A PSYCHOANALYTIC STRUGGLE WITH THE CONCEPT OF DEATH: A New Reading of Freuds Thoughts for the Times on War and

Death Liran Razinsky

Psychoanalysis, both in theory and praxis, has difficulty in dealing with death. Several questions impose themselves right away: Does psychoanalytic theory have a unique attitude toward this phenomenon, toward this element of peoples lives? Can it deal with death in the same manner that it deals with other phenomena? Is death considered a problem? Three main problems can be identified within the mainstream psychoanalytic treatment of death. I will mention them only briefly here. The first is the lack of interest in the subject. Death, to put it bluntly, is not considered a problem; it is not considered a factor of primary importance in mental life. The easiest way to establish this is simply to note the minimal number of texts in the psychoanalytic literature dedicated to this subject, and its marginality among the topics ordinarily discussed.1 Lack of interest on the theoretical level influences, and is influenced by, inattention on the practical level, in therapy, to issues of finitude and death anxiety. Second, often when authors do deal with death, they do so in a reductionist manner. Fear of death, it is argued, is essentially fear of something else (see, for example, Brodsky, 1959; Chadwick, 1929; Fenichel, 1945, pp. 208209, 544). This approach dates back to Freuds earliest formulations regarding the fear of death (1900, p. 254), and can
This study was supported in part by a grant from the Schaeffer Endowment for Research in Depression. I would also like to thank Prof. Rachel Blass for her help and comments on this paper, and the fruitful dialogue around it. Psychoanalytic Review, 94(3), June 2007 2007 N.P.A.P.

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be found throughout his work (1923, pp. 5759; 1926, pp. 129 130, 140). Third, notwithstanding the last remark, there is a doubt whether there exists a uniquely psychoanalytic attitude to the problem of death that is distinct from that of other philosophies. Many clinicians who do not agree with the conventional view on this topic are aware of tension between their personal theories and the standard ones. Simplistic as the preceding picture might seemin that it does not include some theoreticians who do regard death as important, some areas where death is dealt with or some concepts, such as the death instinct, where death is consideredit does seem to capture much of the problem. To address the problem adequately would require too long a study in order to deal with the theoretical reasons for the problem, its history, and so on. What the current article offers is a preliminary approach to the subject: It will focus on Freud and will try to elucidate some of the complexities and problematics of his thinking about death by dealing with his short yet penetrating essay Our Attitude towards Death, which forms part of his Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915, hereafter cited as Thoughts for the Times). This is Freuds first organized attempt to deal with death, and it outlines his future position on the subject. The discussion of Freuds attitude is an end in itself, and can also serve as a sort of case study for illuminating the nature of the difficulty just mentioned, for psychoanalysis as a theory, and for analysts as practitioners when dealing with death. I will show that two attitudesone, akin to existential approaches, that regards death as a central issue, and the other that dismisses it as unimportant, psychically marginalare manifested in Freuds paper. But bothmainly the existential one, I will claimare undercut, undermined in the text, manifesting a basic difficulty in integrating the issue of death into a psychoanalytic worldview. Apart from being the paper in which Freud offers his most comprehensive ideas about death, the only one in which death is the main subject rather than alluded to marginally, Thoughts for the Times is also interesting because of its stated objective: to isolate and understand the source of the sentiments of bewilderment felt by people in that period (1915). These sentiments

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are caused, Freud claims, by the altered attitude toward death imposed on people by war. The possibility of applying such an explanation to the events of September 2001 or to the harsh reality of endless violent deaths on both sides of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict is a further incentive to study this text and to ponder the issue of the way psychoanalysis deals with the fact of human finitude. Of the few writers (mainly Becker, 1973; Hoffman, 1979; Lifton, 1979; Piven, 2004; Rank, 1945; Yalom, 1980) who have written about Freuds attitude toward death in general, most have found his position highly reductionistic (referring mainly to his claim that the fear of death is a derivative of the fear of castration or of separation anxiety).2 Freud tends to ignore death as a phenomenon of importance in our psychic structure and dynamics. Although acutely aware of, and some would say neurotically obsessed with, the problem of death in his personal life (Schur, 1972), his writings usually show little interest in the subject or are reductionistic. Time after time the fear of death is reduced to castration, guilt, or fear of the loss of love of the superego; seen as neurotic; or sexualized, concretized, and so on (Freud, 1923, pp. 5759; 1926, pp. 129130, 140). Interestingly enough, it seems that in only few subjects did Freuds attitude endure with so little challenge, undergoing so little change throughout psychoanalytic thought. This also makes it relevant today. However, among Freuds references to death, Thoughts for the Times is often taken to express a different position, a more existential3 concern with death. Those existential aspects are found mainly in two sections of the essay. First, there is the harsh criticism at the beginning of the article regarding modern societys attitude toward death. Although formally people recognize death as inevitable, they actually behave as if it does not exist. They exclude it from their thoughts, and when events bring them face to face with it, they treat it as a chance event, not as the necessary outcome of life. Second, the oftenquoted final paragraph, in which Freud proposes that we give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due (p. 299),4 is sometimes referred to as representing a view of death as an important factor in mental life, especially the closing

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maxim: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death (p. 300). In addition to these two passages, one can find throughout the article sharp apprehensions of both the inevitability and, on the other hand, the arbitrariness of death. One such case is the following: . . . it is really too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no return-match (p. 291). At the same time, the text contains some of Freuds clearest formulations regarding the impossibility of representing death in the unconscious (being negative in content) (p. 296). This leads to the claim that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality (p. 289). Consciously too, we cannot imagine death (p. 289); thus, these two positions combined, awareness and fear of death are excluded from the human mind. Fear of death, Freud claims, is only secondary, the outcome of a sense of guilt (p. 297). We have, then, two worldviews here, one that finds in death a meaningful and important coordinate for human life, with farreaching implications, and another that discounts the importance of death per se in our mental life. The text vacillates between the two.5 One should notice that this text is much more than the mere juxtaposition of two attitudes, the one denying deaths importance, the other valorizing it. As I will demonstrate, the passages in the text which seem to belong to some kind of an existential discourse are far from being purely existential in spirit. When read in the light of the entire text, the very statements that seem to present an existential attitude are found to be selfcontradictory and devoid of any meaningful content. An example of the confusion that is sometimes created can be seen in a statement like: The fear of death, which dominates us oftener than we know, is on the other hand something secondary (p. 297, emphasis added). My main point is that Freuds essay Thoughts for the Times is the result of two conflicting attitudes about death. Two different positions, one existential and one reductionist, seem to be struggling for expression. I will show, by pointing out various contradictions and inconsistencies in the text and by a close

