Ch. 2: Life, Death and Anxiety

Question 1

Role of death in psychopathology and psychotherapy. The basic postulates:

Answer 1

1. The fear of death haunts like nothing else, always rumbling under the surface, “at the rim of consciousness”
2. The child is pervasively occupied with death at an early age and a developmental task is to deal with the fear.
3. We erect defenses against this fear but ones that are based on denial result in clinical syndromes.
4. A robust and effective approach to psychotherapy can be constructed on the foundation of death awareness.

Question 2

“Don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch,” Adolph Meyer.

Answer 2

Question is: is death something everyone always has in mind anyway, so why further remind the grimness of it?

Yalom argues that death itches all the time.

Question 3

Yalom’s two arguments about death

Answer 3

1. Life and death are interdependent:
   - they exist simultaneously, not consecutively;
   - death whirs continuously beneath the membrane of life and exerts a vast influence upon experience and conduct.
2. Death is a primordial source of anxiety and thus the primary fount of psychopathology.

Question 4

Quotes about life & death

Answer 4

Yalom: “Learning to live well is to learn to die well; learning to die well is to learn to live well.”

Cicero: “To learn to philosophize is to prepare for death.”

Seneca: “No man enjoys the true taste of life but he who is willing and ready to quit it.”

Montaigne: “Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause fatigue, but reveals it.”

Yalom: “Although the physicality of death destroys man, the idea of death saves him.”

Question 5

Heidegger’s two modes of being

Answer 5

1. State of forgetfulness of being
   - World of things, “leveled down”, absorbed in “idle chatter”, lost in the “they”.
   - Not aware of one’s authorship of one’s life and world
   - “Fleeing”, “falling”
2. State of mindfulness of being
   - One marvels not about the way things are but that they are
   - Also called the “ontological mode” (Greek ontos = “existence”)
   - Only in this mode one is in touch with self-creation and can grasp the power to change oneself
   - Full self-awareness: of the transcendental ego (constituting) and empirical ego (constituted)
   - Embracing freedom and nothingness - and is anxious in the face of them

Question 6

Switching from mode’s of being

Answer 6

Heidegger said that one doesn’t go from the first being to the second one just by simple contemplation or gritting one’s death. Rather, through urgent experiences, “border” or “boundary” or “limit” situations. Death is the condition that makes it possible for us to live life in an authentic fashion.

Question 7

How death is thought of generally

WW1

American Flirtation

Answer 7

Claim: we don’t generally think of death as something with positive value to life, but “life shrinks when death is denied.” During WWI, Freud: “Life has indeed become interesting again; it has recovered its full content.” When death is not involved, we lose sight of the stakes involved - “as shallow as an American flirtation where it’s understood from the first that nothing will happen”.

Question 8

Giredoux’s dialogue between Jupiter and Mercury

Answer 8

Giraudoux’s dialogue between Jupiter and Mercury about making love to a mortal: “We miss something, Mercury - the poignance of the transient - the intimation of mortality, that sweet sadness of grasping at something you cannot hold?”

Question 9

Necrophilia or Life-denial

Answer 9

Yalom doesn’t argue for necrophilia or life-denial, but simply that denying death is a denial of one’s basic nature. Embracing death plunges us into more authentic life modes.

Question 10

Tolstoy’s War and Peace: Pierre

Answer 10

Tolstoy’s War and Peace provides an excellent illustration of how death may instigate a radical personal change: Pierre the protagonist feels deadened by the meaninglessness of Russian aristocracy. Captured by Napoleon’s troops, he is sentenced to death. As the 6th in row, he watches how five others are shot before him in terror, only to be freed for no reason himself. The rest of the book he lives purposefully.

Question 11

Golden Gate survivors

Answer 11

6/10 Golden Gate survivors had changed their views of life. “I can now sense other people’s existence.”

