Death and Dying

by Sudhir Kakar

  Summarily, in good part, Lewis resorted to sublimation as a means of thwarting pathological mourning. In an unusual, phasically complex activity, Lewis’s uncommonly complex ‘writing through’ consisted of a revision of four sequential notebooks, which culminated in a ‘publishing through’; that last phase in turn progressed from anonymity to a publically authorial acknowledgement to his compassionately distributing his own book. Emerging from self-involvement, he assisted his readers to moderate their grief and shore up their self-esteem. As he famously said (1961a, pp. 140—41) around the time he published his memoir:

  Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realize the enormous extension of our being that we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense, but he inhabits a tiny world … Like the night sky in a Greek poem, I see with a thousand eyes, but it is still I who see … I transcend myself: and am never more myself than when I do.

  Yet, although Lewis’s work on mourning did inspire many readers in their mourning, one must query as to how far in their bereavement and limited sublimation through creativity were they able to approximate Lewis’s self-transcendence.

  c) Sigmund Freud

  Throughout his life, Freud was intensely concerned, if not obsessed, with death, as seen in his many relevant publications and in his constant anxiety about his age and ageing; even early on, he declared that he ‘never felt young’ (Freud, 1960, p. 138).4 But the more significant issues are twofold: the debated question as to whether Freud feared death, and if so, how much; and whether he died with a mourning in keeping with a spirit of alleged heroic resignation.

  Max Schur (1972, p. 6), a psychoanalyst who was also Freud’s personal physician during the last decade of his life, contended in his biography that Freud did not fear death. It has gone hitherto unnoticed, however, that Schur contradicted himself by citing evidence on three occasions that Freud did indeed fear death (pp. 60, 72, 97, 103). Schur also disregarded the underpinnings of Freud’s own superstitious inclination. As Freud (1901, p. 240) acknowledged: ‘My own superstition has its roots in suppressed ambition (immortality), and in my case takes the place of that anxiety about death which springs from the normal uncertainty of life.’ Schur’s denial about Freud’s fear also contradicted the conclusions held by another psychoanalyst, Ernest Jones, whose three-volume biography (1953–57) of Freud was based on their intimate friendship of over thirty years.

  Uncovering a wealth of documentation (Mahony, 1998), I have shown that Jones was much more right than he thought, for Freud’s fear of death was greatly hidden in the fascinating story of his conception of women, especially American women. In his essay, ‘The Theme of Three Caskets’, Freud identified King Lear’s daughter Cordelia as ‘the fairest and best of women, who has taken the place of the Death-goddess’ (1913b, pp. 300–01). But the death-goddess for Freud was also the most terrifying of women, the destructive archaic mother. Unconsciously personified, more so by Freud in his baffling lifelong struggle with America, she played an indispensable role in the uneasy stabilization of his psychic economy.

  At first blush, Freud’s nigh unbelievably symbolic America does not harmonize with his conception of the relation between mother and son, which for him counted as ‘the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships’ (1933, p. 133), and which ‘provides the purest examples of an unchangeable affection, unimpaired by any egoistic considerations’ (1915—16, p. 206). Hereby, in my view, Freud defensively protected his celestial motherly image by relying on the idea of a phylogenetic heritage on one hand, and on the other, splitting off a negative elaboration of the celestial mother and compulsively relegating it into its transatlantic embodiment.

  Freud’s biographers err in writing that he rarely spoke of the pre-Oedipal mother. The overdetermined fact is that he felt always compelled to speak about her, disguised as America. Her demonically destructive power made him regress into an infantile, paranoid state of aggrievement and petulancy that lasted all his life. In brief, he tried to control the Oedipal but especially pre-Oedipal mother by spatially constricting her in his symbolic geography. And, in fact, nowhere else in Freud’s scientific works can we find the equivalent of America as the omnipresence of the minatory return of what he repressed.

