Against Death’s Representability

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Notes

It is true that one can find other positions as well in Freud (1915, 1916 [1915], 1920), but it is the arguments against death that have had a more lasting influence on the analytic approach to death: The short “On Transience” (1916 [1915]) is outside the canon of Freud’s works, and the death drive never found the wide acceptance of Freud’s other concepts. In any event, even where Freud suggests that death might have a role in psychic life, his texts sometime reflect his stance that it does not have a role and cannot be represented (see Razinsky, 2007a).

My discussion here of “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” will be more partial, since the entire text is the focus of another paper (Razinsky, 2007a), and the position Freud expressed therein is more complex and less strictly opposes the importance of death.

One could also argue that at a certain level of description, all human drives are negation, in the sense that they transform nature and transcend it. This is the view of Hegel for example, for whom negation, in the above sense, is the essence of human desire. If we take the analytic model of tension and discharge, how can one want to drink when thirsty without there being a negative element to it? One wants something that opposes or negates the current state of affairs.

In light of these considerations and following Schimek’s (1975) critique, presented below, of Freud’s theoretical premise that representations are originally formed through an unbiased registration of reality, Hoffman contests the whole focus on the possibility of concrete representation in the unconscious as a criterion for the influence of death in the mind (1998, p. 45). He also comments on Freud’s assertion that in our unconscious we are convinced of our immortality because death is unavailable to the unconscious. Hoffman argues that if unconscious processes are timeless as Freud claims, there could be no belief either in mortality or in immortality, for both require the notion of time (pp. 34–5).

Matte Blanco (2005 [1973]) has an interesting solution: the deep unconscious really has no time, and instincts are therefore absent from it as well. They are translations into higher levels of thought.

In addition to being a form of movement, instincts involve a scope of time at a more intrinsic level: there is the time lapse between the tension and its discharge, a time lapse inherent to the instinctual demand itself. One does not only want the discharge, but the discharge preceded by the tension. Wanting to drink is not wanting not to be thirsty. In addition, a drive refers to action and not to a state of things. One does not want something to be so, but to do something. This is a process that involves recognition of time.

The comparison, concerning abstractness, with castration is of course related to Freud’s fifth argument, tackled below, that nothing like death has ever been experienced, unlike the case of castration.

In some aspects, however, and from an opposing angle, death is really not that abstract, but rather quite concrete. Death is when biological life stops, and it is difficult to imagine something more concrete than a dead body, especially if it was alive a minute ago. It seems that one of the sources of Freud’s (1915, p. 293; 1923, p. 57; 1913, pp. 92–3) reluctance, and perhaps of some analysts’, to attribute importance to death seems to be the suspicion that a concern with death involves the higher regions of the mind or implies spiritual and existential preoccupations which psychoanalysis sometimes finds suspect (Green [1983, p. 256]; Meyer [1975 (1973), p. 84]). And yet, in fact, death is a concept that could bridge the highest and the lowest, the most abstract and most concrete, as it is at once related to the most spiritual issues and questions of meaning and transcendence, as well as to the most fundamental aspects of creatureliness and having a body.

The dynamics (e.g., narcissism, externalization of aggression) that supposedly lead to this representation of the other’s death are irrelevant; what matters here is that Freud judges this representation possible whereas his own arguments should have precluded it, or alternatively, the existence of such a representation should have led to a reconsideration of the arguments.

The variation of it in the text of 1926, the requirement of involvement of “the deeper levels of the mental apparatus” and of sexuality (Freud, 1926, p. 129) is discussed below.

Although, of course, there is a difference between a tendency in the organism to reduce tension to zero or to unbinding–two linkages between death instinct and death–and a psychic representation of death.

Although even here he still holds that the basis of the disavowal is instinctual, the example being the disavowal of the female lack of penis in the case of fetishism.

A good example is Lacan’s (1978, p. 182) observation that the dream of Irma’s injection, Freud’s specimen dream, involves no more than a preconscious, if not conscious, wish, rather than unconscious motives. Lacan (1978, 177–204) explains that Freud’s analysis of the dream did comprise a critical, decisive step, but in a different sense, closer to Lacan’s spirit.

Zilboorg (1943, p. 467) sees the fear of death as the affective aspect of selfpreservation. The organism expends a great amount of psychological energy in order to stay alive, and this is because it is always exposed, albeit not consciously, to fear of death. See also Rheingold (1967, p. 64).

