Freud on the First World War (Part 2)
Jasna Koteska, Full Professor in Humanities, Faculty of Philology "Blaze Koneski", University Ss. Cyril and Methodius of Skopje, Macedonia
Full text
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How to cite: Koteska, Jasna (2020). Freud on the First World War (Part 2). Researcher. European Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences. 1 (3), 45-60.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.32777/r.2020.3.1.3
For the first part of this article go
here and
here.
Abstract:
The
article “Freud on the First World War (Part 2)” analyzes Sigmund Freud’s
controversial attitude towards the First World War. It exposes Freud’s attitude
towards the medical procedure known as the faradization, and his double role
regarding the Great War. His public persona was that of a pacifist scholar,
while his personal correspondence reveals a nationalist who lived from one
German victory to the next. This article demonstrates there are two Freuds
regarding the Great War. The ‘first Freud’ was his public medical persona, who
lamented the partisan attitudes of scientists carried away by their emotions.
The ‘second Freud’ is Freud in communication with his closest friends and
colleagues, where he admits his nationalism, and he identified himself with the
Austro-German side and displays a war enthusiasm. In the only study dedicated
to the Great World, the study titled “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”,
Freud offered a rich and valid insight into human nature, human’s capacity for
destruction, and also human’s attitude towards its own immortality. Freud draw
a clear distinction between war and death, and while in the first essay he
dealt with discontent and disillusionment, in the second he says that human’s
unconsciousness believes in its own immortality. The article also exposes
Freud’s legendary meetings with artists during the Great War, and most notably
with Lou Andreas-Salomé and with Rainer Maria Rilke.
Key
words: Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis. First World War,
faradization, nationalism, two Freuds, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,
the question of War, the question of Death, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rainer Maria
Rilke.
I.
The
Curious Role of Freud in the Case against Doctor Julius Wagner Jauregg
(War
Neurotic or Malingerer?)
During the war, soldiers
were tortured not only by the enemies, but also by their military commanders.
The general attitude of the Austrian military doctors was to proclaim that
patients were lying about their war traumas. The ‘medical procedure’ often consisted
in prescribing so-called faradization (the term originated from the name of
Michael Faraday, the physicist who studied electromagnetism in therapy). The
traumatized soldiers were exposed to the application of faradic currents to
stimulate muscles and nerves. The electrical shocks were often as painful as
the actual traumas, and by critics they were regarded as concealed military
torture! But, despite being painful, were the electric currents actually useful
in healing neurotic symptoms? According to Freud, they were not.
Two decades prior to the
Great War, in his book Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud reported that
faradization is ineffective. In the book he writes about his own usage of
electrical currents in treatments of nervous disorders in one of the five
clinical cases described, that of his patient Elisabeth von R. Freud concluded
the case history with the clear assessment: electrotherapy is useless. Freud
writes: ‘The fact is that… electrical reactions lead nowhere’ (Freud &
Breuer 2000, p. 158). Although Freud was aware the electric currents ‘lead
nowhere’, he still recommended them (Freud & Breuer 2000, p. 138):
We
recommended the continuation of systematic kneading and faradization of the
sensitive muscles, regardless of resulting pain, and I reserved to myself
treatment of her legs with high-tension electric currents, in order to be able
to keep in touch with her.
This is one of Freud’s
earliest mentions of electrotherapy. From the development of the case study of
Elisabeth von R. we learn that Freud did not believe that electrotherapy
actually works, and considered it his little ‘pretence’ treatment. But he still
used electric shocks to achieve two things: a) By gimmicking and pretending
that electrotherapy works, he wanted to continue the treatment (‘to be able to
keep in touch with her’) because on several occasions Elisabeth von R. wanted
to stop the treatments, and b) Elisabeth von R. started to like the pains
caused by electroshocks so much that she forgot her own pains. Freud writes (Freud
& Breuer 2000, p. 138): “She seemed to take quite a liking to the painful
shocks produced by the high-tension apparatus, and the stronger these were the
more they seemed to push her own pains into the background”.