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reading, that the textual material is a product of the two conflicting tendencies. Each time Freud tries to express one position, his other position influences the text such that the original meaning is lost. Freud approaches the theme of death in a manner similar to his approach to other phenomena: He aims at uncovering the truth. However, the nature of death and its psychical implications are such that something remains unsettled, tense. I examine this tension and, in the process, address the more general problem of integrating existential thinking and psychoanalytic attitudes. It is extremely important to read Freuds text as a whole, to see the context as a totality. It is only when we do so, and acknowledge the coexistence of Freuds two conflicting attitudes regarding his subject, that is, mans relation to death, that the various contradictions in the text are exposed. We can then reread the different sections and apply what we have learned from the whole. We will find, through our reading, that the text often speaks to us in more than one voice. Let us delve then into Freuds effort at explaining the human attitude toward death, and see how this topic constitutes a stubborn, unyielding, resistant difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis from its very beginning. As stated later in the discussion, this difficulty is still being encountered in our present psychoanalytic frame of reference to human finitude, or rather, one might say, it sometimes impedes the development of such a frame of reference altogether.
GIVING DEATH THE PLACE THAT IS ITS DUE

Let us start by carefully reading the text, and examine it step by step. First, a brief review of the content. Freud claims that much of the bewilderment of his contemporaries is caused by the effect war has in changing peoples attitude toward death. After describing the modern attitude to death, mentioned earlier in this paper, Freud turns his attention to the attitude of primitive people toward death, which is also reproduced in our unconscious. He sees it as a composite of three attitudes: hate (together with acknowledgment of death), in relation to the death

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of ones enemy; denial, in relation to ones own death, and ambivalence, in relation to the death of a person one cares about. The attitude of the unconscious, ignoring its (the subjects) own death, wishing for the death of others, and being ambivalent in the case of close personsis quite remote from what Freud calls our civilized cultural attitude toward death. The latter has been badly shaken by war. The paper ends with the following passage: [War] lays bare the primal man in each of us. It compels us once more to be heroes who cannot believe in their own deaths. However, war cannot be abolished and so, perhaps it is us who should give in, who should adapt ourselves to war? Should we not confess that in our civilized attitude towards death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means, and should we not rather turn back and recognize the truth? Would it not be better Freud further asks, to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due, and to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed? This seems like a backward stepa regression, he says, but at least it tak[es] the truth more into account and mak[es] life more tolerable for us once again. Illusions only have value if they make life easier for us, and this is no longer the case. We recall the old saying, Freud concludes, Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want to preserve peace, arm for war. It would be in keeping with the times to alter it: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death. (pp. 299300) I first focus on this closing paragraph, the clearest and most important example of the problem in this text. I then turn to other passages to broaden the picture, before reaching my final conclusions. Writers on the theme of death in psychoanalysis have rightly observed that these closing lines do more than merely sum up the text; rather, they contain a general statement, urging the reader toward a change, toward an ethically correct life, a fuller life. This paragraph has been treated as a sort of existential pronouncement by Freud regarding the significance of death for humankind and the need to live our life in the constantly acknowledged shadow of death. Along these lines one can under-

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stand how some writers came to the conclusion that Freuds intention here is to say that all doctrines that deny the significance of annihilation should be abandoned (Alford, 1992, pp. 130131), because these images are nothing but the denial of annihilation, and therefore denial of death itself (Lifton, 1979, p. 14).6 Other conclusions link Freud to existential philosophical traditions, and so we find in the literature that the closing line of Thoughts for the Times leads us toward some of Heideggers own views about death (Bolivar, 1993, p. 124; see also Kaufmann, 1959, pp. 4849, for a similar claim concerning other parts of the paper). Another writer claims that Freud (1915) is following a psychological-philosophical tradition that argues that one must appreciate death keenly if one is also to appreciate life to the fullest extent (Kastenbaum, 1977, p. 36, emphasis in original). A recent writer calls Freuds last line his ethical imperative (following Laplanche, 1976): an imperative to prepare for the possibility of loss, . . . mourning, . . . and failure, whereby Freud is trying to subject life to death (Carel, 2001, pp. 67). Even writers who focus on Freuds attitude toward death and toward the fear of death tend to assign supreme importance to that last paragraph. Freud is praised for calling us to deal frankly with the psychology of death, thus taking more into account the true state of affairs (Wahl, 1958, p. 29), and for expressing, under the guise of a maxim, the idea of the inextricable interweaving of life and death (Eissler, 1955, pp. 2829). Many of these authors in other parts of their work criticize Freud for being generally disinclined to treat death as important for psychic life. One such clear example is Yalom (1980), whose book Existential Psychotherapy contains important criticism of Freuds inattention to death and its implications. But toward Thoughts for the Times, Yalom articulates a more positive tone. After correctly observing that Freud is found to be inattentive to death only in the formal theory while speculating boldly on death in more marginal writings, Yalom cites the entire closing paragraph of Thoughts for the Times, reading it as representing Freuds mindfulness of the role death plays in the shaping of life, and laments the fact that Freud, apart from this

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article, remained silent in his other teachings for therapists on the subject of preparing for death (Yalom, 1980, pp. 6667). All these writers treat the last paragraph as an integral part of the text. In contrast, Laplanche (1976) points out that there is something odd about the last paragraph. While seeing it as linked to a line of thought that includes both Montaigne and Heidegger, he identifies a discordance between the last paragraph and the rest of the essay.7 I have noted these references in the literature in order to show that apart from the fact that this last paragraph does sound existentially oriented in spirit, it has also been understood that way by a variety of authors.8 I claim, however, that a closer reading of the essay as a whole suggests that this passage, too keenly praised by these authors for showing an existential understanding of death, is much less existential than it might seem when read separately, and that Freuds reductionistic approach was not renounced in it. I will endeavor to show that this and other passages in the text, and as a result, the text as a whole, are the compromise formation of two attitudes found in the essay, and as such, actually express neither of them. The problem I have identified in the text has been completely overlooked by all the authors quoted earlier, and so renders their interpretations incomplete.9
BUT WHAT IS THE PLACE THAT IS DEATHS DUE?

Looking at Freuds closing lines about giving death its place and preparing ourselves for death, we may become confused. For that passage, despite its confident and somewhat prophetic tone, is far from clear. If what is laid bare by war is the primal man in each of us, and if war compels us once again to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death, what then is meant by the appeal to adapt ourselves to war? Freud wants us to admit that in our civilized attitude toward death, we are living beyond our means. He wants us to give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due. This statement, in itself vague, could be read existentially, as urging us to be open to the possibility of death, to bring it into constant consideration, and perhaps to accept the fear of death as a constituent part of our

