the insufferable lungs
Black plague; black lung; black heart. One drop. Eeny meeny miney moe.
Eggs butter cheese bread.
Stick stock stone dead.
It is the ammonium nitrate abandoned in the port. The fireworks and the welder. The explosion and the plume, an effervescence of glass.
As Freud would indicate, the trauma of combat—particularly the industrialized, distanced, disembodied combat of the Great War—was bound up in myriad, untold ways with the etiology of the war neuroses. Had his patients been drawn from among the working-classes of Britain and not the Austro-Hungarian middle- and- upper-classes, he might have noticed this earlier. He might have noticed all the ways that capitalism and its labor regime, its disciplines, seep into the mind as well as the body.
This dynamic, that we attend to those traumas that are most conspicuous so we might remain oblivious to those that are closest, bedevils one of our most compelling theories of trauma, the theory outlined by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the work in which Freud sought to think about our stubborn attachments to all that is most unpleasurable, and the ways in which that which is unpleasurable becomes a way of sustaining the pleasure of desire.
Freud often asked much of his readers, but never so much as he did in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a work that took shape in light of consultations he conducted during and after the Great War, a work in which the obvious traumas that arose from the experience of war were often used to illuminate the less conspicuous traumas of everyday life, of human social and sexual development. As is often the case with Freud, his theory and his writing is tied up in its own repressions, its unconscious elisions. While attentive to traumas both exceptional and banal, nowhere in Freud’s theory of trauma does he attend to the fact of physical illness, except perhaps as physical illness appears as the somaticization of a psychic process.
The actual history of the war barely appears, but it is acknowledged. Nowhere, however, does Freud discuss the history of the pandemic that followed after the war, that was triggered and exacerbated by the movements of troops during the war, and was responsible for the deaths of some 50 million people around the world, almost twice as many as were killed on the battlefield, or from injuries sustained during combat. The Spanish flu does not impinge upon Freud’s observations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; the trauma of illness and death of such cataclysmic proportions seems to pale in the face of the gruesome visitation of injury and death in combat.
One of Freud’s most beguiling works, Beyond the Pleasure Principle is much misused. Around psychoanalysis there are, of course, considerable differences between academics and clinicians, to say nothing of the numerous schools and claimants to interpretive priority that have followed after Freud, struggling to stay afloat in his not inconsiderable wake. The death drive that the father begins to elaborate in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is something that remains a subject of rancorous debate; its most enduring misinterpretation perhaps being the characterization of the death drive as a death wish, the psychic instinct toward the dissolution of sensation, of bodily imprisonment, mistaken as a form of suicidal ideation. On the contrary, much of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is devoted to understanding how the death instincts could coexist with an instinct toward life, toward sex and self-preservation; how the existence of a death drive could be accommodated to a psychoanalysis of the neuroses that understood neurosis as stemming from the primary repressions of sexuality and desire which constituted the basis of what Freud called, with some small measure of irony, civilization. Confronted by the first World War, and the influenza pandemic that followed immediately after, as entwined crises of civilization, the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle sought to understand the previously unexamined psychic forces that militated against those primary repressions and the forms of creativity, the forms of sociality, to the forms of neurosis and the everyday unhappiness, to which they gave rise. The result of these investigations remain utterly baffling.
Much of Freud’s effort at tracing an etiology of the death instinct turns upon an extensive discussion of death as a biological fact, the end of respiration and cessation of metabolism as the seemingly common fate of all living things. This is as close as we come to a theory of disease. While Freud concluded that the death instinct could not be explained through reference to biology in the ways in which the sexual instincts, the drive to sustain and preserve life, could be, he was nonetheless compelled by August Weismann’s theories of heredity and the germ-plasm, the component of cellular life that preserved the substance of earlier generations as the inheritance of biological reproduction. Citing Weismann’s contention that the individual body might die but its component germ-plasma would live and continue to reproduce, Freud perceived in Weismann’s theory a means of conceiving something approaching eternal life, albeit of a wholly cellular, secular nature. If, for Weismann, the theory of the germ-plasm was a supplement and a corrective to Darwin’s theories of mutation and natural selection, Freud’s application of the concept seems less bound to heredity and lineal descent through biological reproduction, than to the persistence of life-in-death, of life after death. The theory of the germ-plasm, in this sense, provided a model for resolving the contradiction between life and death instincts, inasmuch as the death of the body—the soma—did not compromise or extinguish the life of its cellular components. “It is generally considered that the union of a number of cells into a vital association—the multicellular character of organisms—has become a means of prolonging their life. One cell helps to preserve the life of another, and the community of cells can survive even if individual cells have to die.”
Like many of Freud’s attempts at thinking the organic dimensions of psychic life, his attention to Weismann and his theory of the germ-plasm is less compelling for what it tells us about the nature of the psyche than for what it tells us about the ways in which the psyche is shaped by our limited efforts to understand it; by the operations of metaphor and metonymy, by image and by example, by language and its fragility. Finding solace in language, our attempts at mastering the psyche, of coming to master loss by coming to know it, are ultimately doomed to consign us to the purgatory of repetition, to the dungeons of the death instinct. In so doing, we preserve ourselves from the horror of eros, of desire and need, of life as the movement toward ever greater connection, and—accordingly—the inevitability of pain, of grief. Freud’s description of the body as a multicellular organism, an association among cells for mutual benefit, may be a reasonably accurate characterization of the body and its biology; it is also, obviously, an image resonant with a host of discourses surrounding and summoning the idea of the social body, of associations among people as components of larger wholes, bound by mutual feeling if not by organic dependencies.
