Compulsive Repetition, Self-Destruction, and Death

It is curious that as we approach the centenary of the publication, in 1920, of Freud's most neglected and professionally disliked book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we are now seeing a renewed interest in its most controversial idea: the death drive. As I said on here only the other day, the sputtering bewilderment proffered by psychoanalysts and others in the face of this theory is itself bewildering to me for evidence of a human propensity towards self-destruction (and the unconscious pleasure, or at least purpose served by such destruction) seems constantly on offer. (Exhibit A might perhaps be the opioid epidemic we keep hearing about.) For Christians, as I shall contend later and elsewhere at greater length, there is an important soteriological dialogue opened by Freud's theory that has not, so far as I have been able to detect thus far, been taken up but should be.

Whether one has to have a theory of the death drive to account for human self-destruction, and whether Freud's theory is the best one, are important questions to which I will return in a moment, aided by an important new book discussed below. But discussions of Freud's notion of a death drive, which were few and far between even while Freud was alive, are now taking off nearly 80 years after his death. Perhaps this is one more illustration of Adam Phillips' argument from some time ago that the best time to re-examine Freud is precisely now, when nobody thinks much of him anymore and there are fewer and fewer professional establishments rushing to "protect" him from being critically scrutinized, or rushing to enforce some orthodox line or other:

This is certainly a good time for psychoanalysis: because it is so widely discredited, because there is no prestige, or glamour, or money in it, only those who are really interested will go into it. And now that Freud’s words are so casually dismissed, a better, more eloquent case needs to be made for the value of his writing ("After Strachey," London Review of Books vol. 29 no. 19, 4 October 2007, p.36) 

So scrutiny is returning to several parts of Freud's project, but noticeably his late-period "cultural works." Thus, earlier this year, as I discussed here in some detail, there was Benjamin Fong's fascinating new book Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism.

And before him, in 2013, in one of the most richly provocative books I've read in a long time, there was Todd McGowan's Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis, which I discussed in detail in three parts. I think the book deserves a wide audience, especially among Christians concerned with what the various depredations of what is variously called consumerism, materialism, or, simply, capitalism.

In addition to Fong and McGowan, nobody has written as much about the death drive as Todd Dufresne, whom I have been reading profitably for some time now, and through whom I discovered the wonderful work of his Doktorvater, the late Paul Roazen.

Roazen's Meeting Freud's Family is a thoroughly charming book. His Freud and His Followers was a groundbreaking and controversial work which fills in very important gaps in the historiography. And I have found his Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis useful in surveying what religious and theological responses were made over the history of psychoanalysis to the 1990s.

Dufresne's work on the death drive is found first in his Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context and then, more recently and succinctly, in his introductory essay to the Broadview translation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 

To my enormous surprise and puzzlement, neither of these books shows up anywhere in the newest book devoted to the topic, Repetition, the Compulsion to Repeat, and the Death Drive: An Examination of Freud's Doctrines, co-authored by M.A. Holowchak (a philosopher) and Michael Lavin (a clinician) (Lexington Books, 2018, viii + 163pp.). It is a very useful, crisply written, and largely clearly argued work.

There are several virtues to this book, including its relative brevity, and the arrangement of each chapter, which aids in reading. More broadly the book will be useful if it is received as the history it is, tracing out the trajectories of the concepts of repetition, compulsive behavior and thinking, and the death drive across the Freudian canon. As such it goes back to 1895 and Studies in Hysteria, co-authored by Freud and Breur, and then forward past Beyond the Pleasure Principle to works in the last period of Freud's life, often referred to as his "cultural" or "meta-psychological" period. Along the way it also notes such "watershed" publications as Freud's 1914 paper, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" as well as his essay on anxiety from 1932, by which point he seems to have moved from the very tentative and speculative writing of Beyond the Pleasure Principle 

Further virtues include the fact that this is neither an attack on Freud--though it advances important, serious, and considered criticisms of his theory--nor a glorification of him in aid of enforcing a certain orthodoxy. It agrees with Freud in places, argues with him in others, and gives evidence in still others for where Freud may have been wrong, or subsequent research does not bear out his often highly tentative and speculative claims in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. On the latter score, it notes problems with Freud's attempting to find phylogenetic evidence for a death drive and compulsive repetition. The question remains: can his theory be rescued if the evidence he claimed to find for it in the biological sciences does not exist, or can be explained by other theories? In answer to that question the authors diverge somewhat, and candidly acknowledge this in the conclusion. For my part, I see few problems in separating out and sustaining most of the theory from insufficient "natural" evidence, and again the authors seem--albeit somewhat uneasily--inclined to agree, especially in a clinical setting, noting that clinicians rarely take their theory pure and whole.

