fragments of the jawbone
Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw around April 1923, just before his sixty-seventh birthday. Presenting himself at the clinic of the Viennese rhinologist, Marcus Hajek, Freud was subjected to an initial examination, which led to what was expected to be a comparatively minor surgery. “The patient had a group of hard, smooth white spots on the inside of the jaw; expecting a trivial operation, he had not mentioned the visit to his family. But the operation went badly—the growth proved cancerous.” When Anna Freud arrived at the clinic, shortly thereafter, she found her father “seated on a kitchen chair” and covered in blood. A second operation was performed, more invasive than the first. “First, a carotid artery was tied off, and glands beneath the upper jawbone (some of them already suspiciously enlarged) were removed. In the second stage of the operation, after slitting the lip and cheek wide open, the surgeon removed the whole upper jaw and palate on the right side, which threw the nasal cavity and mouth into one.” The operation, Ernest Jones notes, was performed while Freud was awake, his face and jaw numbed under the influence of a local anesthetic. Following the surgery, in order to be able to speak or eat, Freud was forced to wear a large, extraordinarily uncomfortable prosthesis, a “magnified denture,” that caused his speech to slur, become thick and distorted, and that prompted an eruption of sores along his gums. If he hoped for some relief from the irritation of the thing, he would loosen its valves and hold its mechanism in place with his thumb. If he wished to smoke, he would pry his mouth open with a clothespin so he could fit a cigar inside. Over time, his family would come to call his prosthetic “the Monster,” and it would become a source of undying torment for much of the rest of their lives. As an effect of these early surgeries, Freud would go deaf in his right ear. He had the couch in his consulting room moved from one wall to another so he could still “see” patients while listening from his left. Barely able to hear, barely able to speak, tongue-tied like Moses, Freud turned to writing to set forth his law; Freud turned to writing to make clear his command.
Freud did not write about his illness but his illness was nonetheless much written about. “On July 16, we got the report from Erdheim that this time it was definitely a malignancy. Pichler and Erdheim studied all the slides of the excised specimen for hours. Because in one area the malignant tissue reached close to the edge, Pichler decided on another operation, for which he was prepared to use general anesthesia….He therefore began the operation under local and regional block anesthesia, but had to stop several times because Freud’s pain was unbearable….Pichler had to remove another part of the underlying bone and extensively coagulate all the surrounding tissue.” Of the thirty-three operations to his jaw Freud endured in the sixteen years between his initial diagnosis and the time of his death, in Max Schur’s description, this procedure is easily one of the most harrowing, as it brings together questions of physical morbidity and bodily pain with more properly psychoanalytic questions of trauma and castration, the dissolution of the body as it prefigures the collapse of the material substance which supports the fantasy of the self and the indominability of the mind. Here we have Freud, the domineering Father, reduced by his illness to the shape of a bone, a burst of skin and blood. Freud, the bone, must be excised, because it is rotted; Freud, his skin and blood, must be staunched. The Father will be awake because he will know the procedure; but for this intransigence he will most certainly suffer. He would take up the pain rather than give up command. “Am I to be the only one who doesn’t cooperate and lets his family down?” Freud would lament. “My wife…remains healthy and undaunted.” Freud’s ill health would dog him most relentlessly in the final years of his life, the slow tempo of age and infirmity matching the pace of the inexorable march of the terror and the prison in which he found himself enmeshed. After escaping Vienna for London, Freud found himself plagued by new complaints–cardiac arrythmia and an irritable bowel–yet his jaw continued in its despotic reign. “Only Anna Freud and I knew how insidious was the onset of each new lesion….[T]he latest…were high up in the oral cavity and hard to reach. There was hardly any normal lining left, and Freud was by now 82! The possibility of further surgery was limited.” By the time of his death, so much of Freud’s jaw had been removed that, of what remained, the ligaments and the bone were so thoroughly rotted that the smell of necrosis overpowered even those remaining stalwarts who attended to his sick room. “My bone is still content to stay with me,” he wrote to Marie Bonaparte, “but not I with it. Schur is very good, but cannot help.” Somewhere near the outskirts of London, Azrael would groan, and beat his black wings.
