent the choice, the exertion of will on unpromising circumstances. Part of his smoking was a resistance, a rebellion, a declaration of himself. He wrote, “annoyed that the discomfort will not give way, I am again sinning more.” He could do nothing about his declining health, but he could smoke. He could assert his power over the long hours of an afternoon. He wrote in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” “What we are left with is that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”
Whether or not this is true of the “organism,” it was certainly true of Freud. He was increasingly focused on the issue of control,a control so expansive and consuming it encompassed even the mode or method of one’s dying. Freud wanted to choose when and how to die. When Anna suggested that they should poison themselves if they couldn’t get out of Vienna because of the Nazis, he was irritated and snapped, “Why, because they want us to?” Freud was in no way opposed to suicide in extremis, but he did not want to be forced to die by Fascists or nature; he wanted to choose when he would die. He wrote, while waiting for his visa out of Austria, that he wanted to “die in freedom,” which meant, ostensibly, that he wanted to die in England, away from the minor and major persecutions of the Nazis. But he also meant: “the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”
For a long time Anna thought he might recover. She was used to his heroic recoveries. She wrote later, “It is really not so that we had known for a long time that he would die. He was very ill, but then he had been very ill many times before.”
Freud, however, was thinking about death in increasingly pragmatic terms. In December of 1936, he wrote to Marie Bonaparte: “If you, at the youthful age of fifty-four, can’t help thinking so often of death, are you surprised that at 80 ½ I keep brooding on whether I shall reach the age of my father and brother, or even that of my mother, tortured as I am by conflict between the desire for rest, the dread of renewed suffering…and by the anticipation of sorrow at being separated from everything to which I am still attached?”
Marie Bonaparte wrote a note to herself at the bottom of the letter. “M.: How beautiful everything is
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