All that having been said, the drive to destroy, including the self, is often a repetitive one, and we are faced with the question of why that is when such a drive brings terrible anguish, suffering, and consequences to the self and to others. Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the drive for pleasure and the death drive are not always operating in mutual and exclusive opposition. As the authors admit flatly, "eros and the death drives do not function independently of each other" (85). In fact, one of Freud's key insights here and in other areas was the admixture of experiences and emotions. In this light, one can, as he himself wrote, find in destructive repetitions the "pleasure of mastery or revenge," including against childhood traumas, enemies, or frustrations.

Such an understanding also goes some way towards accounting for what is perhaps Freud's clearest clinical evidence for compulsive repetitions and self-destructive behaviors: the regularly observed fact that patients get bogged down in treatment, and come actively to undermine the very thing that may help them get better through attacks on the analyst and the "therapeutic alliance" between analyst and analysand (as Christopher Bollas calls it). In this regard, as D.W. Winnicott put it, attacks on a therapeutic analysis may be understood to reflect the fact that for many of us, "health is much more difficult to deal with than disease." In our perverse ways, we like being sick, we like being punished, and though we do not always admit this to ourselves consciously, our unconscious repetitions-in-action bear this out.

By chapter 6, it seems the authors' patience is wearing a wee bit thin, as they sum up the "view in the secondary literature...that the death drive creates more problems than it solves" (98). I think this overstates the case and the authors themselves have not provided absolutely conclusive evidence to support this judgment. Moreover, they fear that Freud's insistence on the death drive runs the "risk of throwing his metapsychology into a state of chaos" (108).

Here is precisely the point where an engagement with Todd Dufresne, mentioned above, would have been crucial. Dufresne's argument is that BTPP is a deliberate act of sabotage on Freud's part, undermining his theories of sexuality and much else. As Dufresne puts it, "metapsychology subverts psychoanalysis," whether "playfully or otherwise," inflicting from a position within the movement a "trauma" on psychoanalysis. Dufresne does not elaborate much on why he thinks Freud may have done this, but I would speculate--following Adam Phillips--that this may have been done precisely to keep the analytic movement from becoming a closed, rigid ideology with enforced orthodoxies and a putative epistemological omniscience.

Freud was certainly aware of the dangers in this direction (and had himself on occasion contributed to it), especially if analysis remained in the hands of psychiatrists or other medical doctors alone. He was forced to address this problem in 1926 in The Question of Lay Analysis, a work I would also see (as, again, Adam Phillips has) as pushing back against analysis becoming a closed system with a closed caste of expert "professionals," especially if those medical professionals were Americans, of whom he thought very little and whom he regarded with enormous skepticism. Such a resistance reflects Freud's own compulsive concerns in some ways, for he was clearly desperate for respect and acceptance for most of his life, but late in life seems to have come to regard such desires with disdain and begun to resist them and call for others to do likewise.

In the end, Holowchak and Lavin conclude there is not a lot that can be salvaged from Freud's death drive, but they do themselves a great service by noting that many other prominent analysts, including Klein, Lacan and Laplanche, disagree with them. Laplanche, it seems to me, takes the most sensible route forward by arguing that if the theory is stripped of biological concepts, if it is seen as exclusively human, and if it is seen as operating not independently but bound up with other drives and desires, it can be rescued.

What, in brief, should the Christian make of all this? Here is where more work needs to be done, but at the very least I think one can say that the destabilizing motives Dufresne detects in defending the death drive and Beyond the Pleasure Principle more generally are ones that Christians should welcome, finding in them analogues to the destabilizing forces of death, grief, and mourning. These forces--as I suggested earlier this month--should function for Christians as a reminder not to close our lives off in presumption of salvation whereby everything is known and everything is resolved, and all must have prizes. Here below we continue to sin, suffer, destroy, and die. Freud attempted to answer why that is, and Christianity does likewise. Between the two there is not nearly so much daylight as many assume--but that, perhaps, is for another day.