In the end, it would be Schur, for Freud, who would come to play the part of the deliverer. God was less help than the doctor would prove. “When he was again in agony, I gave him a hypodermic of two centigrams of morphine. He soon felt relief and fell into a peaceful sleep. The expression of pain and suffering was gone. I repeated this dose after about twelve hours. Freud was obviously so close to the end of his reserves that he lapsed into a coma and did not wake up again.” Psychoanalysis had begun with the dream of an injection; Freud’s life would be brought to an end with an injection and a dream. Having requested that Schur honor a decades old covenant–that he would allow Freud the dignity of a death unfettered by agonizing pain–on September 21, 1939, Freud commended himself not to the Lord of the House of Israel and the abundant peace of His heaven, but to the absorbing embrace of the voracious phage Morpheus, son of the Darkness and of the Night. Brother of the god of Sleep and the lord of Death, Oneiric sigil of chaos and all of our dreams, around 3AM on September 23, Morpheus would come at last to claim him, guiding him toward his “next incarnation,” toward whatever iteration his organic matter might take, toward whatever words might be come in the thrill of his wake.
Jawbone and mouth, a monster with teeth. Like Samson, he slays these philistine hordes. A repetition, a rhythm, an unlikely recurrence. A refrain, a requiem, a mass without chorus. Dies irae and da capo al fine. Adagio and pianissimo. Rage, staccato. Now. Now. Rest. Rest. Four beats, a measure. Slowly, slowly. Diminuendo until the bar.
The bar. The bar. The next whisky bar. I tell you we must die. We now must say goodbye.
Fade and fade out. Fine.
A seemingly unremarkable end to a wholly remarkable conversation, a discussion about the deepest and most intimate aspects of the person that was also intended as a means of surcease, Freud’s suicide was less a victory over death than a victory for the continuity of psychoanalysis, for the concept of death drive, a victory over death drive as the not-quite-primordial drive governing the disposition of life as an insistently regressive movement toward earlier stages of development, toward a diminution of tension characteristic of the end of metabolism and respiration characteristic of multicellular organisms, understood, typically, through the linguistic contrivance generally described as death. It was an act; or, as Lacan might have put it, a nudge, a way of moving the conversation, of changing directions, of making the language say things it otherwise could not, spilling over and out into new directions, down paths otherwise unthinkable and thus untrodden. “One can certainly give oneself over completely to a particular line of thought, and follow it through to wherever it leads, out of sheer scientific curiosity, or out of a desire to act as devil’s advocate–without signing oneself over to the devil,” Freud wrote of the drive. Yet, for Freud, to give up on treatment and elect for death way of illustrating a point about the seductions of the death drive, of the compulsions that attend the manifestations of what Lacan would come to call jouissance: If even our best efforts at staying alive might unwittingly become means of ensuring the timeliness of death, of maintaining the tension of being alive past the point of all reasonable purpose or scheme, perhaps the only means we have for the ensurance of our lives as common denizens of the symbolic order is the radical dedication of ourselves to the imminence of death in the real. To bring the conversation to an end was the only way to be sure that it would survive. Let the body go, so the voice may live.
For Freud, the concept of death drive was broadly indicative of the range of forces at work in the psyche that bent otherwise life sustaining drives toward a range of ostensibly destructive purposes: the compulsion to repeat, the compulsion to repeat that which is most unpleasurable, the compulsion to return and reenact moments of trauma, narcissist self-regard, sadist expressions of control, masochistic self-annihilation, melancholia and dread, those expressions of negative affect that have no proper object and thus overwhelm the capacity of libido as a mechanism of engagement with the other and the Other, a means of entrance into the world. While Freud was careful to qualify the irresolvability of the question of death, turning toward the notional “immortality” of single celled organisms and the effective transference of the vitality of ostensibly inert cellar matter into the metabolic potency of other forms, the deathliness he sought to explore through the concept of death drive accorded with the manifestations of deathliness he saw all around him–the first world war, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the rise of a newly modern and hysterical anti-Semitism, the question of mass death and the problem of grief–as well as the strange play of deathliness and liveliness attendant a variety of movements for the sustenance of life through the pursuit of its destruction; through amputation and cauterization, through the remaindering of people as just so many cells, cancerous blights which were best extracted and disposed before their parasitic dominion might be established. “It is generally accepted that the coming together of numerous cells to form a single animate unit–the multicellularity of organisms–became a means of extending their lifespan. Each cell helps to preserve the life of the others, and the community of cells can survive even if individual cells have to die off.” For Freud, libido was a mechanism for the manifestation of a multicellular, multimodal complicity that was necessary for the sustenance, preservation, and extension of life beyond the prison of the ego; the deathliness of modern life consisted, fundamentally, in the implicitly narcissistic demand that such erratic mutuality be forsworn in preference of modes of affiliation predicated upon the curtailment of tension, the return to the prior state of some fanciful ease. Death drive named a range of not entirely legible processes by which the tendency to regression overwhelmed the movement toward life, rendering the maintenance and continuity of certain, circumscribed forms of life adjutant to the movement toward an inconspicuous death.