This pre-history of Freud’s
opinion on electrotherapy is important because when he testified about
faradization as a form of military torture, Freud surprisingly gave a radically
different opinion from the one expressed in his books. Two years after the war,
in 1920, Freud was asked to give his expert opinion in the case of harsh
military usage of faradisation and electric shocks by doctor Julius Wagner
Jauregg, the director of the Psychiatric Division at the Vienna General Hospital,
and seven years later, in 1927, a Nobel Prize winner for his discovery of the
fever treatment of neurosyphilis. After the war, Wagner Jauregg faced severe
criticism for his advocacy and use of faradization as a form of military
torture. In 1920 the Austrian War Ministry opened an enquiry, and appointed a
special commission to investigate the charges against Wagner Jauregg. Although
in his writings Freud dismissed the electric currents as a successful method,
when called to testify in a personal appearance before the commission, Freud
defended Wagner Jauregg. Freud also submitted a Memorandum of his expert
opinion on the matter in which he distinguished two types of neuroses: the
neurosis of peace and the war neurosis. The neurosis of peace is connected to disturbances
of the emotional life. But the war neurosis, Freud now writes, should be traced
back to the mere desire of soldiers to withdraw from army service (Szasz 1988,
p. 88):
A
soldier in whom these affective motives [to quit the service ― JK] were very
powerful and clearly conscious would, if he was a healthy man, have been
obliged to desert or pretend to be ill. Only the smallest portion of war
neurotics, however, were malingerers; the emotional impulses which rebelled in
them against active service and drove them into illness were operative in them
without becoming conscious to them. They remained unconscious because other
motives, such as ambition, self-esteem, patriotism, the habit of obedience, and
the example of others, were to start with more powerful until, on some
appropriate occasion, they were overwhelmed by the other, unconscious-operating
motives.
In the complicated
distinction between conscious and unconscious motives, one can read what
appears to be Freud’s refusal to recognize the war neurosis as a valid and
operative diagnosis. Why this refusal? According to Thomas Szasz, Freud used
the case against Wagner Jauregg as an opportunity to self-glorify his
discipline. (Freud is well past halfway in his Memorandum before he even
mentions the issue of electric shocks or Wagner Jauregg.) Completely
disregarding all medical rationality and against all the evidence of the Great
War pathologies, Freud claims that soldiers who are implicated as war neurotics
are malingerers (idlers, lazy soldiers) whose basic motivation is to avoid
military service. Freud’s verdict is that Wagner Jauregg rightly advocated the
harsh and painful faradization in order to bring the ‘malingerers’ back to army
service (Szasz 1988, p. 89):
Since
the war neurotic’s illness serves the purpose of withdrawing him from an
intolerable situation, the roots of the illness would clearly be undermined if
it was made even more intolerable to him than active service. Just as he had
fled from the war into illness, means were now adopted which compelled him to
flee back from illness into health, that is to say, into fitness for active
service. For this purpose, painful electrical treatments was employed, and with
success.
Similarly to the military
psychiatrists of his time, Freud purposely confused malingerers with war
neurotics, suggesting that soldiers lie about their symptoms. The soldier’s
illness does not consist of actual symptoms; the illness is ‘invented’ in order
to avoid the army. Although later in his autobiography, even Wagner Jauregg
himself acknowledged that his treatments were harsh measures, Freud was not as
sympathetic towards the war neurosis, and by mixing the rhetoric of illness and
health, he defending the military interests, moral duties, patriotism and
loyalty, instead of defending the medical interests. In the archives of the
Austrian Ministry of War one can find the testimony of one of Wagner Jauregg’s
accusers. The soldier appeared before the commission and stated that the doctor
did him harm. In the public hearing, as we shall see below, Freud refuted the
testimony and said that Wagner Jauregg acted out of ‘his humaneness’. The
doctor’s only ‘guilt’, Freud says, is that he was not direct and transparent in
telling the soldier he was a liar who just wanted to avoid military service,
that he was not a war neurotic. If Wagner Jauregg had used Freudian
psychoanalysis, he would have told the patient that he was ‘not ill’, that he
falsified the illness, and Wagner Jauregg missed the opportunity to expose the
patient as a liar, as a war malingerer! The stenographic transcript goes as
follows (Szasz 1988, p. 91):
PROF.
FREUD: I believe that Hofrat Wagner caused this [the patient’s antagonism
towards himself], in part, by reason of the fact that he did not avail himself
of my therapy. I don’t demand of him that he do so; I cannot possibly demand it
of him; even my own students cannot do it.
PROF.
WAGNER: I used disciplinary treatment, which was very much recommended, instead
of persuading him that he is not ill.