  The extensive evidence for my thesis speaks for itself. A necessary ingredient in Freud’s equilibrium, the existence of America, was hidden in the return of his repressed attitude to women, and hence his anti-Americanism ranked far more than a monetary matter. For Freud, the woman ‘renders man asocial’ (Nunberg and Federn, 1974-75, 4:136). Speaking to his Viennese colleagues, Freud went on to specify: ‘In America the father ideal appears to be downgraded, so that the American

  girl cannot muster the illusion that is necessary for marriage’ (Nunberg and Federn, 1974-75, 3:14). In his later treatise ‘The Future of an Illusion’, Freud rallied (1927) against ‘rule by women’ in America (Frauenherrschaft—cf. Freud, 1930, pp. 103–04).5 If, in his lights, women in general were the dark continent, then matriarchal America was the new and darkest continent, a heart of darkness. And it was to one of his American patients that Freud brutally charged: ‘Women rule American society; they are an anti-cultural phenomenon’ (Wortis, 1940, p. 98, my italics).

  Freud’s symbolic conception of the American woman as an asocial and anti-cultural phenomenon wrought havoc with his mental and physical well-being to an extraordinary degree. Nowhere is that more evident than in the overwhelming impact of Freud’s only visit to the States, an impact unparalleled in his life. Freud’s twenty-three-day visit to America in 1909 accompanied him on his return to Europe and stayed with him for the rest of his life, both in body and fantasy. Such was America, an asocial, omnipotent archaic mother, a force of nature with magical, destructive powers.

  In sum, shortly after returning to Europe, Freud sought, as he said (Freud, 1974, p. 287), to restore his destroyed health by going to Karlsbad for the prolonged period of three weeks; and, as I was able to uncover, he returned there annually with the same restorative purpose for the next six years. His account of particular somatic reactions was distorted by fantasy and repression. For example, he held his American visit responsible for the onset of his digestive troubles; actually, however, we know that Freud had such digestive trouble all his life (Jones, 1955, pp. 59-60 and 391; see also Freud 1993 to Jones, p. 33). He even amplified colitis into a ‘definite, though mild attack of appendicitis’ in America (Freud, 1974, p. 332; Freud, 1993, pp. 41 and 123; cf. Jones, 1955, pp. 59ff. and Schur, 1972, p. 255). Freud also complained that the American trip ‘markedly exacerbated’ his intestinal functioning (letter of 17 March 1910 to Pfister, Gay, 1988, p. 210). Next, Freud traced his first attack of a recurrent prostatitis to America, yet the medical records left by his personal physician do not confirm such a condition (Freud,

  p. 301). On top of all that, with further repression, Freud claimed that in New York he incurred the novel condition of writer’s cramp; we know, however, that he had similar attacks as far back as the 1880s (Jones 1957, p. 236; cf. also 1953, p. 169). And Freud went on to the additional lament that his handwriting ‘deteriorated so very much since the American trip’ (Freud, 1993, p. 42)—yet, during his transatlantic visit, I must note, he wrote nothing at all, apart from some letters, postcards and fifteen pages in a travel journal (Freud, 2002).

  So threatening was the America-death goddess equation for Freud that whereas he changed his mind on many topics, he never altered his vehement anti-Americanism which came from the depths of his being. No matter what genre Freud wrote in—scientific treatise, dialogue, history, biography, letters, autobiography, case-history narratives, you name it—America the archaic mother came to his mind as a ready example of what was bad. And no matter what subject Freud discussed, be it clinical theory, dreams, psychoanalytic treatment, history or social issues, America emerged as an immediate association of what was bad. Freud changed his ide
as about many things, but never about America. Its omnipresence throughout the gamut of the most diverse communicative occasions shows that Freud was in fact not freely associating; the return of the repressed appeared when he was compulsively associating: wherever, whenever, to whomever.

  In a minor and ambivalent way, Freud had also associated the death-goddess with the benevolent pre-Oedipal mother, and in particular, with his daughter Anna. Thus the pre-Oedipal mother was both domestically disguised in Anna as well as geographically remotely disguised as America. So we read in a private commentary to his essay, ‘The Theme of Three Caskets’, Freud’s avowal that its ‘subjective condition’ related to his daughter Anna (Mahony, 1992); she was the death-goddess who ‘carries away the dead hero from the battlefield’ (1913b, pp. 300–01). Freud’s essay proved uncannily predictive, for several years later, he took his daughter Anna the death goddess into analysis. We know some crucial details about the highly charged symbolism of that ambivalent undertaking: during the treatment, not surprisingly Anna, true to her symbolism ascribed by her father, had violent and even murderous fantasies; and for his part, Freud privately admitted to a colleague that only his own death would resolve his daughter’s conflicts. Within the framework of the psychology of creativity, it is noteworthy that it was only during that analysis that Freud postulated for the first time the death drive,6 a thesis undercutting his previous belief that the unconscious knows nothing about death. That lethal domestic analysis was a midwife to Freud’s pushing death back to a radically earlier beginning, antipodal to the traditional conception of its being at the end of life.