Similar stories from clinicians who work with suicidal patients who survived by mere chance. Also similar stories from people who had near-death experiences (automobile accidents, drownings, mountain climbing etc.) - strong sense of the preciousness of life, increasing the ability to live in the moment (Noyes).

Question 12

Chinese pictogram for “crisis”

Answer 12

combination of two symbols: “danger” and “opportunity”

Question 13

Cancer patients

*Kübler-Ross’s stages of dying

Answer 13

Cancer patients also report changes, although from Yalom’s study with women who had cancer, most of them did not report changes before cancer and “now” (after the onset). Yet for the ones who did, almost for everyone it was towards growth.

• One patient said Kübler-Ross’s stages of dying are skewed towards a hospitalized population and overlooks the “golden period” that occurs if a patient has time to assimilate his confrontation with death.

Question 14

Story of Jane: “I do not know what is going on.”

Answer 14

Jane was someone who was in chronic retreat from life. Failing kept Jane young, kept her protected, kept her from having to make choices.

Jane got news that she might have a tumor in her lymph node, and in a group therapy session she realized on a deep level that no matter what she did, no matter how she enfeebled herself, ultimately she would face death alone - no one could die her death for her.

The cancer did turn out to be benign, but Jane had already grown, she took over the helm of her own life. “I think I know what’s going on.”

She had tried to defeat death by staying young, by avoiding choice and responsibility, by choosing to believe her myth that there would always be someone who would choose for her. Growing up, choosing, separating oneself from others also means facing loneliness and death.

Question 15

Anxiety as a beacon

Answer 15

Though therapeutic work extends in many directions, therapists use anxiety as a beacon: they work toward anxiety, uncover its fundamental sources, and attempt to uproot and dismantle these sources.

Question 16

Death transcendence

Hegel quote

Answer 16

Death transcendence is a major motif in human experience - from our nightmares, to monuments, theologies, ideologies, our addictions, our belief in progress, our yearning for lasting fame.

Freud believed the first humans huddled together out of a fear of separateness. We perpetuate the group to perpetuate ourselves.

Hegel: “History is what man does with death.”

Question 17

Robert Jay Lifton, 5 modes to achieve symbolic immortality:

Answer 17

1. The biological mode - living on through one’s progeny (endless chain of biological attachments)
2. The theological mode - living on in a “higher” plane of existence
3. The creative mode - living on through one’s works (Lifton suggests that therapists strive to this through their patients as well)
4. The theme of eternal nature - one survives through rejoining the swirling forces of nature
5. Experiential transcendent mode - through “losing oneself” in a state so intense that time and death disappear and one lives in the “continuous present”

Question 18

Norman Brown, Ernest Becker, and Robert Jay Lifton

Answer 18

Norman Brown, Ernest Becker, and Robert Jay Lifton have brilliantly demonstrated how the fear of death has permeated the fabric of our social structure. I shall argue that the fear of death is a primal source of anxiety which affects the internal dynamics of the individual.

Question 19

Interchangeable terms

Answer 19

death anxiety, fear of death, mortal terror, fear of finitude.

Question 20

Diggory and Rothman’s research (7)

Answer 20

Researchers have suggested that fear of death is a composite of smaller related fears. Diggory and Rothman’s research resulted in the following ranking:

1. My death = grief for friends and relatives
2. All my plans and projects would come to an end
3. The process of dying might be painful
4. End of experiences
5. Not able to care for people who depend on me
6. Fear of life after death
7. What happens to my body after my death

Question 21

Chronon distinguishes three types of death fear

Answer 21

1) what comes after death,
2) the event of dying,
3) ceasing to be.

Yalom will focus on the third.

Question 22

Anxiety vs Fear

Answer 22

Anxiety = fear of no thing

(Kierkegaard: “A nothing with which the individual has nothing to do.”)

Fear = fear of something

Question 23

How do we combat anxiety?

Answer 23

By displacing it from nothing to something.