PROF.
FREUD: Your treatment had no success here; it only brought him to misunderstand
the doctor’s intentions. Well, I have overstepped my duty as an expert witness,
but I have stated the impressions I gained from the deliberations.
CHAIRMAN:
The expert expresses the point of view that he would have found it correct to
give psychoanalytical treatment.
PROF.
FREUD: In this case, yes.
Freud not only altered the commission’s agenda
and used the opportunity to promote psychoanalysis, as Thomas Szasz writes, but
he also implicitly questioned the existence of war neurosis as a valid
diagnosis, in order to promote his method of healing. Freud did not even care
to speak about the potential benefits or risks of electric shocks; his agenda
was to rank psychoanalysis higher than other methods, even if the price to be
paid was to expose all soldiers as malingerers by default. For the historical
record, Freud equally distrusted all other methods of healing (hydrotherapy,
diets, hypnosis, etc.), not just electrotherapy. After the war, in 1919 in his
preface to Theodor Reik’s book Ritual: Four Psychoanalytic Studies, Freud wrote
(Reik 1962, p. 7): “Psychoanalysis was born out of medical necessity. It sprung
from the need for bringing help to neurotic patients, who had found no relief
through rest-cures, through the arts of hydrotherapy or through electricity”.
Freud proposed that
psychoanalysis is the only answer to traumas. He considered the trauma as
something that affects the psyche, not the soma. Despite millions of people
with actual physical and psychological wounds as a direct result of the war,
Freud insisted that all stress is caused by an emotional stressor. And
curiously Freud was not alone in this reserved attitude towards war neurosis
and shell shock diagnoses. In his posthumously published autobiography (1983),
Emil Kraepelin, one of the most influential psychiatrists of the nineteenth and
twentieth century, also warned about the ‘excessively liberal’ (Kraepelin 1987,
p. 189) use of the terms, which led to generous pensions, public sympathy, and
retroactively only prolonged the distress, the endless grief and further
damaged society. Kraepelin’s comments triggered further controversies about the
actual status of the war neurosis, and only proved that the Great War was a
difficult ordeal for medical science in general.
II. Freud’s Personal
Opinion about the Great War
(On Freud’s ‘War
Enthusiasm’)
All my libido is given to Austro-Hungary
(Jones 1961, p.
336)
This is a well known
sentence attributed to Freud regarding the First World War. It is quoted by his
biographer, Ernest Jones, from the letter Freud sent to Karl Abraham. Although
Ernest Jones was much criticized for presenting an over-positive and
acclamatory portrayal of Freud in his three volumes The Life and Work of
Sigmund Freud (1952–1957), Jones’s portrait of Freud during the First World War
provides a picture that is less sympathetic than the rest of the pages
dedicated to other aspects of Freud’s life and work. The sentence was quoted
numerous times in various books. For the sake of historical evidence, the Freud’s
letter written to Karl Abraham on 2 August 1914, just five days after the
beginning of the First World War on 28 July 1914 (for the researchers, the
letter is referenced as ‘239 F’), actually reads as follows: At the time of my
writing the great war can be regarded as certain; I should be with it with all
my heart if I did not know England to be on the wrong side (Brunner 2001, p.
112).
Freud was 58 when the Great
War broke out. His immediate response to the war was not one expected by a
pacifist scholar; Freud did not greet the war with horror, as many others did;
instead, he displayed “youthful enthusiasm” (Jones 1961, p. 336), Jones writes.
For the first time in 30 years Freud felt himself to be an Austrian; he felt
that Vienna was not a foreign city to him any longer. Since the AustroHungarian
army had no victories of its own, Freud lived from one German victory to the
next (Brunner 2001, p. 112); he was carried away by Germany’s role in the war;
he talked about ‘our battles’ and ‘our victories’, and (as obvious from the
letter to Abraham), he was concerned that England was on the wrong side of the
war. When in December 1914 Freud was offered a place of asylum in Baltimore by
the American psychoanalyst Trigant Burrow, he declined. Freud’s three sons
joined the Central Powers: his eldest son Martin went to war in July 1914 as a
gunner fighting in Galicia and Russia, his youngest son Ernst was fighting in
Italy, and his other son Oliver was engaged in engineering work, constructing
war tunnels and barracks. In the 1919 edition of his masterpiece The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud added the acknowledgement in which he explained
that in one of his dreams during the war he dreamt that one of his sons was
alive but wounded. Freud analyzed his dream as envy for his sons’ youth. Freud
(Freud 2010, p. 526) writes:
Deeper
analysis… enabled me to discover… the concealed impulse… which might have found
satisfaction in the dreaded accident to my son: it was envy which is felt for
the young by those who have grown old, but which they believe they have
completely stifled.