  In 1923, not long after that analysis, Freud was diagnosed as having a cancerous jaw that subsequently occasioned more than thirty surgical interventions. Two years before his death in 1939, Freud composed his famous essay, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, which amounted to a veritable obituary or treatise of death sentences, so to speak, for the idealized and thus correspondingly unrealistic conception of analytic cure.7 Meanwhile, at home, the dying Freud treasured most the company, not of his wife but of the death-goddess Anna: ‘The most enjoyable thing near me is Anna’s enjoyment in her work and her unchecked achievement … Fate has been good to me, that it should still have granted me the relationship to such a woman—I mean Anna of course’ (Gay, 1988, pp. 633 and 650).

  Despite their interpretive differences about Freud’s attitude to death during his lifetime, his biographers Jones and Schur agreed that he maintained a heroic resignation until the end (see also Robert Lifton, 1996). Although Freud again and again refused any palliative medication to allay his cancerous torment, can we say unreservedly that he exemplified heroic resignation? Bent on working right up to a perceived nihilistic end, Freud insisted on having patients up to two months before his death in September 1939, despite the fact that he suffered from deafness in his right ear, that his buccal prosthesis impeded clear speech, that he had a hole in his cheek, and that he reeked so much from his putrefying skin tissue that his dog would no longer stay in the consultation room. When analysis is conducted in those circumstances, I maintain, the positions at either end of the couch are changed so that the patient becomes the caretaker. Still driven by denial on the final day of his devastating life, he compulsively continued his habit of winding up two clocks, one for the day and one for the week (Schur, 1972, p. 527). How, we must ask, might a death be heroically tolerated with an appropriate mourning if one can no longer analyse patients, but rather exploit them, even traumatizing them and pathologizing their conficts about death?

  The Deadly Idealization of Heroes: A Generalizable Lesson in Mourning

  A generalizable lesson in mourning is gotten when we look critically at the frequent idealizations of Freud by his disciples. Early infantile and later forms of idealizations of another human by their very nature dehumanize, whereas non-idealization accords with the golden thesis of classical moral philosophy that to have one virtue perfectly, you must have them all perfectly. We can live more healthily by mourning through a persistently infantile and therefore deadly need to idealize others. As Nietzsche expounded in his Also Sprach Zarathustra, gods should die that man may live.

  Freud’s combined fertility and originality were indeed awesome: from his showing that throughout life we partly retain our infantility that nourishes conflict, and then his exposing that the dreamwork carried out by children in the sweatshop of their nightly dreams actually includes the family home within the universal presence of child labour. Freud’s supreme historical stature stands as a paradigmatic case in which a balanced and non-idealizing evaluation of a hero’s achievements should demand both an enlightened and vital self-esteem on our part.

  Although a mature admiration of Freud respects his humanness and essential limitations, idealization by its very nature attributes perfection to him and correspondingly rejects his humanness and depreciates our own. Yet, many of Freud’s disciples went from merely admiring him to idealizing him, whose founding of a discipline generated appealing archaic fantasies of auto-genesis or self-fecundation. A benign form of fundamentalism concurrently took hold within psychoanalysis itself, according to which the idealization of Freud concurred with a tendency not just to depreciate but to demonize others, even patients, who were perceived as uncooperative with him. It is clear that far from being the diametrically opposite of Freud-bashing, the idealization of Freud is actually its variant.

  The discussion of idealization is clarified by two critical terms which Freud confused (Lussier, 2006): the ideal ego (Ichideal) and the ego ideal (Idealich). The ideal ego is the most primitive level of the ego and the inheritor of original narcissism. In this most archaic narcissistic agency, the grandiose fantasies of omnipotence, omniscience and perfection in the ideal ego are drive-invested, for, if not, there would result in merely inoffensive elaborations of fantasy. Whereas the ideal ego is essentially unconscious, never evolves, and is never proportionate to or ordered to realism, the ego ideal is largely conscious and involves various evolving and eminently realizable aspirations and ambitions, unless they are contaminated by the essentially unrealizable ideals of the ideal ego. As for the superego, it is variously forced to function in reaction to the excessive, pathological investment of the ego ideal and its megalomania.