• Kierkegaard: “the nothing which is the object of dread becomes more and more of something.”
• This helps to mount a self-protective campaign: we can start avoiding it, seek allies against it, develop magical rituals to placate it etc.

Question 24

DEATH ANXIETY: CLINICAL MANIFESTATIONS

Form of death anxiety

Answer 24

Anxiety wanting to become fear confounds clinical work - death anxiety is rarely encountered in its original form. Usually denial-based, complex set of operations to repress it.

Question 25

Car-accident after lunch

Answer 25

Yalom once had a fairly serious car-accident after lunch and although he could even get on a plane and give a lecture the same night at another university, he later developed intense anxiety for lunch period with colleagues (“Would I have interesting things to say”; “Would I make a fool of myself”). Other smaller fears as well, cycling, skiing, driving. Further, the world lost its feeling of hominess (Heidegger: “uncanniness” unheimlich).

Question 26

Mexican cemetery

Answer 26

*Side story from A Green Tree in Geddes: there is a Mexican cemetery that’s divided into two parts: the “dead” who are remembered by the living who still bring flowers etc.; the “truly dead” whose grave sites are no longer maintained because no one remembers them.

Question 27

Clinical case of Joyce

Answer 27

fell in love at 15, married at 21, divorced at 30, because she did not want to be with him anymore, but wanted him to continue loving her, because as she said: “everyone wants to be remembered”. Without their union, she felt her memories would perish.

She also did not fully complete tasks, she dreaded being “finished”, feared failure, because she had always been successful. Now a failed marriage hit extra hard. She believes she is special and can win a Nobel prize within 5 years and if that fails then write an astonishing novel. All of these were connected to death anxiety, and dealing with them helped her give up her neurotic needs for Jack. They actually re-established the marriage.

Question 28

Clinical case of Beth

Answer 28

single in her 30s, always making the “wrong” choice in terms of partners, but now was looking for a good one. She was concerned about her age and childbearing years passing by. Yet when her current partner wanted to discuss marriage she panicked. She was worried about being too fixed, and she also realized that she always “tried to stay ahead” with daily things as well - thinking of dessert while eating the main course. For Beth then the realization was that her press towards marriage and fear of marriage were stemming from a death anxiety.

Question 29

Patients with obsessional neurosis

Answer 29

R. Skoog reports that over 70% of patients with obsessional neurosis had a near death experience at the onset. Disgust, decay, illness, germs related to fear of personal annihilation. Also found to play a large role in hyperventilation panic, hypochondria, depersonalization syndromes.

Question 30

DEATH ANXIETY: EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

Answer 30

Empirical death into research is lacking, especially 1984 for Yalom. Fewer than 2% of 2,600 books and articles up to 1972 about death report empirical research.

• Several reports have found that devoted religious individuals have less anxiety.
• Medical students who go to surgery have less death anxiety than ones who go for psychiatry.
• Students who have lost a parent have high death anxiety.
• Several projects have demonstrated that (but not explained why) females have higher conscious death anxiety.

Question 31

Conscious death anxiety

Answer 31

A few reports have attempted to correlate conscious death anxiety and psychopathology.

• Positive correlation between death anxiety and neuroticism in students
• Prisoners incarcerated for a “minor” offense when compared with normal controls have significantly more death anxiety, death preoccupation and fear of funerals and medical diseases, and are aware of suppressing thoughts about death
• Conscious death anxiety correlates positively with the MMPI depression scale in aged psychiatric patients
• Same study revealed no correlation between death anxiety and somatic symptomatology
• Studies indicate a lack of overt death anxiety in the normal aged population, those who are aged and psychologically immature or disturbed show high death anxiety
• Adolescents tend to show higher death anxiety than other age groups
• Institutionalized “sub-normal” girls showed more death anxiety than non-institutionalized “sub-normal” girls
• Poorly achieving high school girls had considerably greater fear of death

Question 32

Unconscious death anxiety

Answer 32

Studies of conscious death anxiety are of little help in understanding the role of death anxiety in psychodynamics, thus several researchers have attempted to study unconscious death anxiety.