There exists an extensive
psychoanalytical literature explaining how the maturing of one’s own children
into adulthood shatters the sense of perpetual youth “because identification of
the childhood self with young children is no longer possible” (Colarusso &
Nemiroff 1994, p. 319). But, Freud’s 1914 dreams can be read beyond just the
envy for his sons’ youth. Freud was experiencing what we could call ‘the war
joy’. Psychoanalysis was among several important forerunners of the concepts of
individual and collective traumas, and the war offered endless opportunities to
study them. Excited, but also disconcerted, Freud and his circle to a great
extent ignored the political implications of the war. As Jones writes, they
were slow to apprehend the gravity of the international situation (Jones 1961,
p. 336), and as Schwartz writes, they were not good “at questioning the
political and military goals of the war itself!” (Schwartz 2010, p. 198). For
the first time, Freud was able to witness the full dimensions of the ruthless
promiscuity of destruction. In Freud’s private correspondence we find a
multitude of mixed sentiments (the perverted pleasure that his theories about
human destructiveness are true, the fascination with human nature, envy of
youth, etc.), but we cannot find the expected disgust with the war. By his own
admission to Ferenczi, he spent 1916 reading up to four newspapers a day, and even
in 1917, Freud was still writing to Ferenczi: I am, strange to say, quite well
in all of this, and my mood is unshaken. Proof of how little basis one needs
for this (Falzeder & Brabant 1996, p. 186.). José Brunner comments that
throughout the war, Freud managed ‘to separate his personal sentiments from the
public medical persona as disinterested observer of universal human affairs’
(Brunner 2001, p. 111), and it took him ‘a rather long time ― until May 1917 ―
to call the war a “‘disaster [Unglück]’ and to start longing for peace”
(Falzeder & Brabant 1996, p. 112). Publicly Freud worked hard to retain the
image of a cool, objective scientist, a ‘pure’ analyst outside of the sphere of
war, the absent third party. Much of this was the result of his true dedication
to his science, but some of it was a good ‘cover up’ for his lack of political
awareness.
Freud did not volunteer to
serve in the war, like many other doctors, and instead he spent the war years
in Vienna. During and after the war Vienna suffered from inflation that
destroyed the middle class, and lots of people were starving. The circumstances
of war did not bypass Freud’s life. Two things Freud that hated most throughout
his life ― helplessness and poverty ― became everyday reality for him. In
October 1914 Freud had two patients, both of them Hungarian aristocrats, and in
November 1914 he was left with one patient. The Vienna psychoanalytical
society, established by Freud, stopped its regular weekly meetings. Part of
Freud’s preoccupation during the war was to preserve the continuity of his
psychoanalytic publications, and he managed to keep Zeitschrift and Imago running
throughout the war, but the journal Jahrbuch never appeared again after 1914
(Jones 1961, p. 342). As other citizens of Vienna, Freud had difficulty
procuring food; his study could not be heated, and all scientific writing had
to be given up in the winter months. Freud’s family was still better off for
food than most Viennese because of the constant financial efforts of Ferenczi
and Anton von Freund (a doctor of philosophy and a wealthy director of a beer
brewery in Budapest). Both men (mis)used their military position to help Freud;
Anton von Freund financially helped Freud to establish an independent
publishing firm, Verlag (Jones 1961, p. 350) and in 1918 he donated a sum of
almost two million crowns for the advancement of psychoanalysis, which Freud called
‘the overpayment worthy of note’ (Falzeder 2015, p. 125).