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life. On a more abstract level this statement could indeed be interpreted as leading in the direction of Heideggerian thinking, seeing mans being as being-towards-death. But such interpretations are called into question by the second part of the sentence, which asks us to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude toward death that was suppressed. Doing that would take truth more into account and get rid of the unnecessary illusion. But now is the time to remember what actually is the attitude of primeval man and of the unconscious. Interestingly, it is far from being existential. Though recognizing death as annihilation with regard to others, our unconscious ignores the possibility of our own death. Death has no place in the reality of the unconscious, said Freud explicitly several pages earlier (pp. 289, 296). Again, it is not only the civilized cultural attitude that ignores death. The unconscious is no different in that regard. Therefore, the call to abandon our comforting illusions toward death and to re-adopt our real attitude, is misleading. Our real attitude, the unconscious one, ignores death all the same, and denies its place in reality and in our thoughts. Therefore, there is nothing to return tono illusion-free zone in our mental life concerning death. Going back to the unconscious attitude will not serve to prepare us for death. *** What, then, could have Freud meant by his concluding words in Thoughts for the Times? When read thoroughly, Freuds last paragraph and, as we will later see, some of the other pivotal paragraphs in his paper hardly make any sense, both in themselves and in the light of the rest of the text. This is because the entire paper is actually the result of a hesitation between two attitudes, a result that leaves both these conflicted positions frustrated. It seems that part of the problem in understanding Freuds assertions is that he leaves open crucial questions about the meaning of his claim. Among these is the difference between readopting the unconscious attitude, and recognizing it or knowing about it; whether the truth we should return to is that of

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death or that of the unconscious; and which element in that multiple unconscious attitude Freud is speaking about: being murderous, recognizing death as annihilation in the case of others, or denying death in our own case. He also does not clearly pinpoint which component of the situation renders it painful or disturbing. Basically, all attempts to make sense of what Freud is saying in this famous last paragraph run into the two basic problems already discussed and that we will encounter again in other sections of Freuds essay: first, the fact that actually there is no difference between the unconscious and the cultural-conventional attitudes regarding the question of denying the existence of death, and, second, the tension between the existential tone of the paragraph, mainly the maxim Prepare yourself for death, and the other, more classical psychoanalytic descriptions. Instead of proposing the full range of possible interpretations, I limit my discussion to briefly sketching several such interpretations and demonstrating how none of them manages to offer an acceptable reading of the paragraph. According to one possibility, it is chiefly the murderousness of the unconscious that is distressing for us. It is unlikely that Freud would urge us to readopt or reassume it, which would be in clear contradiction to the spirit of the article (see page 296 and most of the first essay, The Disillusionment of War). Rather, he would urge us to know about it, to recognize our true nature, which will supposedly render unconscious pressures easier to support. Does this explanation make the paragraph coherent and clear? Not quite. Apart from rendering the treatment of death reductionistic, since death is only discussed in terms of murderousness, we still encounter two problems. First, one cannot ignore the existence of other aspects of the unconscious attitude toward death. Isolating the different aspects is misleading, since they are intertwined. Therefore, one would still have to face the difficulties raised earlier about the element of denial of death in the unconscious. Second, this interpretation still cannot solve the riddle of the meaning of the last line, which calls on us to prepare ourselves for death. But if it is not the murderousness of the unconscious, what could be the source of the distress that we feel? Freud seems to

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suggest that the changes that war has caused in our attitude toward death are a serious cause for distress (p. 289). But what is the exact effect of war?10 This question is bound up with another one, that of the nature of the illusion. What is the illusion Freud is talking about in the last paragraph, and why has it become valueless? Maybe under the pressure of external reality, of war, we have regressed to our unconscious attitude, and therefore our conscious attitude becomes a superfluous, empty idea that we do not really believe any more. The source of our difficulty would thus be the tension between conscious and unconscious ideas, which has become much more accentuated since the unconscious is now much closer to the surface. Or maybe our conscious attitude, which tends to ignore death, has become a valueless illusion since war forces us to face death, in masses (p. 291).11 But here once again we encounter the same problem: The unconscious is also ignoring death, that is, the persons own death. This offers no advantage over the conscious attitude but merely replaces one illusion with another. Both possible sources of discontent, heightened conscious unconscious tension and massive exposure to death, necessitate a diversion from standard Freudian explanations if we are to accept them: for taking the truth into account might mean explicitly taking into account the disturbing and unpleasant truth of the unconscious, but the reality which knocks on the door in the case of death is still an external one. That is, even if Freud thinks that there is some attitude of the unconscious of which we are unaware, it is actually the external reality of war in any of its possible ramificationsof death, of the accumulation of deathsthat is disturbing for us, and in a much more intensive form than merely as the ruining of a fantasy. The reality itself is the heart of the problem, not the disparity between it and the fantasy.12 What we find, then, is that there is something about this passage which stubbornly refuses to fit in, that the call to give death its due place and to live our life under the imperative para mortem is incomprehensible when we consider the rest of the text. It is not some minor problem of logic, but rather a major one. Enough with denial, lets go back to denial, to put it schematically, is what is actually said. What could then be the

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meaning of this maxim and of this whole last paragraph? And more important, in this essay what is Freuds attitude toward death?
THE HIGHEST STAKE IN THE GAME OF LIVING

Trying to answer the question about Freuds attitude toward death, we now look at another, no less interesting paragraph, a passage in which Freud tries to explicate in a more detailed manner the relationship between letting death enter our thoughts, and our life. This paragraph comes right after Freud discusses the cultural-conventional attitude toward death with all its behavioral and intellectual manifestations. He then turns to examine the effects of this attitude on us. He writes: But this attitude of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives. Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes, he notes, as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind. Freud further explains what he means: [o]ur emotional ties, the unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us. We dare not contemplate, he says, a great many undertakings which are dangerous but in fact indispensable, such as attempts at artificial flight, expeditions to distant countries or experiments with explosive substances. We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to take the sons place with his mother, the husbands with his wife, the fathers with his children, if a disaster should occur. Thus, he concludes, the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions. Yet the motto of the Hanseatic League ran: Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse. (It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to life.) Upon a close reading of the paragraph, certain problems arise. Life is impoverished, we are told at the beginning, when

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the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. Now this imposing phrase closely resembles in its tone the message conveyed in On Transience (1916), written several months following Thoughts for the Times. That article, which deals with transience in general, is also a statement concerning human transience and its effect on the value of life. Freuds stance there is that the transience of things lends them more value.13 Freuds approach in Thoughts for the Times, about not risking the highest stake in the game of living, initially seems close to it. Human finitude, or the awareness of it, Freud seems to be saying, renders life richer and more interesting. Eliminating death from life, hardly thinking of it, results in shallowness and emptiness. Thus it appears that here, as earlier, Freud is concerned with our intellectual/cognitive attitudes (i.e., not thinking about our own death, judgments which attribute death to accidental events). The message contained in the paragraph seems a rather existential one: We humans tend to put death aside, banish it from our thoughts, and this attitude of ours indeed has a price. We live a diminished, shallower, emptier life. But a sharp twist lies ahead. Our emotional ties and the intensity of our grief cause us to keep away from danger. Then comes what is, to my mind, a quite odd and unexpected list of activities that we avoid. These include artificial flight, expeditions to faraway areas, and experimenting with explosive substances. Not the most common activities, to be sure. We are no longer in the realm of thought, for now the text deals with emotions and pure actions. It turns out that what we miss, the way in which life is diminished, is that our activities are more restricted. The text has become quite concrete. The reader has the feeling that Freud wishes to demonstrate his earlier point, but that the demonstration is quite at odds with the claim itself (that life loses in interest). The price we pay for our tendency to exclude death from our calculations is a restricted sort of life, one might say a neurotic life, which, under the fear of death, is not pushed to its limits. We may recall Otto Ranks description of the neurotic, the type who restricts himself or herself because of the fear of death, as one who refuses the loan (life) in order thus to escape

