The Death Instinct

'Perhaps we'll be all right,' he resumed.

'Please, Dr Freud,' said Colette. 'Can you explain what's the matter with my brother?'

'I'll tell you what I know, Fraulein, but the concepts will be new to you and strange. Brandy?' Taking his time, Freud refilled his own and Younger's glasses.

'Well, where to begin?' said Freud. He was seated again, his legs crossed, in one hand a cigar, in the other his brandy. 'Twenty-five years ago, I discovered a path to unseen provinces of our mental life, which I may have been the first mortal ever to enter. There I found a hell of inexpressible fears and longings, for which men and women might have burned in earlier eras. A man cannot expect such insight more than once in a lifetime. But last year, I made a new discovery that, in my more vainglorious moments, I think might even surpass the first. No one will believe it, but that will be nothing new. It came to me from studying the war neuroses — indeed in part from studying your brother, Miss Rousseau. Not that your brother has a neurosis, strictly speaking, but his condition is similar. I want to be clear about one thing: he requires treatment. Wherever you go next, you should not simply leave him as he is. His case is straightforward enough. I could cure him myself, I expect, in — I don't know — eight weeks.'

'Cure him?' repeated Colette. 'Completely?'

'I should think so.'

Colette didn't know how to respond.

'You sent us to Jauregg,' said Younger. 'Why?'

'Many choose to treat their psychological disorders mechanistically. Miss Rousseau has to decide if she really wants her brother analyzed. I'm not sure she does. Twice now, she has brought her brother to Vienna but refused to commit herself to the time an analysis would require. And perhaps she's right: after all, it may not be pleasant for her.'

'For me?' asked Colette. 'Why?'

'I told you last year,' said Freud. 'The truths that psychoanalysis unearths are never irrelevant to other family members. Fraulein, you know what it is to yearn for revenge. Your brother is taking revenge too — by not speaking.'

'On whom?' asked Colette.

'Perhaps on you.'

'Whatever for?'

'You can't tell us?' asked Freud.

'I can't imagine what you're talking about,' answered Colette.

'It's just speculation, my dear. I don't know the answer.'

'But you said you knew what was wrong with him,' said Colette.

'I do. I understood it last summer, two months after you left. It was child's play, as a matter of fact. Younger, what is the boy's most revealing symptom?'

'I have no idea,' said Younger.

'Come — I just gave it away.'

Younger chafed at Freud's habit of luring him with analytic conundrums, particularly under the present circumstances, but all the same, the lure took. Child's play? 'His game,' said Younger. 'Something to do with his fishing reel game.'

'Exactly,' said Freud. 'Miss Rousseau told me that her grandmother played a German hide-and-seek game with her brother when he was little. He is saying fort and da when he unspools and rewinds his reel — gone and there. What does it mean?'

Younger thought about it: 'When did he start?'

'In 1914,' said Freud.

'He's reliving the death of his parents,' said Younger.

'Obviously. Over and over. But why?'

'To undo the feeling of loss?'

'No. He isn't undoing anything. He's making himself experience the single worst moment of his life again and again.'

Cigar smoke had filled the candlelit room with its heavy, heady odor.

'It's the key to the riddle,' said Freud. 'All the war neurotics repeat. They have a kind of compulsion — a repetition compulsion — a need to reenact or reexperience the trauma that has given rise to their condition. And they're all repeating the same thing: death, or the moment when they came closest to it. Normally, we have defenses — fortifications, physiological and psychological — that keep our mortality away from us, out of our consciousness. If these fortifications are breached, if in a moment of unexpected trauma, mortality punctures these defenses, its terror rushes in and starts a kind of mental conflagration — a fire very difficult to extinguish — but a fire to which a man wants to return again and again. The shell-shocked man will relive his trauma when asleep; or in broad daylight, he will conjure a bomb going off in the noise of a door slamming; he may even reenact the episode through bodily symptoms.'

'Why?' asked Younger. 'To discharge the fear?'

'For a long time I tried to understand it that way,' replied Freud. 'Discharging fear would be pleasurable. At least it would lessen displeasure. Every psychological phenomenon, I thought, was motivated at bottom by the drive to increase pleasure or lessen displeasure. But I was trying to fit facts to theory, when I should have been fitting theory to facts. I had just begun to understand it when you were last here. The war taught me something I should have seen ages ago: we have a drive beyond the pleasure principle. Another instinct, as fundamental as hunger, as irresistible as love.'

'What instinct?' asked Colette.

'A death instinct. More tea, Miss Rousseau?'

'No, thank you.'

'You mean a desire to kill?' asked Younger.

'That's one side of it,' said Freud. 'But fundamentally it's a longing for death. For destruction. Not only someone else's; also our own.'

'You think people want to die?' asked Colette.

'I do,' said Freud. 'It's built into our cells, our very atoms. There are two elemental forces in the universe. One draws matter toward matter. That is how life comes into being and how it propagates. In physics, this force is called gravity; in psychology, love. The other force tears matter apart. It is the force of disunification, disintegration, destruction. If I'm correct, every planet, every star in the universe is not only drawn toward the others by gravity, but also pushed away from them by a force of repulsion we can't see. Within an organism, this force is what drives the animal to seek death, as moths seek a flame.'

'But you can cure it — this death instinct?' asked Colette.

'One cannot cure an instinct, Miss Rousseau,' said Freud. 'One cannot eliminate it. One can, however, make it more conscious and in this way relieve its pathological effects. When an instinct creates in us an impulse that we don't act on, the impulse does not go away. It may subsist unaffected. It may intensify. It may be turned to other objects, for better or worse. Or it may produce pathological symptoms. Such symptoms can be cured.'

'I wouldn't have thought,' said Younger, 'that Luc's muteness aimed at death.'

'No, his muteness has another function. That would be the point of analyzing him — to uncover that function. It's undoubtedly connected to his parents' death, but there's something more too. Possibly their death reminded him of a scene he had witnessed even earlier. Did your father mistreat you, Miss Rousseau?'

'Mistreat me? In what way?'

'In any way.'

'Not at all,' said Colette.

'No? Did he favor you?'

'Luc was his favorite,' said Colette. 'I was a girl.'

Freud nodded. 'Well, it's a pity you can't remain in Vienna, but I don't see how it's possible. Vienna is a much smaller city than New York. You'll be noticed here. The police will have everyone watching; someone will report you.'

'May I ask you a question, Dr Freud?' asked Colette.

'Of course.'

'These two forces you describe,' she said. 'They're good and evil, aren't they? The instinct for love is good, and the instinct for death is evil.'

Freud smiled: 'In science, my dear, there is no such thing as good or evil. The death instinct is part of our biology. You're familiar with chromatolysis — the natural process by which cells die? Every one of our cells brings about its own destruction at its allotted time. That's the death instinct in operation. Now if a cell fails to die, what happens? It keeps dividing, reproducing, endlessly, unnaturally. It becomes a cancer. That's what cancer is, after all — cells afflicted with the loss of their will to die. The death instinct is not evil, Miss Rousseau. In its proper place it's every bit as essential to our well-being as its opposite.'