Because the night needs our love
a small curation for the 85th anniversary of Freud's death
"...he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also
because it needs our love. (Auden, In Memory of Sigmund Freud, 1940)
The 85th anniversary of Freud’s death comes during a time of war.
So much of Freud’s work emerged during war, in the aftermath of war, between two world wars, and in the longer, painful legacies of conflict. War was, at times, an urgent personal threat; at others, it was an intellectual danger to be faced and understood. By 1915, early in the First World War, the question was an immediate one, an individual and collective event, and a challenge to our attitudes towards violence, death, murder, culpability, self, other, and nation.
“It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that, at bottom, no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing another way, that, in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”
“It is evident that the war is bound to sweep away our conventional treatment of death. Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in him. People really are dying, and now not one by one, but many at a time, often ten thousand in a single day. Nor is it any longer an accident.”
“We live in the hope that the impartial decision of history will furnish the proof that precisely this nation, this in whose tongue we now write, this for whose victory our dear ones are fighting, was the one which least transgressed the laws of civilization - but at such a time who shall dare present himself as the judge of his own cause?”
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (Freud, 1915)
“In 1920, Freud’s favorite daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, died during the fourth wave of the so-called ‘Spanish’ flu, which had ravaged Europe for several years and which also played its part in determining the outcome of the First World War. Before it struck, the Axis powers were confident of victory. Freud therefore found himself in the midst of the two experiences, plague and war, for which Camus believed no one is ever prepared… In his letter to Pfister after Sophie died, [Freud] described her as being ‘snatched away… as if she had never been’.” (this account is taken from Jacqueline Rose, The Plague, 2023)
Freud later rejected suggestions that Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the hugely important work in which he introduced the idea of a ‘death drive’ was in any way linked to Sophie’s death, pointing out that “it was half-finished when Sophie was alive and flourishing.” (Freud, letter to Max Eitingon, July 1920, cited by Rose, The Plague)
Rose, however, believes that Freud was evasive about this question. She cites later research into the history of the text itself:
“An entirely new sixth chapter, the longest by far, was added to a later draft, making up almost a third of the published text. The new chapter contained the first appearance in print of the term ‘death drive’. Its only earlier appearance was in two letters to Eitingon of February 1920, just weeks after Sophie’s death. I think it would, therefore, be fair to say that Freud owes the genesis of this unprecedented concept to her.”
If we may love this leap taken by Rose who is, herself, writing in a time of pandemic and war, then this is because it deepens the gift Freud gave us with his wonderful essay.
“Who does death belong to? If this has become a question during today’s pandemic it is because the lack of state provision, the missing medical supplies… and isolation from human touch have made it feel to many for the first time that death is something of which a person - the one dying, and those closest to her or him - can be robbed. Freud and his wife could not reach their sick daughter because there was no transport, not even the trains getting children out of a starving country in the aftermath of war. They could not be with her when she died. This may help us to understand these remarkable lines from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, from what we now know to be its new sixth chapter: ‘If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime necessity, than to a chance that might perhaps have been escaped.’” (Rose, The Plague)
Rose next reminds us that Freud precedes this astonishing sixth chapter with a discussion of the ‘repetition compulsion’ which he had “first identified in soldiers returning from battle who found themselves reliving their worst experiences in night-time and waking dreams. Slowly tracing this tendency from the front to the consulting room (patients wedded to their symptoms), Freud concludes that such a compulsion is a property of all living matter. The urge of all organic life is to restore an earlier state of things.” (Rose)
Allowing for the highly speculative approach he is taking, Freud proposes that the “drives of self-preservation” can now be read as also serving the “organism’s need to follow the path to its own death.” (Rose):
“The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion… The aim of all life is death.” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle)
What Rose finds in her reading of this text is an act of parental love (a response to Sophie’s untimely death) in which Freud longs to restore something that pandemic and war take from us: “the belief that life should move along its path to its own end.” (Rose) Yet Freud’s essay is also a fearless look at the fact that so many, like Sophie, are denied such a path:
“He was warding off her destiny, naming it for the outrage it was… Freud is offering a philosophy of grief. He helps us understand why what is happening among us can feel as much an internal as an external catastrophe. Death in a pandemic [or war] is no way to die.” (Rose)
“This is what war does to theory,” remarks Rose elsewhere in her reading of Freud’s text, a discussion that ranges over far more material than is possible here, including the ambivalence of grief and Freud’s related insights, as well as our individual and collective tendencies to focus on threats and dangers that come from ‘outside’ while resisting our internal dangers/processes, our ‘inside’.1
Freud died in 1939, so he did not live to know that three of his five sisters were murdered in the gas chambers at Treblinka, while a fourth sister perished in the Theresienstadt ghetto. The First World War and the pandemic formed the immediate backdrop to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but the text - as Freud’s own story would tell, and as Rose found during Covid and war - would continue to shine its light into our dark human corners and our efforts to do, and be better.
Because the night needs our love.
See Jacqueline Rose, The Plague, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023. Her talk (given at the Freud Museum London in 2020) To Die One’s Own Death - Thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic can be found here.
In addition, the Freud Museum exhibition, 1920/2020: Freud and Pandemic is available online. The exhibition includes a more detailed history of Freud’s personal responses to the loss of Sophie, alongside a clear summary of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. All of this material is brought into dialogue with our contemporary experience of the Covid pandemic in this excellent curation.
The two photographs in this piece appear courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Further information and credits can be found here: Sigmund Freud, 1935 and Freud family, 1898.