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the payment of the debt (death) (Rank, 1945, p. 126). But are Freuds words really similar to Ranks? Is he proposing a theory whereby fear of death is mans dominant factor? It hardly seems so, for the activities denied the normal person by not thinking about death are too far-fetched, too esoteric perhaps for this to be the case. Freuds examples are much weaker than the claim he is trying to make. So what? one could say. Not all people, after all, are destined to be conquistadors and mountain climbers. Are these the serious consequences we are warned against? Is it really so unfortunate that we do not court danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us? Why does Freud seem to be losing momentum in the middle of his message? My answer is that it has been an ambivalent message from the outset, directed toward two opposing ends. For why is it that people refrain from overly dangerous tasks? It is the intensity of our grief, our emotional ties, and the thought of who is to fill our place or our loved ones place if we or he/she dies, says Freud. But arent those behaviors precisely the clearest signs of a significant presence of death in our thoughts? It is precisely because we do think about death, because we are aware of this eventuality, even incessantly, are even paralyzed by the thought, to borrow Freuds own term, that we are careful and avoid dangerous activities. Freud had just claimed the contrary in the preceding paragraphs, when he described our cultural-conventional attitude of not thinking or speaking about death. In fact, the attitude he describes here, of avoiding danger for fear of what will happen, is much closer to the description of the continental love affair than to that of the American flirtation. We human beings bear in mind the consequences, both the possible influences of our actions and the possibility of lifeor of the affairhaving an end. Is it because death is excluded from our calculations that we refrain from action, or is it because we are paralyzed by the thought?14 Are we oblivious to the possibility of death or obsessed with it? Freud evokes heroism and bravery in other places in the article (pp. 291, 296297, 299), and it is possible that this paragraph should also be read as one about courage. Ordinary people are not courageous enough to risk their life performing heroic deeds. But this explanation does not resolve the contra-

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diction in the paragraph: The life of the ordinary person, the one with the cultural-conventional attitude, criticized for not being a hero, not daring, not pushing to the limits, is impoverished because the individual is not thinking about death. But the hero, the one who dares, who will risk death in order to attain a cultural goal, is actually the one, according to Freud himself, who ignores death totally (pp. 296297). He is heroic, says Freud, only because his unconscious, like any other, ignores the possibility of death. And so, for the hero, the highest stake in the game of living may indeed be risked, but only because it has no value for him, because he does not realize the rules of the game. Although it is a game with only one critical move, he behaves as if he can always have a rematch.15 This impasse is similar to the one we encountered earlier, when analyzing the concluding lines of Freuds essay. There, too, Freuds call to oppose the cultural-conventional treatment of death by taking death seriously ended by turning to an attitude (that of the unconscious, of primeval man, and now, we add, of the hero) that in fact equally ignores death and is no less blind to its presence. This paragraph, then, is self-contradictory and gradually advances from one claim to its complete antithesis. It seems that when Freud arrives at the statement that the problem with people is that they refrain from handling explosive substances, he is not where he wanted to find himself. The task of lending coherence to this paragraph turns out to be impossible. The question, what did Freud really mean when he said life loses in interest when death is left out, remains unanswered. We are back in an aporia. With a sense that this aporia is fundamental to this article, I now carry my investigation further, and discuss two more sections. As we continue to investigate Freuds position, this aporia will reemerge with a twist, and its centrality to Freuds thought on this issue will become apparent.16
THE DIRECT ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH

We now turn to look briefly at yet another passage in the essay. It appears after Freud begins characterizing the attitude of primeval man toward death, and concerns the point where prime-

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val man first faced the reality of death. It can be regarded as a kind of mythic description of mans encounter with death. Freud expounds an elaborate theory about the origin of religions and ideologies, which he locates in this encounter. Examining its pivotal idea will enable us to view Freuds general tendency in his treatment of death. However, reading Freuds description of the confrontation with death can serve as yet another example, one perhaps closer to the experiential level than those already discussed, that Freud had more than one intuition regarding death. It will show once more his hesitation between considering death as important, giving it its due, and taking a reductionistic stance that regards deaths influence as secondary to certain psychoanalytic notions. Freud characterizes primeval mans attitude toward death as very different from ours, that is, from our conscious culturalconventional attitude. We have seen that primeval man recognizes death vis-a `-vis his enemies and even desires that death, but completely denies it in regard to himself. There is also the ambivalent attitude for those who are neither completely other, nor completely self. Freud describes the moment when primeval man stood near the body of his loved one. Primeval man was then forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself (p. 293). The death of the close other was painful for primeval man, but it also pleased him, for he was also an other who died. Freud then mentions an unattributed philosophical view whereby the intellectual enigma of death is what led primeval man to reflection, and thus was the starting point of all speculation (pp. 293294). Commenting sarcastically yet characteristically that here the philosophers are thinking too philosophically, he declares that he would like to limit and correct their assertion. But then the supposed limit and correction turns out to be a complete inversion of the claim, since what Freud says is that it was the ambivalence of feeling regarding the two-faced object, loved and hated, that caused primeval man to think. This thinking led to religious doctrines whose aim was to deny the significance of annihilation. We can see how death is subjugated to psychoanalytic concepts. The motive for inquiry is not the brute fact of the existence of death in the world, but rather an internal conflict, not the fact of human finitude, but the law of

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ambivalence of feeling toward objects. Psychoanalytic terms are quickly invoked to block the possibility of an existential acknowledgment of death. Death and the anxiety it evokes, as so often in psychoanalytic theory, are explained in psychoanalytic terms (e.g., the claim that fear of death is actually fear of castration [Freud, 1926, p. 130] or has its origin in the sense of guilt [p. 297]) that do not fully address the issue. Could it be, then, that it is also the psychoanalysts who are thinking too psychoanalytically? Indeed it could, at least as long as by psychoanalytically we mean adhering to the standard Freudian doctrine. But there is no one single Freudian doctrine about death in this article, as we have already seen, and as we see again if we return to primeval mans encounter with the death of his loved one. Freud is quite clear here about the law of ambivalence of feeling being the important factor. But we read otherwise, in his own text. We read that when primeval man saw the loved one dead, he was forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself, and his whole being revolted against the admission (p. 293). Hoffman (1979) discusses this paragraph in the context of Freuds insistence on the hypothesis that death has no representation in the mind and is therefore inaccessible to us. He rightfully shows that the language of cognitive limitation is hopelessly entangled with the language of defensive avoidance of a painful and, if anything, all too well comprehended reality (Hoffman, 1979, p. 237). How can it be, he asks, that mans whole being revolted against the admission of something which to begin with cannot be the content of subjective experience in any profound sense something which is, rather, unimaginable and unreal? (Hoffman, 1979, p. 237238). Carrying Hoffmans analysis a little further, one can point to the self-sufficient nature of the explanation. Let us recall: Primeval man does not yet know of the fact of his finitude, does not acknowledge it. Suddenly he learns about it, in the most painful way. Andhow could it be otherwise?his whole being revolted. It is important to note that this reaction of primeval man, as described in the text itself, is completely autonomic and self-explanatory. It needs no further elucidation. Freud adds the ambivalence of feeling, but if we read carefully, this explanation is only supplementary. It is not