Question 33

Feifel defined three levels of concern

Answer 33

1. Conscious
   - measured by scoring the response to the question “Are you afraid of death?”
   - 70% of individuals denied a fear of death
2. Fantasy
   - measured by coding the positivity or negativity of responses to the directive “What ideas or pictures come to your mind when you think about death?”
   - 27% denied death fear, 62% answered ambivalently, 11% gave considerable evidence of death anxiety
3. Below-level awareness
   - measured by mean reaction time to death words on a word-association test.
   - Most participants gave evidence of considerable aversion to death

Question 34

General findings about death anxiety (6)

Answer 34

• Psychotics fear death more than neurotics and normals
• Older or religious participants perceive death more positively but “succumbed to anxiety at the gut level”
• Meissner measured galvanic skin response (GSR) of normal subjects who were presented with neutral and death symbols (candle burning out, crossing a bridge, sleeping person). Death symbols evoked greater GSR response.
• Magni demonstrated that theology students required less time to identify funeral scenes or of decayed corpses than ones going into research or teaching
• Elderly individuals who are assigned separate living quarters similar to a familiar setting have significantly less death anxiety than those individuals in traditional institutions for the aged
• The aged have less unconscious death anxiety if they are involved in many life activities

Question 35

Death anxiety and Dreams

Answer 35

A large normative study found that death anxiety was present in 29% of dreams

A study of nightmares found that the most common ones are about dying or being murdered
- A close one dying or being chased by someone were also popular

Subjects who have suffered death of close friends and/or relatives (especially when under the age of 10) have more death nightmares

Curvilinear relationship between conscious death anxiety and death dreams: individuals who have very high or very low conscious death anxiety (possibly denial) tend to dream of death

Question 36

The Inattention to Death in Psychotherapy Theory and Practice

Answer 36

The incorporation of death into life enriches life; it enables individuals to extricate themselves from smothering trivialities, to live more purposefully and authentically. Death anxiety dealt with maladaptively results in the vast variety of signs, symptoms, and character traits we refer to as “psychopathology”.

Yet death topics are generally in second- or third-line journals and are anecdotal in form.

Question 37

There are three major strategies for dealing with death in clinical reports

Answer 37

1. Authors selectively inattend to the issue and report no material whatsoever
2. Authors may present copious clinical data related to death but ignore the material completely in their case formulation (often Freud)
3. Authors may present death-related clinical material but in case formulation translate “death” into a concept compatible with a particular ideological school

Question 38

Examples of death denial cases:

1) Erotic longings
2) The undertaker

Answer 38

One patient’s friend for whom she had erotic longings died. Authors conclude that although patients own fear of death was kindled by watching her friend die “her anxiety reaction was against the unconscious homosexual attachment with which she struggled… her own death meant the reunion with the homosexual beloved who had departed… to die means a reunion with the denied love object.” – Yalom says, well maybe just fear of own death?

Another patient’s father was an undertaker. “I never thought of death when I was with corpses… but now I feel I want to run.” The authors conclude: “the anxiety about death is the expression of a repressed wish to be passive and to be handled by the father-undertaker.” ??? In their view the patient’s anxiety is the product of her self-defense against these dangerous wishes and of her desire for self-punishment because of her incestuous wish.

Are these translations about a fear into a “deeper” fear what the patient needs? He or she may not be out of contact with reality but instead, through failing to erect “normal” denial defenses, may be too close to the truth.

Question 39

Inattention to death has implications for research

Answer 39

Many researchers have studied bereavement but fail to take into consideration that the survivor has not only suffered an “object loss” but has also encountered the loss of themself as well. Underlying message: “If your close one dies, then you will die too.” (Some hear words: “You’re next.”)

“This failure of reference is another sorry example of the impoverishment that ensues when behavioral science ignores intuitively evident truths.”

