To Die One’s Own Death – Thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic, Livestreamed from London Freud Museum, 23 September 2020

ABSTRACT

It has been a hundred years since the tragic loss of Freud’s daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, to the Spanish flu shortly after the end of World War One. In this essay, delivered as the 47^th Annual Vienna Freud Museum lecture, Jacqueline Rose argues that Freud’s historic moment – of grief, pandemic and war – had an even more decisive impact on his thinking than has previously been recognised. Freud’s writings on the death drive collide with, and are fuelled by, an increasingly urgent engagement with our innermost psychic and biological relationship to the past and, at the same time, with the cruelty and injustice of the world. Today, as we confront the darkness of the hour, psychoanalysis has never been more urgently needed. What can we still learn from Freud about how to live and how to die in our own troubled times?

KEYWORDS:

• Pandemic; war; ambivalence; grief; death drive

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Because Covid-19 prevented my traveling to Vienna, the lecture was live-streamed from the Freud Museum in London.

2. This version of events is contested although there is no conclusive evidence for any of the alternative versions. For a strong summary of the issues, see (Nobus forthcoming; Molnar 2013). See also Lucie Freud to Felix Augenfeld, 2 October 1939, (Library of Congress 1939, 1973, 1976). I am grateful to Daniela Finzi for alerting me to this controversy and to Dany Nobus and Michael Molnar for sharing their research.

3. Freud’s title had been “Overview of the Transference Neuroses,” which Grubrich-Simitis makes the sub-title of the English edition as it corresponds less closely to the work’s content.

4. “Quiescence,” or “ruhende” in German is the word Freud repeatedly uses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to describe how the mental apparatus tries to subdue the trauma of acute physical or mental shock.(Freud 1920, 30–31, 1940, 30–31).