On the Problems of Biography: Freud Reconsidered

I am at work on two recent books that are both, in part, biographical studies but also studies that grapple with the problems of biography and how to interpret an author's life in light of his works. The first is--it will not surprise you--by the incomparably compelling Adam Phillips (about whom see here): Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale UP, 2016), 192pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Becoming Freud is the story of the young Freud—Freud up until the age of fifty—that incorporates all of Freud’s many misgivings about the art of biography. Freud invented a psychological treatment that involved the telling and revising of life stories, but he was himself skeptical of the writing of such stories. In this biography, Adam Phillips, whom the New Yorker calls “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytical writer,” emphasizes the largely and inevitably undocumented story of Freud’s earliest years as the oldest—and favored—son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and suggests that the psychoanalysis Freud invented was, among many other things, a psychology of the immigrant—increasingly, of course, everybody’s status in the modern world.

Psychoanalysis was also Freud’s way of coming to terms with the fate of the Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So as well as incorporating the writings of Freud and his contemporaries, Becoming Freud also uses the work of historians of the Jews in Europe in this significant period in their lives, a period of unprecedented political freedom and mounting persecution. Phillips concludes by speculating what psychoanalysis might have become if Freud had died in 1906, before the emergence of a psychoanalytic movement over which he had to preside.

Biographies of Freud are not wanting, beginning with the three-volume and largely apologetic endeavor of one of Freud's close early associates, Ernest Jones (about whom see here).

A more recent attempt, by the widely respected historian Peter Gay, was published to great acclaim in 1988 as Freud: A Life for Our Time. I read it shortly after it came out when I was an undergraduate student in psychology, and it is a fine study, though not (as Paul Roazen showed) without some residual tendencies towards an apologetic treatment of Freud that he didn't need.

Phillips' study is a unique one, now joined by another one from Todd Dufresne (who studied under Roazen): The Late Sigmund Freud: Or, The Last Word on Psychoanalysis, Society, and All the Riddles of Life (Cambridge UP, 2017), 322pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Freud is best remembered for two applied works on society, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents. Yet the works of the final period are routinely denigrated as merely supplemental to the earlier, more fundamental 'discoveries' of the unconscious and dream interpretation. In fact, the 'cultural Freud' is sometimes considered an embarrassment to psychoanalysis. Dufresne argues that the late Freud, as brilliant as ever, was actually revealing the true meaning of his life's work. And so while The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and his final work Moses and Monotheism may be embarrassing to some, they validate beliefs that Freud always held - including the psychobiology that provides the missing link between the individual psychology of the early period and the psychoanalysis of culture of the final period. The result is a lively, balanced, and scholarly defense of the late Freud that doubles as a major reassessment of psychoanalysis of interest to all readers of Freud.

This latter study, I must confess, has challenged my own approach to Freud's late works, which I have heavily discounted. I'm still rethinking this issue as I make my way through this book.

But, having finished Phillips first, let me turn to it. It is a slender volume and the writing is much more taut than one finds in a lot of his other books, whose characteristically discursive style I noted here. It is interesting to read Phillips alongside Dufresne because Phillips gives pride of place to the early works, where as Dufresne weights the very last works the same as the earliest.

Phillips repeatedly makes the argument in  Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst that if Freud had died in 1906 then psychoanalysis would have developed very differently, and far less ideologically, without a prescribed history and an apparently inviolable canon of sacred texts, rituals, and rules.

The early Freud, that is up to his turning 50 in 1906, wrote books that evidence a much freer spirit: "Freud in his forties was a younger man than he had ever been: less cautious and more boldly and brashly speculative. And the writings of this period have a corresponding sense of exhilaration and possibility" (145). Of those writings, Phillips singles out five, starting with the landmark The Interpretation of Dreams (1899/1900).

The book on dreams was quickly followed by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).

These books, Phillips says, show more openness to engaging with others--artists, feminists, socialists, among them--though he notes several times Freud's total lack of interest in engaging politics, which he preferred to ignore almost at the cost of his life. Even as late as 1938 he thought that the Nazis were still not a serious threat, and that the Catholic Church was more of an enemy to him as both a Jew and an analyst.

That view is one that is quite understandable in the world Freud grew up in, born in Freiberg in Moravia, then part of the Habsburg Empire, before moving to the imperial capital of Vienna, where he would remain until the last 18 months of his life before being forced to flee to England to "die in freedom."