Question 40

Gilgamesh

Answer 40

Gilgamesh, whose friend Enkidu had died: “Now what sleep is this that has taken hold of thee? Thou hast become dark and canst not hear me. When I die shall I not be like unto Enkidu? Sorrow enters my heart, I am afraid of death.”

Question 41

Death concerns are simply not voiced by the patients

Answer 41

Some therapists state that death concerns are simply not voiced by their patients. Or is the issue that therapists are not prepared to hear them?

Question 42

Patients give an abundant amount of death-related concerns (4)

Answer 42

1. Deaths of friends and family, growing old, death dreams, seeing friends age, ascendancy of children;
2. Small deaths like liver spots, senile plaques, gray hairs, stiff joints, stooped posture, deepening wrinkles;
3. Retirement approaches, children leave, children start caring for them.
4. Others fear murder or other cinematic type of violence.

Question 43

Cueing patients

Answer 43

Yalom: “Undoubtedly to some extent I have cued patients to provide me with certain evidence. But it is my belief that in the main it was always there.”

Joyce and Beth for example had commonplace problems connected to starting and ending relationships. Yet on deeper inquiry both showed much concern about existential issues.

Question 44

Letter from guest of a lecture

Answer 44

Someone who had attended Yalom’s lecture wrote a letter in which she talked about a student patient who had been raped, and that the therapist thanks to the lecture could tune into the patient’s fear of dying.

“She now feels vulnerable and flooded with anxieties that used to be suppressed. She seemed to believe that it was all right to talk about being afraid to die, even if no terminal illness can be found in her body.”

Question 45

Therapist’s personal death anxiety

Answer 45

Many therapists, despite long years of personal analysis, have not explored and worked through their personal death anxiety - leads to blatant inattention to obvious death-linked material in their practice too.

Question 46

Collective Inattention

Answer 46

Inattention happens among psychologists collectively as well - although anxiety is central in both the theory and everyday practice of dynamic psychotherapy, there is no place accorded to death in the traditional dynamic theories of anxiety.

Question 47

Freud: Anxiety without Death

Answer 47

Freud’s ideas have been so influential that the evolution of dynamic thought is often the evolution of Freud’s thought. Yet he had a blind spot for death.

Question 48

Studies in Hysteria

Answer 48

Freud’s first significant contribution is Studies in Hysteria.

Also interesting because of its selective inattention to death. The book includes 1 case by Josef Breuer (Anna O.) and 4 cases by Freud.

Symptoms of patients include paralysis, anesthesias, pain, tics, fatigue, obsessions, choking sensations, loss of taste and smell, amnesia, etc. Freud and Breuer postulated an etiology of hysteria and a systematic form of therapy based on that etiology.

All five patients suffered from a trauma. Freud says that usually trauma fades away or is cathartically expressed, but for these patients it stayed to haunt them.

Freud said that the trauma was suppressed from conscious thought and converted into physical symptoms. They used hypnosis and free association to get patients to express the effects verbally and behaviorally instead. This approach was a landmark.

Question 49

Yalom disagrees about the source

Answer 49

Yalom doesn’t agree about the source, the nature of the original trauma.

Freud’s letters all bear evidence of the direction of Freud’s thinking:

1) he gradually shifted the time of the “real” trauma responsible for anxiety to an earlier period in life;
2) he came to view the nature of the trauma as explicitly and exclusively sexual.

He gradually developed a formal theory of anxiety: it was a signal of anticipated danger, the seed was planted early in life when a trauma occurred, the memory of the event was repressed and its attendant affect transformed to anxiety.

Question 50

Freud & Helplessness

Answer 50

Freud stressed first that the life-long traumas have something to do with helplessness: “Anxiety is the original reaction to helplessness and is reproduced later on as a signal for help in the face of trauma.”