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necessary, for the original description explains itself quite well and is logical without it. Ambivalence still serves as a condition here for being influenced by the others death. Near the slain enemy, primeval man had triumphed, Freud reminds us.17 But once the condition is fulfilled, it is not, in Freuds own description (but contrary to his conclusion), the ambivalence that generates the response. It is the pure knowledge of death, of finitude, that is responsible, on the emotional level, for a revolt of the whole personality. It is noteworthy that we are no longer dealing with intellectual enigmas. In the domain of the intellectual, perhaps the philosophers are thinking too philosophically. But here, with primeval mans response to the death of his loved one, we are dealing with an intense, immediate, emotional response which, in psychoanalytic terms, we would probably call instinctual.18 Here too, then, even when it seems the contrary, we find that the text speaks with more than one voice. One can also note the opposition between reacting emotionally with ones whole being and having an ambivalent, split frame of mind. The emotional response to the reality of death, which we have just revealed in Freuds text, has a certain totality, an overarching influence, unlike the more psychoanalytically oriented explanation offered in that same paragraph whose major characteristic is partiality and ambivalence (see also Hoffmans [1979, p. 252] emphasis on the whole in this phrase, in another context). We can also corroborate our stress on the irruption of death into awareness, as well as Freuds reluctance to admit it in that mythical moment of encounter, when we see in a version of the article entitled Death and Us, read by Freud at the meeting of the Jewish Bnai Brith organization (see fn. 17), how Freud says specifically that one of the consequences born of this encounter is the fear of death. In the later version, the one found in the Standard Edition, this observation was deleted. Freud showed himself to be very anti-existential (to borrow Hoffmans [1979, p. 250] expression) in his understanding of the claim that speculation began for humanity with the encounter with death. He offered a correction but actually adhered to his standard, reductionistic view of the important psychic mo-

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tives. However, we see that the reduction does not succeed in being complete, that another view about death stubbornly manifests itself in Freuds own text, a view that does not reduce death to any psychoanalytic notion.
THE INFLUENCE OF WAR

Before concluding, let us examine one last example of the inconsistencies of Freuds article. The subject of the whole essay is the influence of war, and twice Freud refers in it directly to the effects that warthat is, World War I, raging all aroundhas on our cultural-conventional treatment of death. We note the difference between the two references, though the context gives no reason to postulate a change of mind. The first reference to the influence of war is right after Freud describes the culturalconventional attitude toward death and the paragraph about life losing in interest. It reads:
It is evident that war is bound to sweep away this conventional treatment of death. Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die. (p. 291, emphasis added)

The second reference is in the concluding paragraph. It reads:

It is easy to see how war impinges on this dichotomy [between our unconscious attitude toward death and our cultural-conventional attitude]. It strips us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us. It compels us once again to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death. (p. 299, emphasis added)19

Again we ask ourselves what Freud is trying to say here. Did we believe in death before war? And do we believe in it now? Once again Freuds text leaves us perplexed about his stance. It would seem unjustifiable and naive to assume that such clear contradictions in the very content of the article are coincidental or are due to Freuds inattentiveness.20 It seems much more likely, as I have argued throughout this paper, that Freud has two competing views of death whose interplay is so complex that they lead to inconsistencies, bungled writing, and contradictions in the text.

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DISCUSSION

What we see then, when we look back at Freuds essay as a whole, is that there are two different attitudes toward death in it, each one seeking expressiontwo attitudes that come into constant confrontation and that incessantly undermine each others claims as well as the logic of the essay as a whole. The interplay between the two attitudes found in this essay generates passages that are in a way a compromise formation of the two claims. This polyphonic or, rather, dissonant, text, in which Freud continuously alternates back and forth between his two positions, leaves us somewhat perplexed about his real attitude toward death. This coexistence of two positions can be found throughout Freuds writings whenever he touches upon the question of death, though usually they appear separately.21 Those two attitudes are not just found together in the same paper, but are continuously interchanging in a complex game of vacillation. Paragraphs intended to express the first attitude end up as manifestations of the second, while clear articulations of the second hide, and are undermined by, budding appearances of the first. It might be said that it is the nature of death, with all the questions that it raises, to create such a complex and problematic form of discussion. I offer the following (though not the only) way of looking at the basic problematics of the essay, and more importantly, at Freuds attitude toward death: Freud essentially describes two kinds of attitudes: the cultural-conventional attitude of modern man, and the attitude of the unconscious, of primeval man, of the hero. Each of these two attitudes has its inner distinctions and characterizations, but the general point is that both of them, not just the culturalconventional, ignore or deny death, specifically the death of the subject. What Freud says about the unconsciousheroicprimeval attitude recognizing death as annihilation in the case of others changes nothing, since our question is about the individuals contemplating the givens of his or her own existence. If we look not at the attitudes described, but at Freuds two attitudes, we can define the problem as hesitation between two

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positions concerning the same question: Why is death absent from our thoughts most of the time (in the general sensethat is, all products of the mind) and from our calculations in life? The first position claims that we do not want to think about death, and we shall not think about it. The second supposes we cannot think about death. The first of these two is what we referred to as the existential position of Freud, which is also a critical one. It implies that a change is needed. It regards the absence of death from our mind as problematic. It also proposes that death does exist on some level or at some time in our thoughts, but that we prefer to minimize this presence. The other position is Freuds standard view regarding the psychic reality of death and death-related mental products. It sees death in a reductionistic way, for it implies that death is not really representable for us, that all thoughts about death are epiphenomenal, and that all emotions regarding death, mainly anxiety, are secondary to other emotions. This stance is purely descriptive and implies that there is neither a need nor a possibility for change.22 Freuds problem is that he holds both positions simultaneously. He suggests that people should pay more heed to the problem of death, but at the same time claims that it is impossible. Therefore every time he uses the first position as criticism, he falls back on the second one. We have seen it in the last paragraph of the articleone should give death its place, give the unconscious attitude its placebut actually we found that this task will lead nowhere, for the unconscious ignores death all the same. We have seen it in the paragraph that asserts that life loses in interest when death is not a possible stakethat is the condition of modern man. There we saw that those for whom death is a stake, those who are willing to risk life, are actually the ones who ignore death the most, according to Freud. The same problem can be seen once more where Freud speaks twice about the influence of war. While on the one hand Freud claims that war changes our cultural-conventional attitude toward death and does not allow us to deny it, on the other hand, only a few pages later, he suggests that war only serves to bring out more clearly our basic disregard of death on the level of the unconscious. We note Freuds dilemma in an example taken from the very beginning of the essay. Freud writes (p. 289) that we tend