In “On sexual theories of children” (1908, p. 218) and in the case of little Hans (Freud, 1909, pp. 134–5), one could see this tension: on the one hand an Oedipal wish that includes an intercourse with the mother, impulses of penetration, and on the other hand, an insistence on the unavailability of the knowledge on the woman genitals to the little boy. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1988) notices the existence of these impulses and the discrepancy, and uses it to claim that the theory of phallic monism is the result of repression or a split rather than of lack of knowledge. More than a question of acquired knowledge about the vagina, the absence of such a content from the unconscious is probably related to an unconscious refusal to acknowledge anatomical difference. This reversal can be applied to death as well, where it seems to be a case of not wanting to know more than a structural absence from the unconscious.

Interesting in this regard is Freud’s need to add arguments. If the claims concerning timelessness and lack of abstraction and negation in the unconscious are really what trouble him, and these are the ones most often cited, why does he feel the need to add the prior experience and philosophical claims? If the system he constructs really has no place for death, as it is, why the need to add more arguments? It seems that what is involved here actually is Freud’s desire to reinforce a given position, rather than a theoretical imperative.

Some passages in the current and following sections overlap with similar ones in Razinsky (2009).

Schimek (1975) criticizes Freud’s theory of representation, mainly for its premise that representations are originally formed through an unbiased, passive perception and registration of reality, an assumption that Schimek believes does not stand up to contemporary ideas on perception. Freud’s grounding of his theoretical reference to death’s psychic influence in the notion of representation is therefore problematic in that it rests on an outmoded model of representation. This adds to my own emphasis here on how Freud’s notion of concrete representation as a precondition for death’s influence impedes him and other analytic theorists from accounting for death’s influence in psychic life.

One might object to the focus in the current paper on the issue of representation, in that it does not give enough importance to the link between Freud’s ideas on representation and the instincts: namely the notion that representation is how the drives become known and available to awareness, as derivatives, and the idea that representation is biased by the drives and never simple. And yet it is important to note two things: first, in the arguments against death discussed here, Freud does not refer to this more specifically analytic notion of representation, but rather refers to standard notions of representation, speaking for example of “a belief in death,” or evoking ordinary terms in sentences like “ … any content to our concept of the annihilation of life.” Second, Freud’s standard notion of representation is precisely the problem for him. It is through that very drive-biased representation model that he finds he cannot account for death’s psychic presence. This is why he says that fear of death “presents a difficult problem to psychoanalysis,” since death is abstract, and a negative and has no unconscious correlative (1923, p. 58). It is because the regular model does not function here, because no account of death through the usual schema of unconscious thought can easily be given, that death presents, according to Freud, a difficult problem to psychoanalysis (see Razinsky, 2012b).

Piven (2004, p. 33) thinks perhaps of similar ideas when he says that the fact that death is “an undiscovered country,” that is, that it is unpredictable and unknown, makes it more frightening. Death is “an affront to reason.” People cannot believe that such a horrible fate is what awaits “something so alive, so meaningful” as human life, and so they devise alternative explanations.

A concrete example of how the gap death leaves is extended to psychic life in ever growing circles is Freud’s description, in Totem and Taboo (1913, pp. 55–6), of the extensions, in some groups, of the prohibition against uttering a dead person’s name. Within certain tribes, people mainly, but also animals and objects, whose names are the same as that of the dead person, are given different names, and “[t]his usage leads to a perpetual change of vocabulary” (p. 55). The avoidance extends to anything related to the dead person. Thus we have a lack that has the potential to stir the entire system of representations. It is as if the change of words is supposed to prevent the lack underneath from revealing itself.

Blass’s (2006) reconstruction of Freud’s notion of the “desire for knowledge” as a fundamental human aspect, which she locates as an integral element of the psychoanalytic worldview, is highly pertinent here.

Lacan (1977, pp. 65, 103–4), in analyzing this scene, sees it as the birth of symbolic activity in the child. The child switches absences for presences, a thing for a name. Lacan’s interpretation is relevant here, but for the sake of the current discussion, the act itself, of throwing and searching, is enough.

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Notes on contributors

Liran Razinsky

Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural studies, Bar Ilan University, Israel.