Question 51

Freud’s primary sources of anxiety

Answer 51

As Freud boldly changed his theory a lot, there’s a lot of conflicting information, yet two primary sources of anxiety from Freud are clear:

1. loss of mother (abandonment and separation)
2. loss of the phallus (castration anxiety).

He believed these two bedevil us throughout our waking lives and in our sleep, providing the nightmares of falling and being chased.

3. Other major sources:
   - Superego and moral anxiety
   - Fear of one’s own self-destructive tendencies
   - Fear of ego disintegration - being overwhelmed by the darkness within (going mad?)

Question 52

Astonishing discrepancy between the case histories and Freud’s conclusions

Answer 52

Death so pervades the histories of these patients that only by a supreme effort of inattention could Freud have omitted it from his discussion of precipitating traumas.

Question 53

Anna O.

Answer 53

Anna O. for example fell ill when her father fell ill (and succumbed to that illness 10 months later).

• At first she nursed him all the time, but eventually had to be removed from her father because of altered states of consciousness, amnesia, linguistic disorganization, muscular conversion etc.
• After removal the situation deteriorated further, however, “nevertheless always seemed to remain conscious of the fact that her father died.”
• She had crazy hallucinations of seeing her father in the mirror with death’s head, or seeing her fingers turning into black snakes.
• Breuer: “On the last day of treatment, by rearranging the room to resemble her father’s sick room she reproduced the hallucinations which constituted the root of her whole illness.”

Question 54

Frau Emmy von N.

Answer 54

illness started also when her closest person died - her husband.
Emmy’s memories: saw her sister in a coffin (age 7), saw her aunt in a coffin (age 9), finding her mother unconscious after a stroke (age 15), finding her dead (age 19), nursing her brother who had tuberculosis (age 19), witnessing the sudden death of her husband later on.

Question 55

Fraulein Elisabeth von R

Answer 55

nursed her dying father, witnessed the inexorable deterioration of her family - a sister moved far away, her mother suffered a severe illness, her father died, and Elisabeth’s own illness erupted in full force when much-loved older sister died.

Freud concluded that Elisabeth felt guilty after her sister’s death because she wanted to marry the now free husband. Yalom: “Certainly, Freud uncovered interesting conflicts in people, yet it is what he omitted that bears scrutiny. If, as Freud speculated, Elisabeth indeed thought ‘Now her husband is free again, and I can be his wife,’ then she most certainly also thought ‘If my darling sister dies, then I too will die’.”

Question 56

Robert Jay Lipton in The Broken Connection

Answer 56

Robert Jay Lipton in The Broken Connection also says that Freud’s libido theory inspired by Little Hans “dedeathifies” death.

Question 57

How come did the archaeological Freud who always drilled for bedrock (earliest origins, ways of primitive man etc.) choose for castration and abandonment and stopped before death?

&

Yalom: “The logic falters badly here.”

Answer 57

Freud: “The unconscious seems to contain nothing that could give any content to our concept of annihilation of life. We have daily experiences that can remind us of castration (faeces separating from body) or abandonment (separation from mother’s breast at weaning), but nothing resembling death can ever be experienced. I am therefore inclined to adhere to the view that the fear of death should be regarded as analogous to fear of castration.”

Yalom:

• First, Freud insists that since we have no experience of death, then no representation in the unconscious. Same thing with castration. Surely the feces-weaning-castration linkage is not more logically compelling than the concept of an innate awareness of death.
• Second, consider that women too have anxiety, the gymnastic efforts required to apply castration theory to women are truly the supreme high jinks of analytic metapsychology.

Question 58

Why did Freud exclude death from psychodynamic theory?

Answer 58

“The high-sounding phrase ‘every fear is ultimately the fear of death’ has hardly any meaning and at any rate cannot be justified.”

Despite attacks by Melanie Klein, Rank, Adler, still Freud persisted in his views and begat a cult of death denial in generations of therapists (Fenichel, Waelder, Greenson).