The Great War marked what is
today known as the second period of Freud’s writing. The lack of patients meant
more time for writing, and Freud’s productivity grew significantly in 1914 and
1915. In 1915 Freud completed seven of some of his most important studies:
Mourning and Melancholia, The Unconscious, Repression, the case history of the
Wolf Man (published in 1918), Instincts and their Vicissitudes, The
Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams and the twin essay
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. During 1916 and 1917 Freud delivered
28 lectures at the University of Vienna which he published in 1918 as
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. The book had 717 pages, equal to
Freud’s printed production in all three previous war years. With the end of the
war, Jones tells us that Freud’s practice had revived and in 1918 he was
treating nine or ten patients a day. Freud’s family did not sustain losses in
the war and his two sons came home safely. After the break-up of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, Freud once again resumed his regular lament that his
discipline would be forgotten, and psychoanalysts would no longer be needed as
during the war. In a letter to Ferenczi (Falzeder & Brabant 1996, p. 311),
Freud writes:
No
sooner does it begin to interest the world on account of the war neuroses than
the war ends, and once we find a source that affords us monetary resources, it
has to dry up immediately. But hard luck is one of the constants of life. Our
kingdom is indeed not of this world.
III.
Freud on Death
(Thoughts for the Times on War and Death)
In 1915, six months after
the outbreak of the war, Freud wrote his only study dedicated exclusively to
the Great War. The study was a set of twin essays entitled Thoughts for the
Time of War and Death. But immediately upon finishing it, in a letter to
Abraham, Freud dismissed his work as “a piece of topical chit-chat [zeitgemäßes
Gewäsch] about war and death to keep the self-sacrificing publisher happy”
(Brunner 2001, p. 112). As pointed out above, in the matter of the war two
different versions of Freud can be seen: a public and a private one.
This article demonstrates
there are two Freuds regarding the Great War. The ‘first Freud’ is his public
medical persona, who laments the partisan attitudes of scientists carried away
by their emotions, a Freud who sees the war as the greatest discontent and
disillusionment for the human race. His study Thoughts for the Time of War and Death is written by the ‘first
Freud’. The ‘second Freud’ is Freud in communication with his closest friends
and colleagues, where he admits his nationalism, he identifies with the
Austro-German side, he displays a silly war enthusiasm, and he even defends
military torture performed by his colleagues, as we saw in previous sections of
this article. But, despite Freud’s private nationalism, the study Thoughts for the Time of War and Death
remains a valid and rich insight into human nature, our capacity for
destruction, about how war alters our attitude to death, and the study offers a
complex theory of human aggression. Eric Fromm argues that the First World War
‘constitutes the dividing line within the development of Freud’s theory of
aggressivity’ (Dufresne 2000, p. 29). Freud’s study incorporates the themes of
death, loss and destruction into his analysis of culture and is today regarded
as the earliest precursor of his most important and widely read work, Civilization and its Discontents (1930).
The title of the study Thoughts for the Time of War and Death
suggests that Freud wanted to draw a clear distinction between war and death
(Drassinower 2003, p. 15). The first essay about war deals with discontent and
disillusionment with the human race, and the second essay addresses the problem
of death. Freud makes a clear distinction between war and death, because as he
says: two problems occur as a result of war. The first and ‘less’ problematic
is that disillusionment with civilization occurs in war; war destroys all the
precious and common possessions of humanity, including artistic and scientific
achievements; war brings humanity to its lowest level. But, the second and much
larger problem, according to Freud, is that war alters our attitude towards
death! The following sections offer a reading and summary of Freud’s seminal
work relating to the Great War.
1. The Problem of War
Freud
distinguishes several aspects of war, which contribute to the disillusionment
with the human race: a) the clash between technology and humanity, b)
disillusionment in ideas of goodness, c) war showcases the brutality of humans,
d) destruction is paradoxically greater in knowledgeable people and in more
advanced civilizations, e) war results in the passivization of communities, f)
war introduces greater tension between society and instincts, and g) war upsets
the balance between good and evil.
Freud
says that the increased perfection of weapons of attack and defense makes the
Great War ‘more bloody and more destructive than any war of other days’; war
‘disregards all the restrictions known as International Law’, and it ‘ignores
the prerogatives of the wounded and the medical service’ (Freud 2000). Further,
Freud says, people act ‘as though there were to be no future and no peace among
men after it is over’. The war cuts all the common bonds between nations and,
paradoxically, it appears that the more civilized the community is, the more
‘barbaric’ it appears to be. Another problem is that due to the cruelty of the
war, communities are being anaesthetized, and they ‘no longer raise
objections’. According to Freud (Freud 2000, p. 3072):
When
the community no longer raises objections, there is an end, too, to the
suppression of evil passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud,
treachery and barbarity so incompatible with their level of civilization that
one would have thought them impossible.