But with Phillips I tend to see in the early Freud not the hardened hostility to Christianity that would emerge in 1927's Future of an Illusion but, as he says in his concluding line to Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, a man working with ideas and methods "for those eccentrics and dreamers who don't know what to make of themselves."

Secrets of the Soul and Body Politic

Peter Tyler's densely argued The Pursuit of the Soul: Psychoanalysis, Soul-making and the Christian Tradition, published last year, is, alone of the recent attempts at a Christian re-engagement with psychoanalytic thought discussed on here, the most intellectually sophisticated and serious. He draws on the patristic tradition, including Origen and Augustine, to look at the conceptualization of the "soul" in classical Christian spiritual traditions as well as modern psychoanalysis.

About this latter he makes a convincing case that those who supervised the "Englishing" of Freud, that first generation of such as Ernest Jones and James Strachey, zealously concerned to protect Freud and his tradition from charges of being "unscientific," and equally zealous to differentiate themselves from "spiritual healers" and other charlatans and quacks, coined a series of neologisms in English purposefully to get away from any language of the "soul" and to sound more "scientific."

That theme of the soul also comes up in a very good history I've just finished by Eli Zaretsky: Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. Published in 2005 by an author whose earlier work, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life, clearly informs the later work, Secrets of the Soul is the very model of the sort of careful cultural analysis that someone like Rod Dreher should have done if his new book (which I discussed here at length) were to be regarded as remotely intellectually serious. Zaretsky follows a similar narrative arc as Dreher, both tracing the rise and then gradual decline of a given tradition--Christianity in the West for Dreher, and the psychoanalytic tradition for Zaretsky--but what distinguishes Zaretsky is his careful and very detailed scholarship co-relating the socioeconomic conditions that facilitated first that rise and then more clearly still the gradual decline of psychoanalysis. Socioeconomic changes are not entirely responsible, but together with intellectual debates and other factors, they play a crucial role. Christians who wish to be taken seriously in staking out claims of decline cannot be taken seriously until and unless they also attend to socioeconomic changes in as careful and discerning a manner as Zaretsky has done.

Zaretsky's book would make a good companion for two works by George Makari: his Revolution in Mind: the Creation of Psychoanalysis, which I reviewed in some detail here; and then his more recent Soul Machine: the Invention of the Modern Mind.

One thing that comes up in all these works is the painstaking efforts Freud took to stay out of secular politics in both Austria and Germany. This was clearly done for purposes of preservation and protection, especially after 1933. Given the treatment handed out to Freud and his daughter Anna at the hands of the Gestapo in 1938, and the treatment more broadly during the war of Jews (all of Freud's sisters were killed in Nazi death camps), such anxiety to avoid politics makes a great deal of sense. Freud was in fact eventually, and with great reluctance, forced finally to flee Bergasse 19 in Vienna for London, where he died in 1939; the tale of this flight is well told in David Cohen's surprisingly well-done and riveting Escape of Sigmund Freud.

Freud also repeatedly insisted that psychoanalysis as such not enter into political debates about various topics, especially during and after the Bolshevik revolution. The early Bolsheviks saw some use for psychoanalysis, but it was later denounced and banned in Russia for its bourgeois-capitalist and Jewish backgrounds. Nevertheless, Freud lives on today in part not for his clinical work, but precisely for the political application of his clinical insights, a point made in depth and detail in Zaretsky's newest book, released just this month, Political Freud: A History.

About this new book the publisher tells us:

In this masterful history, Eli Zaretsky reveals the power of Freudian thought to illuminate the great political conflicts of the twentieth century. Developing an original concept of "political Freudianism," he shows how twentieth-century radicals, activists, and intellectuals used psychoanalytic ideas to probe consumer capitalism, racial violence, anti-Semitism, and patriarchy. He also underscores the continuing influence and critical potential of those ideas in the transformed landscape of the present. Zaretsky's conception of political Freudianism unites the two overarching themes of the last century―totalitarianism and consumerism―in a single framework. He finds that theories of mass psychology and the unconscious were central to the study of fascism and the Holocaust; to African American radical thought, particularly the struggle to overcome the legacy of slavery; to the rebellions of the 1960s; and to the feminism and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Nor did the influence of political Freud end when the era of Freud bashing began. Rather, Zaretsky proves that political Freudianism is alive today in cultural studies, the study of memory, theories of trauma, postcolonial thought, film, media and computer studies, evolutionary theory and even economics.