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to put death aside, eliminate it from life, hush it up23 (this is the existential stance, that is, we do not want to think about death), and he slides from it directly to the psychoanalytic position of the irrepresentability of death (we cannot think about death, represent it, or experience it in any way). The shift between Freuds two very different, almost contrary positions is managed swiftly, almost too naturally.24 We commented at the beginning of the present paper about how Freuds general attitude toward death is a reductionistic one, one that denies the importance death has in our mental life. Truly, the essay we have studied here, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, offers an alternative. But we cannot overlook the fact that when Freud does try, in this text, to present us with a different view of death, matters become highly complex and difficult. In the text itself, referring to the existential facet of death involves dissociation within the essay, disregard of the position that denies that very facet, a position that is held within the same paper. General Implications The preceding observation leads us to widen our perspective and to look at some more general implications. For one may still ask, why all this bother? Why rethink a text dating from 1915? Why should we be concerned with its contradictions and dynamics? Havent we surpassed it in our current attitudes? Why reevoke a resolved problem? My answer to such reservations would be that, yes, it is true that in some respects, death in psychoanalysis is a dead subject. But it has been silenced to death, totgeschwiegen, by psychoanalytic theory, almost from the very beginning. Yet the problem persists. Death still declares itself and demands to be acknowledged, while the various developments within psychoanalytic theory do not do more justice to the problem of death than did Freud. This paper does not propose to offer an answer, but rather tries to show the complexities and contradictions one might encounter when dealing with the subject. Critiques of the psychoanalytic attitude toward death have been voiced for decades, most of them centering around the

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1970s: Rank (1945), Searles (1961), Becker (1973), Lifton (1979), Hoffman (1979), Yalom (1980), and more recently Hoffman (1998) and David (1996), to name some of the more prominent ones. But there is a very interesting point about this list of studies. Though very cogent and at times admirable in their exceptional level of interpretation and very sharp in their criticism, these studies have had a rather limited influence on the psychoanalytic community as a whole. They were left as isolated islands of thought that were generally not integrated into the standard view of psychoanalysis. I am not speaking about these authors in general (the centrality of Hoffman, for example, within current psychoanalytic thought cannot be disputed),25 but rather only about the part of their thought related to death and psychoanalysis. Unlike other areas of criticism that have had a strong influence on psychoanalytic practice (e.g., feministic criticism, postmodern epistemological criticism, criticism regarding the nature of the analytic relationship), this has not happened in relation to the theme of death. Why is this the case? We shall return to this question in a moment. Some authors, namely Hoffman (1979, 1998), Becker (1973), Yalom (1980) and David (1996), among those already mentioned, and others, such as Rosenthal (1963), Schermer (1995), Bolivar (1993), Langs (1997), and Piven (2004), offered ways of integrating death within psychoanalytic theory, and discussed the modifications that should be carried out within psychoanalytic theory and practice in order for death and its related anxieties and influences on mental life to have their proper place, without forfeiting psychoanalysis altogether. The present paper does not aim to supply yet another version of such possible modes of integration. The interested reader will be able to find such ideassuch as using elements of the structural model to give a theoretical frame to thinking about death, or, from a different angle, using the concept of the death instinct for the same goalin the works just mentioned. What the current paper does try to do, through a discussion of Freud, is to ponder, together with the reader, what exactly is at stake here, where exactly does the problem lie in attempting an integration of existentially oriented death sensitivity into psychoanalysis. It allows us to see an example of some of the deep con-

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tradictions and oppositions between the existential imperative to take death seriously and the basic psychoanalytic positions and modes of understanding. I have tried to argue that the opposition is very deep. This is apparent in the extreme difficulty Freud encountered when, having some intuitive knowledge about the importance of death, made more vivid perhaps by the contemporary atrocities of war, he tried to give an explanation of death while remaining within the structure and terms of his psychoanalytic worldview. The two worldviews are very hard to reconcile, even when one is Freud and is perhaps able to reframe his own conceptions more freely than others. In this sense, as already stated, Freuds efforts are at once interesting in themselves and edifying about Freud and about psychoanalysis, as well as serving as a case study of the more general nature of the problem of giving death its due place within a psychoanalytic worldview. These difficulties have not since disappeared. To take two examples: Some readers might have asked themselves whether the death instinct is not actually Freuds solution to the riddle of death, a psychoanalytic way of discussing death that is also used by future analysts, such as those of the Kleinian school, or some French analysts, among others. Indeed, although most analysts do not accept the death instinct or see it as a valid psychoanalytic response to death, it is worthwhile to consider it as one. A full discussion of it would of course exceed the limits of the current paper, but we can still notice how the position embedded in the theory of the death instinct is illuminated by the current research. On the one hand, the death instinct implies a full recognition of deaths importance to our lives, and raises this importance to the level of lifes organizing principle (the aim of all life is death; Freud, 1920, p. 38). On the other hand, however, the concept of the death instinct distorts and transforms death, in a way that renders death perhaps fitting for the psychoanalytic mode of thought, but thereby losing much of what death is. In the theory of the death instinct, notes Otto Rank (1945), the element of fear was neglected. Death is transformed from an unwished for necessity to a desired instinctual goal (p. 116). Lifton (1979), Schermer (1995), and Langs (1997, p. 214) make

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similar objections, that the death-instinct theory turns death into a wish and ignores anxiety.26 Thus again, Freuds ideas waver between a keen existential awareness of death and a reductive tendency, and again the two positions find one single theoretical expression, a compromise. Between these two poles, the attempt to find a specifically psychoanalytic position with regard to death that is not reductionistic is still unsuccessful. A second example concerns death wishes. In a sense, it would be inexact to state that death is absent from mainstream psychoanalytic thought. In some aspects of it, namely, analysts attentiveness to death wishes toward self or toward others and to death fantasies, it might in fact even be claimed central. Yet, once again, valuable as these observations are, they entail several crucial problems that the study of Thoughts for the Times illuminates. First, in limiting the analytic discussion of death to these elements, death is made into something else. Death as a reality, rather than a fantasy, is omitted, as are the fear of death and the more general question of finitude and its influence on us. The focus on death wishes, ostensibly a focus on the significance of death, subsumes death under the issue of aggression and makes it concrete and active. We have seen how Freud, in grappling with the attitude to death, tends to neglect aspects of it, as he himself understands it, and to focus instead on murderousness toward others. In addition, other specific problems that we encountered in Freuds text come into play here: If we seriously maintain that death has no psychic representation, how can we explain the death fantasies or wishes? Neglecting the existential aspects of death not only renders the psychoanalytic understanding of death incomplete, it makes it selfcontradictory. Thus, while death wishes and death fantasies are part and parcel of psychoanalytic discourse, they are commonly used without real consideration of the phenomenon of death, without enough attention being given to the question of what death really is for psychoanalysis. Our investigation, rather than being limited to one exploration of death by Freud, brings up problematic tendencies that are found in the psychoanalytic position to this very day.