War brings ‘low morality
shown externally by states’, but also the ‘brutality shown by individuals’. How
do we imagine the process by which an individual becomes brutal? Freud says
that even though we believe that people are ‘noble from birth’, and that human
development consists in ‘eradicating the evil human tendencies’, in reality
‘there is no such thing as ‘eradicating’ evil’! The psychoanalytical material,
says Freud, demonstrated that the deepest essence of human nature consists of
‘instinctual impulses which are of an elementary nature’. War perfectly
demonstrates that people’s earliest instincts are never forgotten, they are
present, only war makes them visible, active again. This explains what Freud
calls the mystery of hatred, when whole communities ‘hate and detest one
another’. War makes people ‘all of a sudden behave without insight, like
imbeciles’, says Freud, which causes the re-establishment of primitive stages
of being and regresses in civilization. Societies obey their passions far more
readily than their interests, and because instincts are ‘easily rationalized’
the war nations rationalize the instincts of people.
These impulses ‘in
themselves are neither good nor bad’; according to Freud, the impulses which
society classifies or condemns as evil, selfish or cruel are ‘inhibited’ in all
people, and they never change into altruism, or ‘cruelty into pity’. Freud
gives example of the most common pair: intense love and intense hatred are to
be found together in the same person, and the ‘two opposed feelings not
infrequently have the same person for their object’. For Freud the instincts
are not formed from the beginning, they change with time (Freud 2000, p. 3074):
Those
who as children have been the most pronounced egoists may well become the most
helpful and self-sacrificing members of the community; most of our
sentimentalists, friends of humanity and protectors of animals have been
evolved from little sadists and animal-tormentors.
The transformation of ‘bad’
instincts is brought about by the human need for love, and according to Freud,
we learn to value being loved as an advantage, for which we are willing to
transform the egoistic trends into altruistic and socially acceptable
attitudes. People incline to turn their egoism into altruism because of the
‘benefits in the way of love’ and because of ‘rewards and punishments’. This
means that for Freud, humans are neither good nor bad. People are generally
inclined to appraise people as ‘better’ than they actually are, or in his words
(Freud 2000, p. 3074): “A human being is seldom altogether good or bad; he is
usually ‘good’ in one relation and ‘bad’ in another, or ‘good’ in certain
external circumstances and in others decidedly ‘bad’”.
The actions of people are
regarded as good or bad only in relation to the current cultural point of view,
and for Freud good actions are not an outcome of good impulses. People ‘choose’
to behave well for their private, selfish purposes. From the cultural
standpoint it does not matter if people are selfish or altruistic as long as
they are culturally acceptable. Theoretically speaking, one cannot even
distinguish between good and bad impulses. In the book Psychoanalysis and Faith
(1963) one can find an exchange of letters between Freud and a Swiss Lutheran
minister and lay psychoanalyst, Oskar Pfister. Just before the end of the war,
in his letter to Pfister from October 1918, Freud writes (Heinrich & Ernst
1963, pp. 61–62):
I do
not break my head very much about good and evil, but I have found little that
is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are
trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical
doctrine or to none at all.
2. The Problem of Death
War
is devastating, says Freud, but not only because of the destruction of all
common possessions of humanity. More distressing and alarming for Freud is that
war alters our understanding of death! Freud opens his essay with the thesis
that people do not regard death as something natural, quite the opposite:
‘death seems unnatural to people’. Of course, people ‘know’ that death is a
necessary outcome of life, but they are accustomed to behave as if death does
not exist. According to psychoanalysis, people tend to eliminate death from
life, because for our unconscious we are immortal, and could imagine our own
death only as spectators. Freud writes (Freud 1914, p. 3088):
Our
unconscious does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were
immortal. What we call our ‘unconscious’ ― the deepest strata of our minds,
made up of instinctual impulses ― knows nothing that is negative… it does not
know its own death.
While we consider ourselves
immortal, we have no problem acknowledging death in strangers or enemies. In
fact, we humans tend to ‘get rid of anyone who stands in our way’, and of
anyone who has offended or injured us. Freud says: ‘Our unconscious will murder
even for trifles...If we are to be judged by our unconscious wishful impulses,
we ourselves are, like primeval man, a gang of murderers’ (Freud 1914, p.