In this light, Political Freud clearly picks up where Zaretsky ends Secrets of the Soul: noting that while its clinical status continues to decline, psychoanalysis is far from dead as a cultural hermeneutic. As Zaretsky notes in his epilogue, by the time we arrive at about 1980, psychoanalysis "divided into two divergent projects: a quasi-medical therapeutic practice aimed at treating mental and emotional disorders, and a set of new approaches to the study of culture." If the former project seems increasingly eclipsed by psychopharmacology and other therapeutic traditions (the efficacy of which is not, as noted here, always so great), the latter remains vibrant and valuable.

But what, in the end, remains valuable in the psychoanalytic tradition? This is a question I am continuing to think about in preparation for a lecture I've been asked to give in Iowa in late September of this year which marks two significant anniversaries in the Freudian canon: 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Freud's most popular and widely translated work, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.

It also marks the 90th anniversary of perhaps Freud's weakest but nonetheless one of his most controversial works, Future of an Illusion. This latter work purported to explain the origins and purposes of monotheistic religions certainly (and perhaps even all "religions" if such a thing can be defined at all); but it is not a good book, and it rather unnecessarily drew down upon itself a great deal of ire and opposition from Christians who were thereby handed an over-easy excuse for refusing to see what was valuable in Freud. (Having recently re-read Future of an Illusion, I must say, with all due respect to the great master, how much Terry Eagleton's opening line, reviewing Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, also applies to this book: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.")

But one badly considered book (especially in so vast a Freudian, to say nothing of wider psychoanalytic, canon) must not be allowed to detract us from seeing what remains valuable in psychoanalytic thought. Here Zaretsky's Secrets of the Soul offers us a useful list of "a set of understandings that we need to protect," including:

• the reality of the individual's inner and unconscious life, part of which is not just hidden but repressed;
• that such individuals exist not in the abstract but as "concrete, particular, and contingent";
• relations with others, especially loved ones, are shaped by that unconscious life;
• "psychologically, being a man or being a woman is the outcome of an idiosyncratic and precarious process, and that no one is simply one sex or the other" (a point I discussed at some length recently);
• an "irreducible gap" between the individual's psychic life and "the cultural, social, and political world";
• and finally that "society and politics are driven not just by conscious interests and perceived necessities but also by unconscious motivations, anxieties, and half-spoken memories, and that even great nations can suffer traumas, change course abruptly, and regress."

The Other Welsh Wizard

On a lark I picked up a copy of Brenda Maddox's Freud's Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis (De Capo, 2008), 372pp. at Hyde Brothers, a wonderful used book store here in Ft. Wayne. Neither the book nor my comments have anything to do with Eastern Christianity directly but it arises out of my ongoing interest in seeing what use psychoanalytic thought still offers us today 100 years after Freud's most popular work, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis were completed, and 90 years after his rather silly but nonetheless influential Future of an Illusion was published. That latter work was, of course, his broadside against religious belief, which is held to be nothing more then a species of wish-fulfillment and an illusory wish for a powerful father-figure to protect us from the vagaries and violence of a nature thought by Freud to be terrifyingly red in tooth and claw. I will have more to say about both in public lectures I've been asked to give later this year.

But back to Maddox's book, which was a wonderfully fun book to read and so I want to draw attention to it for those who may be interested, not merely for what it reveals about the politics of the first generation around Freud, but also for some interesting, and often amusing, potted histories of, e.g., the early Canadian medical establishment and the arrival of psychoanalysis to Toronto, and then especially of Wales. He felt that the Welsh were far more open about sex, and far less preoccupied with capitalist pursuits, than either the English or the North Americans.

Jones was Welsh, and while he lived for a time in Canada (in exile, it seems, after charges of sexual harassment began piling up in London) and England, he returned to Wales and kept a house there, and saw that Welsh history could be useful in resisting some of the imperial depredations of the English.

As non-Americans, both he and Freud shared a kind of envious disdain of the newly emerging great power, which in their correspondence they both mocked for its sexual prudery. Jones was very much someone who saw himself as spreading Freud's greatness in North America, and so he arranged the famous 1909 trip for the great man from Vienna to give a series of lectures at Clark University. After this, when safely back in Vienna, Freud did not look fondly on America for its obsession with money, its fast-pace, its food, its attitudes towards sex and drink, writing to Jones: "Yes, America is gigantic. A gigantic mistake"!