  To Freud’s thesis (1914, p. 91) that the immortality of the ego is the most touchy point in one’s narcissistic system, I would append the precision that mortality comprises the greatest insult to the ideal ego, whose constant enemy is reality and the optimal or realizable. The ideal ego breeds the illusions of self-grandiosity and contributes to the idealization of the other. (It is unfortunate that ‘ideal’ is often used as a loose synonym for realizable, the upshot of which is that the term ‘idealization’ tends to be used in a unthinking way that encroaches on divinization.) Since human beings and their products fall short of perfection, their limitation intrinsically jars with any primitive or later form of their being idealized. Consequently, positive reality-based appreciation allows for admiration, love, reverence, but not idealization.

  In deflating the myth of Freud’s final days of heroism and his work ideal as an umblemished model for analysts, I am merely following his own ironical reflection: ‘We suspend criticism of the dead, overlook his possible misdeeds, declare that de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and think it justifiable to set out all that is most favourable to his memory in the funeral oration and upon the tombstone. Consideration for the dead, who, after all no longer need it, is more important to us than the truth’ (Freud, 1915b, p. 290). Freud’s timely call for the truth is in keeping with Voltaire’s (1872, 2:14) admirable admonition that ‘We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.’

  It should be said that, contrary to his many disciples, Freud did not idealize himself. Ever shunning celebrity as a paramount goal, Freud would have agreed with the novelist John Updike’s definition of celebrity as a mask that eats away the face. In grateful wonderment for what Freud wrought, I am moved to mu
se in this dreamy way: After a baby is born, when will its words be as many as the leaves on a tree? And how many trees will it ever live to speak? For it was in that growing forest of untold, telling sounds that Freud, like a backwoodsman, toiled on and on to make a clearing, however overshadowed. He combined retrospect and prospect when he suggested this memento mori: ‘When you think of me, think of Rembrandt: a little light and a great deal of darkness’ (Bergmann and Hartmann, 1976, p. xiv).

  Finale: A Brief Retrospection

  People given to responsible living may be divided into three categories that may or may not overlap: the ethical, the spiritual and the religious. There are those who live ethically and yet have no transcendent belief; and of course there are those who believe in some kind of transcendence such as nature mysticism, but have no faith in an afterlife as cherished by the major religions. Ironically, although Death has been touted throughout the centuries as the Great Leveller of physical distinctions, mortality has provoked an endless variety of personal reactions. Whether one believes or disbelieves in some kind of afterlife, no automatic correlation obtains between one’s cognitive and affective attitudes to death. A further complication has to do with the awareness or denial of one’s possibly different attitudes to death during life as opposed to its experienced ending. Then again, much evidence makes us hesitate to accept the facile axiom that a happy life facilitates the acceptance of death. As Thomas Browne, the Shakespeare of English prose, was driven to recall, ‘The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying’ (Hydriotaphia, 1658).

  As I pen these words, my memory goes back over the years to my patients beset with their bewildering kinds of death, mourning and idealization, and sometimes ignorant of what they wanted to lay to rest. I cannot forget the middle-aged gentleman who realized at length that he came into analysis so that I would resuscitate his ambivalently idealized parents, yet still living, whom he had long ago killed in unconscious fantasy. A short procession of other patients quickly comes to mind: a recent widow who yearned for rainy days so that she could go out in public and sob without being perceived in her mourning; a victim recalling her crazy mother who would feign death and then revive in order to pacify her panicky children; a young conflicted male unaware of his mourning so apparent in his flat affect, hunched shoulders and heavy black apparel that he always wore, even on the hottest summer days;8 a female patient whose abandonment and uncommmon chronicle of multiple family deaths led her to envision her birthday as her ‘death-day’ and to calculate her mortified age as the number of years following that fatal date; another patient so tormented with his masculinity that he described his being born as DOA, the acronym for ‘dead on arrival’ which he congenitally redefined as ‘dick on arrival’; another female patient who was psychically killed by her grandfather’s sexual abuse and who decades later, within the space of thirteen months, gave separate legal authorizations to have her hospitalized mother, brother and husband unplugged from life support, all of which undercut her sense of victimhood and thrust her into seemingly hopeless funereal burnout; and finally, a number of patients overburdened by the so-called history of replacement, i.e., they received the name of a dead sibling whom their parents continued ever after to idolize.