3089). Acknowledging other people’s death mean that we somehow are ‘aware’ that
death exists. That is why, Freud says, civilized people invented all kinds of
rituals to speak of death considerately. When someone dies, we adopt a special
attitude towards the deceased, a kind of ‘admiration’; we are ‘always deeply affected’,
and most importantly we ‘lay stress on the fortuitous causation of the death ―
accident, disease, infection, or advanced age’ (Freud 1914, p. 3082). We do
this in order to reduce death from a necessity to a ‘chance event’! However,
there are three categories of people who do talk about death without the
restrictions: a) Children, who could say unashamedly: ‘Dear Mummy, when you’re
dead I’II do this or that’ (Freud 1914, p. 3082). b) Doctors and lawyers who
‘deal with death professionally’, and c) Artists, who talk about death in their
works of fiction, as a way for humans to ‘reconcile ourselves with death’. But
war changes our perspective on death. War sweeps away the conventional
treatment of death. What is disturbed in war is ethical striving. Freud writes
(Freud 1914, p. 3083):
(In
war) people really die; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of
thousands, in a single day. And death is no longer a chance event. To be sure,
it still seems a matter of chance whether a bullet hits this man or that; but a
second bullet may well hit the survivor; and the accumulation of deaths puts an
end to the impression of chance.
War means that death is no
longer a ‘chance event’. What is disturbed in war is ethical striving. War
means that people are allowed to kill, and war, says Freud, invalidates the
most important prohibition made by religion: ‘Thou shalt not kill’. The
commandment itself, for Freud, is the strongest proof that humanity springs
from endless generations of murderers. In his study Totem and Taboo (1913)
published just one year prior the First World War, following Darwin, Freud says
that the primal crime of mankind is patricide, the killing of the primal father
by the horde. The commandment was produced as a force which would stop people from
killing.
How to justify killing? War
introduces the concept of heroism, and for Freud the secret of heroism, its
rationale, rests on a judgement that the subjects’ own life is so precious that
they have to kill in order to acknowledge their immortality. The primitive
races invented various rituals in which they had to atone for the murders they
committed in war; the rituals helped them express their ‘bad conscience about
the bloodguilt’ (Freud 1914, p. 3087). But civilized men, says Freud, have lost
their ethical sensitivity, and that is another reason for the vast number of
traumas related to the Great War. In times of war, Freud says, the dichotomy of
love-hate is annihilated, and it forces people to believe they are heroes who
cannot die, while they murder others, whose death is desired. In the same year
Freud wrote the study On Narcissism (1914); here he considered narcissism to be
the libidinal aspect of egoism, and assumed that aggression was an integral
part of the complex of self-preservation. In his later theory the wish to live
became part of the vast complex of Eros, in opposition to Thanatos.
IV.
Instead of a Conclusion
Two of the most legendary
meetings and exchanges Freud had with artists regarding the Great War were with
Lou Andreas-Salomé and Rainer Maria Rilke. In the letter to Andreas-Salomé from
November 1914 Freud writes (Unwerth 2005, p. 9):
I
have no doubt that humanity will get over this war, but I know for certain that
I and my contemporaries will see the world cheerful no more... My secret
conclusion is: since we can only regard the highest present civilization as
burdened with an enormous hypocrisy, it follows that we are organically
unfitted for it. We have to abdicate, and the Great Unknown, He or It, lurking
behind Fate will someday repeat this experiment with another race.
Freud met Rainer Maria Rilke
in the autumn of 1914, when Rilke was training for military service in Vienna.
In her book Time, Eva Hoffman (Hoffman 2009, p. 113) describes their meeting
and conversation as follows:
During
a brief walk which has entered literary history, Freud met Rainer Maria Rilke ―
a poet who experienced a terror of mortality and who disconsolately felt that,
ultimately, they had no value; they didn’t count. Not so, responded Freud. It
is the transience of nature and human beings ― of the loved human face ― that
gives them their poignant significance; it is because we know all things living
shall pass that we cherish them.
Sigmund Freud concluded his
only study dedicated to the Great War, Thoughts
for the Time of War and Death (1915), with the following enigmatic passage
(Freud 1914, p. 3091):
To
tolerate life remains, after all, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion
becomes valueless if it makes this harder for us. We recall the old saying: If
you want to preserve peace, arm for war. It would be in keeping with the times
to alter it: If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.
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