Much of Freud’s work betrays such regressions. Driven by an illimitable curiosity for the inexhaustibly mutant curiosities Auden referred to as “the fauna of the night,” Freud revisited and revised, reacted to and reconsidered, abreacted and absorbed, different aspects of his work over the long course of his life, leaving behind a body of literature, a body of theory, that was, as often as not, at odds with itself; or, at least, generally open to the possibility of the forms of creativity that would contribute to the eventuality of its transformation or the imminence of its erasure. The digest as form is a figure of the drive, and Freud was forever digesting and regurgitating old bits of himself. “[T]he protozoa die after a period of senile decay just as the higher animals do….If, at a point before they exhibit signs of senescene, two animalcules are able to coalesce with each other, to ‘conjugate’–after which in due course they separate again–they remain unaffected by age….One is reminded of the famous experiment undertaken by Loeb, who by the use of certain chemical stimuli induced segmentation in the eggs of sea-urchins…” Feeling his way toward the death drive, and the proof necessary to sustain his otherwise unwieldy, admittedly untenable metapsychological hypothesis, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle–as elsewhere throughout his work–Freud returns to himself as a physician, as a neurologist and a researcher, dedicated to the investigation of the organic dimensions of neurological disorder. Even as he declaims organic theories of traumatic neurosis as stemming from the literal impact of a physical trauma upon the immediate functioning of the nervous system, Freud finds himself again swimming with eels, mucking about with protozoa and theories of embryology, speculating on the ways in which morphological adaptations are replicated–repeated and restored–at ostensibly higher levels of multicellular organization. He turns, that is, back to himself, back to the scientist he once wished he could be, back to the man who once had faith in the body, in nature, in the physical sciences and all they revealed. He turns back, to himself, and the philosophy of Plato, but back even from Plato and a philosophy he abjured. Citing Aristophanes’ description, from the Symposium, of the origins of love in the history of primordial man once united in body then cloven in two, Freud seats himself again at the banquet of the ancients, seeking solace in what the boy must once have believed; in certainty, in evidence, in the consolation of myth.
Freud’s speculations on cellular evolution are perhaps best read as clinical descriptions of what is most reasonably understood as an unfolding metaphorical, metabolic process, attempts at nailing down the never less than inscrutably lyrical dynamics of a mind that is never more opaque than it is to itself, as well as the relationship between the mind and the body, and the bodies and things it encounters in the world. Documenting regression within the space of the text, they register, as a matter of form, the dynamics of mind Freud hoped to elucidate, a mode of regression that proffered both a diminution of tension as well as a means of its sustenance, a means of maintaining the tension endemic to the continuity of life at a level suitably muted for the purposes of ongoing enjoyment, tuned neither to the depths of despair or the heights of joy. Inasmuch as the drive operates not to meet any particular overwhelming need, yet pursues its enjoyment in the continuity of its operation, death drive pursues the attenuation of pain in as much as it allows for the continuity of life as a continuation of suffering, an ongoing battle, inevitably lost, which is waged for the satisfaction of nothing and no one except for itself. Much of the final years of Freud’s life might be described in similar terms, as he fought, with those around him, to sustain and prolong his life, in defiance of his cancer, well past the point where there was any hope of recovery, even as the Nazis closed in around him, even as the tumors began to threaten to consume what was left of his eyes. Confronted by the cruel antisemitism of the Viennese in the wake of the Anschluss, Freud had been defiant when his daughter suggested they might contemplate taking their own lives. Why should we, he demanded. “Because they would like us to?” Yet, at little more than a year after arriving in London, he would do no less than this: in defiance of his family, in defiance of his friends, in defiance of the drive to continue on in defiance of his myriad foes, Freud chose death and, in choosing death, laid claim to his life. He would destroy all effigies of Moses; he would destroy what was left of himself. Just as his ersatz children could not be allowed to defeat him, neither cancer nor Nazis would lay claim to his corpse.