By the time Freud finished editing these reflections, his daughter was dead. Of the Spanish flu. And neither he nor his wife could get to Hamburg on the train. Pandemic steals us from death, even. We cannot be there to watch our loved ones die. And within a few years, he and his fellows would have new associations about trains.
Sophie Halberstadt-Freud was twenty-seven when she died. She had one child, Ernst Wolfgang, who was the inspiration for some of Sigmund Freud’s most penetrating insights on loss, condensed in the figure of fort, da. Fort, da: Here, gone. Whether we see it or not, fort, da is a game indulged by almost all children of a certain age, and almost always at mealtime, when they are often restrained, and they throw a toy, or their food, to the floor. Being restrained, they cannot retrieve the object they discarded, so they are dependent upon an older person to retrieve it for them, to return it to them. Dependency, here, of course, is another name for mastery, for control; not of oneself, but of those around them. It is a way of taking control of some aspect of an otherwise terrifying environment, a room, a house, a landscape in which one finds oneself largely out of control; or without control, which might be the same thing.
Am I still playing this game? If so, what are the pieces, and have the rules changed?
I withhold food. I vomit until I am severely ill. I fall, I hurt myself, I am helped up, I get helped. Doyle is worried.
“The manifestations of a compulsion to repeat,” the father writes (Freud the Father, the Father of Psychoanalysis, the German Vater, Wasser, Water, Vader, Darth Vader, my Grandma Vader, my Grandma Erma, Irma the patient with lesions in her mouth and throat, the mouth and the anxiety of speech when the chance of getting better rests upon the ability to manipulate the breath) “exhibit to a high degree and instinctual character and, when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some ‘daemonic’ force at work. In the case of children’s play we seemed to see that children repeat unpleasurable experiences for the additional reason they can master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active than they could by merely experiencing it passively. Each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery that they are in search of.”
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of course, was—in no small part—the summation of Freud’s attempts at understanding the myriad violences of the First World War; not just the violence of the battlefield and the trench, but the violence of displacement, of populations forced to flee, of empires crumbled and new nations thrown up; of revolution and its specter, of Bolshevism and its siren melodies. It is an attempt at mastering the experience of war, the horror of war and then pandemic, which might account for its weirdly elliptical structure, a structure less labyrinthine than rhizomorphic in the Deleuzian sense. It is a text born of loss on an unimaginable scale, a loss that quite simply cannot be wholly admitted or borne.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud addresses the war directly on only one occasion, in chapter two, when he introduces the question of what he calls traumatic neurosis, a condition that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, has most likely come to be known as post-traumatic stress disorder. “The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind, but it at least put an end to the temptation to attribute the cause of the disorder to organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force.” In this opening salvo, one hears some slight rebuke to the Freud and Breuer of the Studies in Hysteria (1895) that marked the dawn of psychoanalysis: not in terms of organic lesions of the nervous system, but of the relatively uncomplicated version of trauma that Freud and Breuer held, their sense that the childhood traumas that prompted hysterical neuroses were relatively straightforward and somehow always related to the physical reality of sexuality, rather than—as Freud would later postulate—fantasies of sex. Freud would seem to admit as much when, in a subsequent passage, he writes, “No complete explanation has yet been reached either of war neuroses or of the traumatic neuroses of peace.” The text goes on to discuss the relationship between fear, fright, and anxiety, their differences, their interactions, and their relationship to the formation of traumatic neuroses.
Chapter two is, not inconsequentially, where Freud introduces fort, da. “I propose to leave the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis and pass on to examine the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities—I mean in children’s play.” That Freud would move so immediately, if obliquely, between the experience of traumatic neurosis as the underlying structure of war neurosis and the operations of children’s play—particularly inasmuch as his observations concerning children’s play came directly from his grandson and his consultations with his daughter—is both illuminating and perverse, drawing attention to the relationship between infantile attempts at mastering loss and the fact of war as a perpetually repeating means of attaining mastery. Describing the mechanics of the game at some length, Freud goes on: “The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach.”
Repetition as cultural achievement: a way of mastering the self and the life instincts, mastering desire by holding onto loss. Freud’s grandson invented fort, da as a way of staging and compensating for his mother’s absence. It cannot have been lost on Freud that by the time he wrote these lines, Sophie’s absence was irrevocable.
It now seems baffling that it took a world war for Freud to notice that his patients were often quite desperately and willfully attached to their pain; or rather, to draw out the theoretical consequences of those attachments. In evoking the war, Freud represses the history of the pandemic. This is not all that surprising. War is spectacular and horrifying, given to associations with heroism and romance, of beginnings and endings and great deeds and vainglorious death. Disease is slow and worrying but uncertain, a form of the slow violence that is insidious, tedious; painful to watch, harder to narrate. The emotional toll of the slow violence of pandemic emerges in his notorious essay on mourning.
War did not steal his daughter. War he could face. The inventor of psychoanalysis, a means of healing by way of the quiet, patient, slow movements of the talking cure, could not face the tedium, the banality, of the illness that consumed his daughter.
Europe is haunted by its dead. It clings to them and cannot give them up. It is a way of holding to them, of making sure they stay put. Every once in a while, however, they jump out of the dark just to remind you that they are there. A reflection of all that you are, but have forgotten about yourself.