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Anyone who wishes to take a serious step toward a more existentially oriented psychoanalysis must bear in mind the profound nature of the difficulty involved. Theoretical discussions such as those mentioned earlier about death and psychoanalysis seem to not always fully recognize the depth of the problem they are trying to solve, which at times renders the solutions a little less sound than hoped for. What I mean by this is that often integrative attempts such as these go directly to the solution without fully exploring the theoretical problems that need to be resolved. Among the critics mentioned earlier, Hoffman (1979) was most acutely aware of the difficulty of the existence of conflicting attitudes in Freuds thought. My reading and analysis of Thoughts for the Times goes in that direction, trying to illuminate more closely the nature and amplitude of the difficulties in their manifest level, and thus, I hope, enabling a glimpse at the deeper sources of such difficulties and contradictions.27 Returning to the issue of acceptance of the critics regarding psychoanalysis and death, my claim would be that the lack of reception of criticism on that issue is by no means coincidental. Once again the problem derives from those deep contradictions and oppositions that the present paper points at, obstacles obstructing anyone who tries to think psychoanalytically while taking death into account. If those calls to take death seriouslythat is, those critiques pointing to a lacuna in the psychoanalytic worldviewhave met with only little success (in terms of acceptance), this is because they pose a certain risk to common psychoanalytic conceptions. Clinicians and theoreticians alike are reluctant to make the necessary shift in their worldview. It seems to me that this is precisely because they somehow understand, even without always giving themselves a full account, that taking death seriously within psychoanalysis is not just another addition or minor modification, but that what is at stake here is in fact quite radical, something which is at odds with the very heart of psychoanalytic thought. This is not to say that it is a question of either one worldview or the other (an existentially oriented one, or psychoanalytic listening), but, notwithstanding, something at the heart of both worldviews is at odds. The current paper has tried

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to point out the fractures and fissures in the amalgam of both worldviews, represented in Freuds Thoughts for the Times. On the one hand, then, this test case enables us to see that taking death seriously within psychoanalytic theory and practice is not an easy task. The advances already made provide a good basis, but do not suffice in themselves, because they leave some very basic tensions unaddressed and unresolved. On the other hand, those few writers who in their thought and work try to accomplish this integration have themselves not been integrated into the standard views of psychoanalysis, or, if so, only in a simplistic way. Here, too, the basic tension between an existential viewpoint concerning death and certain psychoanalytic principles is at play. Those who share the psychoanalytic Weltanschauung do sense that there is a problem with accepting death as important without making some major changes within psychoanalysis itself. The integration of the two worldviews cannot be accomplished easily. For now, it seems that one side in Freuds struggle, the existential frame of mind, has succumbed, while the other has triumphed. It is in our interest to highlight all these difficulties and to reveal their sources if we want psychoanalytic theory and practice to be more encompassing and more cognizant of such important dimensions of human existence. The change cannot be made before one understands the nature of the problem, and how deep it goes. It is my hope that the present paper has managed to shed a little more light on these issues. One point still remains that might be of interest to us and that gives some hope for future perspectives. When one considers Freuds attitude toward death, an attitude maintained throughout in psychoanalysis and only seldom questioned, one cannot overlook a rather interesting fact about the text at hand. Though the standard Freudian attitude toward death is that of nonacceptanceboth in terms of the possibility of representation and of the inclination to regard death anxiety as constitutive in the psyche, this essay, Thoughts for the Times, which does discuss death more existentially, as a fact of life, is very psychoanalytic in its spirit. Freud is, so to speak, very Freudian here: the Freud who comes to unveil our illusions, the lies we tell ourselves; Freud the unmasker of cultural hypocrisy. This observation

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may make us wonder whether the classical psychoanalytic attitude toward death (seeing it as secondary and not as constitutive in the psyche) is justified, and whether an attitude that analyzes the defenses raised in the psyche against the knowledge of finitude is not in some aspects more congruent with the spirit of psychoanalysis. Would it not be better if we psychoanalysts give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due?

NOTES

1. I refer to writings that address the general issue of death in psychic life and specifically the fear of death. Rich literature exists concerning specific areas of life when death is brought, by reality, to the center: literature on coping and on the terminally ill, on mourning, on old age, on suicide, or on the death of the analyst. Reviewing this literature here is impossible. Some of these studies suffer from the problematics discussed in this article, some less so than others. Although some of these issues have been neglected for years (Rosenthal, 1957, p. 88), interest in them has been revived by such pioneers as Eissler (1955), Ku bler-Ross (1969), Weisman (1972) or Shneidman (1973), among others, as part of the evolution of a new field of knowledge, thanatology. However, most noteworthy about this mass of studies is that rather than question the conclusion that there is a problem with the psychoanalytic response to death, their existence, paradoxically, in a sense solidifies it: Death is addressed, but is only addressed when it is a concrete threat. It is mostly ignored in relation to the more general role it plays in life. Yet death is not a problem only for the terminally ill or for the mourner, but a question that every person must grapple with. 2. Piven (2004) is a major exception, for his position is that upon close reading, Freuds attitude toward death is actually rich and instructive. Philips (2000) also presents Freuds ideas on death as instructive. 3. The term existential will be used in this paper to designate a certain sensibility in regard to death, and will not refer directly to the thought of a particular philosopher, theologian, psychologist, or school of thought. This sensibility, which is not uniform and which can be found in writings that are as chronologically far apart as Ecclesiastes and Heideggers Being and Time, includes a perception of the importance in our lives of our finitude and its implications. Such implications range from the relationship between finitude and perceiving and valuing life, to the psychological significance of the emotional attitude toward death, mainly in the form of anxiety thereof. The existential attitude does not reduce death to other phenomena, nor transform it, but rather underlines its inevitability, arbitrariness, and place in mental life. 4. Page numbers, unless otherwise noted, refer to Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (Freud, 1915). 5. Cf. Yalom (1980), Hoffman (1979, pp. 249251), and Lifton (1979, pp. 1317), texts which stress the existence of an ambiguity or an ambivalence in Freuds overall attitude toward death.