Question 59

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Answer 59

*At 64, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud made a place for death in his model of the mind but even then he did not talk about dread of death but will to death - Thanatos was designated as one of the two primary drives.

Question 60

‘Si vis vitam, para mortem.’

Answer 60

Freud: “We recall the old saying: ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum.’ If you want to preserve peace, arm for war. It would be in keeping with the times to alter it: ‘Si vis vitam, para mortem.’ If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.”

Question 61

Freud’s task of a therapist

Answer 61

Freud believed that the task of a therapist was to help a patient endure life. Yet he remained mute forever about preparing for death.

Why? Yalom: “I believe two reasons:

1) an outmoded theoretical model of behavior;
2) a relentless quest for personal glory.”

Question 62

FREUD’S INATTENTION TO DEATH: THEORETICAL REASONS

Answer 62

At 75, Freud was asked who was his biggest influence. “Brücke.” Ernst Brücke was his relentless physiology professor in medical school. He finally found a student in Freud worthy of his interest and they worked together closely in the neurophysiological laboratory in Vienna.

Brücke was a primary force behind the ideological school of biology founded by Helmholtz that dominated European medical and basic scientific research in the latter part of the 19th century.

Question 63

Basic Helmholtzian position

Answer 63

(to Freud via Brücke, written by du-Bois Reymond):

“No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism; that, in those cases which cannot at the time be explained by these forces has either to find the specific way or form of their action by means of the physical-mathematical method, or to assume new forces equal in dignity to the chemical-physical forces inherent in matter, reducible to the force of attraction and repulsion.”

Thus, deterministic and antivitalistic - man is a machine activated by chemical-physical mechanisms. Freud adopted this mechanistic, Helmholtzian model and applied it to constructing a model of the mind. “My life has been aimed at one goal, ‘to infer how the mental apparatus is constructed and how forces interplay and counteract in it.” Funnily enough, Freudian theory, often ironically assailed as irrational, is deeply rooted in traditional biophysical-chemical doctrine. Freud’s dual instinct theory, the theory of libidinal energy conservation and transformation have their anlage in Brücke’s mechanistic view of man.

Question 64

Duality

Answer 64

Duality - the existence of two inexorably opposed basic drives (attraction and repulsion) - was the bedrock upon which Freud built his metapsychological system. His first proposal was “hunger and love”, the struggle between preservation of the individual organism and the perpetuation of the species. Later he chose for a more fundamental one - life and death, Eros and Thanatos.

Question 65

Event-to-be

Answer 65

Death is not yet, it is an event to-be. This did not fit with Freud’s deterministic schema of the unconscious forces that clash. There is no place for complex mental acts where the future is imagined and feared. As Nietsche: conscious consideration !follows! behavior rather than precedes it; one’s sense of governing one’s behavior is entirely illusional - we just want to feel in power, feel autonomous.

Death then can play no role in Freud’s formal dynamic theory. Since it is a future event that has never been experienced and cannot be truly imagined, it cannot exist in the unconscious and thus cannot influence behavior. Freud thus only wrote about death in “off the record” essays like “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and “The Theme of the Three Caskets” or crammed death into his system under something else like castration.

Question 66

FREUD’S INATTENTION TO DEATH: PERSONAL REASONS

Answer 66

Why did Freud cling to a theoretical system that cramped his intellect?

It is a luxury to study the personal lives and motivations of artists and scientist, but when considering a theory that aims to capture the deepest levels of human behavior and motivation and that is in large parts based on the self-analysis of one man then it becomes a necessity to study that man as deeply as possible. Luckily information about Freud is abundant: with the right picking of material one may defend about any outrageous hypothesis about his character.

Question 67

“My golden Siggy”

&

Personal diary

Answer 67

Much suggests that at the core of Freud’s determination was his passion to attain greatness. His family believed that he was destined for fame: mom called him “my golden Siggy” and favored him above other children. Freud: “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, the confidence of success that often induces real success.” In school he was always ahead of other students even to the point that others stopped questioning him.