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6. It is true that Lifton, who advocates symbolic immortality, criticizes Freuds attitude (which he refers to as rationalistic-iconoclastic), but this criticism is irrelevant for the current study. 7. It should be noted that Laplanches main interest concerns the axis of self other, and not an existential/reductionistic understanding of death (which is the subject of the current paper). 8. A somewhat amusing but clearly indicative example of the level of discrepancy between the concluding statements and the rest of Freuds paper is Loys (1996, p. 4) slip in discussing these statements. First he cites Freuds position regarding the unavailability of death to the unconscious as part Thought for the Times, then in the following paragraph, he says that in another short essay . . . Freud recommended more consciousness of death and cites the concluding lines of Thought for the Times: Would it not be better to give death the place. . . . In reality the two statements belong of course in one and the same paper. (Possibly Loy means to cite On Transience.) 9. It is quite possible that other instances in the literature, which ignore this essay, are related to the fact that it has something incomprehensible, selfcontradictory in it, sensed by the authors but not elucidated. How else can one understand the fact that Schurs (1972) five-hundred-page-long book, dedicated to Freuds attitude toward death, discusses so marginally what seems to be Freuds fullest account of death? 10. Later in the article I show that there is more than one answer to this question in Freuds essay. 11. We can no longer, in the context of war, says Freud (p. 292), hold our former attitude, and yet we have not yet found a new attitude. He then speaks about the unconscious attitude and that of primitive man. But the fact that we can no longer hold that attitude does not explain why we should adopt the unconscious one, nor does this explanation solve the problems raised in the preceding paragraph. 12. Some authors (Alford, 1992; Lifton, 1979) seem to think that Freud, in this passage, is telling us to abandon all doctrines that deny the significance of annihilation. If we try to elaborate this position concerning our text, it would mean going back to the moment before those doctrines appeared. This moment (to be discussed later) happened when primitive man was faced with the death of his loved one, and consequently began inventing ideologies whose aim was to mask death and deny its significance, the significance of annihilation (p. 293295). However, this interpretation, like those offered earlier, cannot be valid. Even if primitive man had some sudden, clear apprehension of death at that moment, it was still a very transient one, since the general attitude of primitive man toward his own death was to ignore it completely. He denied death, both before that moment, and subsequently, through the invention of doctrines that promise an afterlife. This interpretation will not make giving death the place . . . which is its due any more comprehensible. In addition, that moment involves a conscious, or perhaps a total (both conscious and unconscious) apprehension of death, and is not the unconscious attitude in itself, so returning to it will not be a return to our unconscious attitude. (One can also ask if such a painful recognition of finitude makes life more tolerable, which is what Freud wishes to promote.)

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13. See the discussion about On Transience in Hoffman (1979), where Freuds position is reformulated as a basis for what could be, according to the author, a psychoanalytic theory of adaptation to mortality, based on a conflict within the ego. 14. The thought of who is to take our place if something happens to us, which is actually a thought about death and its consequences. 15. To borrow Freuds metaphor for life mentioned earlier. 16. In a recently discovered and published first version of Freuds article, one that was originally read at the meeting of the Jewish Bnai Brith organization, one can discern several differences from the final version. In terms of the rhetoric used, the salient one is that the version from the Bnai Brith meeting uses fewer psychoanalytic terms and is slightly clearer on some points. Freud also makes use of quite a few Jewish jokes, anecdotes, and referencesa rhetoric meant to hold the attention of his audience, but which also can be seen as a means of accessing the difficult subject by way of the Witz, the joke. The paragraph we have just dealt with is one where the changes in the two versions of the text are the most obvious. They do not, however, shed more light on the issue we deal with here. See Le Rider (1992), Nitzschke (1991), and Meghnagi (1993) for a discussion of the differences between the two versions. Upon a deeper reading, however, and concerning other issues, some very important themes related both to Freuds Judaism and to his attitude toward death can be discerned from comparing the Bnai Brith version with the one in the Standard Edition. See Razinsky (2005) for a discussion of the importance of these Jewish elements and of the JewishatheistChristian context of Freuds discussion in the first version, and of the differences between the two versions. 17. As a matter of fact, it is not even ambivalence that serves as a condition, but the mere existence of love for the other. This love is what forces the primitive man to face death. 18. As opposed to there is nothing instinctual in us which responds to a belief in death (p. 296). 19. One may say that while Freud speaks about our death in the second sentence, he deals mainly with anothers death in the first one. But this interpretation is not in line with the text (for example: In the paragraph before the first of the two sentences, Freud deals with our use of art as a means of experiencing a symbolic death, and speaks of our death through identification with the hero). 20. We also have no basis for assuming that Freud wants to illuminate a compound ambiguous human position that results from the influence of war: that one has to recognize death but at the same time is forced even more strongly to deny it. Here, as with the last paragraph of Freuds text, there is no indication that the two attitudes described converge, complete each other, or result from one other. There is no cross-reference between them at all. 21. We now see that Laplanche (1976), though sensitive to some discordance between the concluding paragraph and the rest of the text, is not justified in saying that they follow completely different directions. The text contains both an existential look at death and a view that tries no less than primitive man, the unconscious, or the cultural modern attitude to put death aside,

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to deny it in terms of its effect on our mental lives. Both trends are expressed in the closing passage. 22. This description, derived from an analysis of Freuds essay as a whole, is very much in line with Hoffmans (1979, pp. 237238) distinction of whether the absence of death from our thoughts is the result of repression or of the impossibility of representing it. Piven (2004, p. 39) also questions, in the case of primeval man, whether he refused to believe in death as annihilation because he really could not imagine it, or because he wished not to. 23. It is interesting to notice the German word used: totschweigen, literally to silence it to death, to shut it up, thus rendering it dead. The it in Freuds phrase refers to death itself. 24. Right afterwards in the text there is another too-swift shift, noticed and analyzed by Hoffman (1979), from irrepresentability as a cognitive limitation to a universal belief in immortality in the unconscious. 25. Indeed, Hoffman might be an exception. Though his article from 1979 received too little attention, the success of his book Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process (1998) might indicate that some change has been taking place. However, it is difficult to differentiate his attitude about issues that concern the nature of the psychoanalytic process and the construction of reality from his attitude toward death, and one cannot be certain that readers of his book paid enough attention to his existential mode of thought. It is to be hoped that such consideration has indeed been given. Another exception is Lacan. His school is the only major one within the psychoanalytic world that can be considered existential in a strong sense. But one then faces the problem of either having to accept all his positions as a whole, or rejecting them in full, since these elements of his theory cannot be easily used separately. Also note that the group I spoke of here are those authors who are part of psychoanalysis or close to it in some way and criticize it from an existential point of view. Their criticism is not integrated into psychoanalytic thought, and their ideas are often not regarded as part of psychoanalysis. This undoubtedly applies a fortiori to the existential-phenomenological school of psychotherapy (Binswanger, Boss, Minkowski, May, among others), and quite rightly. Neither regarding the former group nor, especially, regarding the latter, can the argument be made that they represent a psychoanalytic approach to death that takes it seriously and is part and parcel of the analytic worldview. 26. Note, moreover, that drawing on the death instinct as Freuds answer to death, one that is not reductionistic and that does acknowledge it, involves some anachronism, since Freuds strictest objections to the presence of death or to the validity of the fear of death, apart from the ones discussed here, date from 1923 (The Ego and the Id) and 1926 (Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety), thus already after Freuds theory of the death instinct was postulated. 27. More recently, Piven (2004), mentioned earlier, analyzed Freuds ideas from a different perspective, which regards death as a central psychic source of motivation and fantasy that necessitates defense, and tried to combine these ideas with Freuds statements against the importance of death and its validity as a psychic entity.

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The Psychoanalytic Review Vol. 94, No. 3, June 2007