Holy shit (page 71)! Freud, at 28, before entering psychiatry, wrote to his girlfriend that he just destroyed all his scientific notes, manuscripts of publications, diaries of the last 14 years. 
“Let the biographers chaff; we won’t make it too easy for them. Let each one of them believe he is right in his ‘Conception of the Development of the Hero’: even now I enjoy the thought of how they will all go astray.”

Question 68

Neuron theory

Answer 68

He missed greatness by not pursuing his early neurohistological work to its logical conclusion: the establishment of the neuron theory.

• He one day casually mentioned to Karl Koller, a physician friend, that he had noticed cocaine’s anesthetic properties. Shortly after he left town for a long visit with his fiancee.
• By the time Freud got back, Koller had already conducted decisive surgical experiments and gained fame as the discoverer of local anesthesia.
• Freud had great intellectual powers: crazy imagination, limitless energy, courage. Yet Brücke said he couldn’t go into research in Vienna because of anti-Semitism there, so Freud started working as a physician and practicing psychiatry privately.
• The cocaine incident was hard for him, so he also continued studying cocaine by giving to his patients and friends as it reduced depression and fatigue.
• He introduced it to the Viennese Medical Society, but soon after first reports of cocaine addiction appeared, and Freud’s credibility plummeted (this incident also accounts in some parts for the Viennese academic community’s lack of responsiveness to Freud’s later discoveries).

Question 69

Hysteria

Answer 69

Freud hoped that hysteria would be his great theory, but soon counterevidence started appearing and he was crushed. “The hope of eternal fame was so beautiful..”

Question 70

All-encompassing model of the mind

Answer 70

“The three systems of neurons, the ‘free’ and ‘bound’ states of quantity, the primary and secondary processes, the main trend and the compromise trend of the nervous system, the two biological rules of attention and defense, the indications of quality, reality, and thought, the state of the psychosexualgroup, the sexual determination of repression, and finally the factors determining consciousness as a perceptual function - the whole thing held together and still does.”

The basic schema - existence of repression, relationship between consciousness and unconsciousness, biological substrate of thought and affect - was not novel (Nietsche and Schopenhauer had touched upon it) yet novelly thorough.
“Many people have flirted with the unconscious but I was the first to marry it.”

That sexual energy - a constant amount of energy that proceeds to well-defined stages of development, that may be bound or unbound, subjected to objects, that may overflow or be dammed up or be misplaced, and be the source of thought and behavior - that was novel.
For the sake of his libido theory he sacrificed his relationships with his most promising disciples who refused to accept the central role of libido in human motivation.

Question 71

Distinguishing an important factor

Answer 71

Death didn’t meet Freud’s Hemholtzian postulates and had little appeal, nor was it novel. Eternal fame would be his from discovering a heretofore unknown source of human motivation: the libido.

There’s little question that Freud correctly distinguished an !important! factor in human behavior. The error was to think that libido is the primary one. Under that aspect he subsumed everything else human.

Question 72

COUNTER THEORIES

Answer 72

They soon appeared. Freud’s most creative students took issue with libido theory and by 1910 Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and Otto Rank had all chosen to leave the good graces of the master.

Each of these defectors proposed another source of motivation.

Jung: spiritual life-force monism

Adler: child’s concern with survival and their smallness and helplessness in the face of a macroscopic adult world

Rank stressed the importance of death anxiety and suggested that the human being was ever twisting between two fears - fear of life (and its intrinsic isolation) and fear of death.

Theirs and the works of Fromm, May, Tillich, Kaiser, Becker all supplement (but don’t replace) Freud’s

Question 73

Conclusion: Freud

Answer 73

Freud’s contribution was his formulation of a dynamic model of the mind. Death has always been there beneath castration and abandonment, yet Freud and subsequent traditions have remained too superficial but later theorists have deepened our view of the human being.