The Denial of Death (18 page)

But this attack was in Freud’s eyes and not necessarily in Jung’s. That he talked on about the peat-bog corpses at the time of the first fainting could well reflect existential anxieties, pure and simple. Jung was fascinated by the idea of death. We can well imagine the younger Jung, also anxious about the voyage to America, lingering on the problem of bodies in the presence of a man he looked up to because he wanted to broach something that fascinated him to a thinker who might ruminate with him, perhaps add his own insight into the mystery of bodies, death, and destiny. On the other hand,
Erich Fromm ( who is hardly a fan of Jung’s ) has diagnosed him as a necrophilous character. On the basis of one of Jung’s dreams at the time of his break with Freud, Fromm believes that Jung did have unconscious death-wishes toward Freud.
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Yet all this speculation is beside the point, because we are talking about Freud’s own perceptions and problems. From this point of view the significant thing about the occasion of the first fainting is that the talk of mummies came up because of Jung’s confusion about the corpses. Freud’s anxieties on
both
occasions are thereby tied to the same subjects of Egypt and the effacing of the father. Also, it is important to note that on this historic voyage Jung had been invited for his own work and not necessarily because of his connection with Freud; he was literally and openly a competitor.

The Interpretations of Jones and Freud

We get even further “inside” the problem of Freud’s perceptions when we look at his own attempts to understand what had happened to him. Jones tells a somewhat different story of the occasion of the first fainting than did Jung. Jones says that what characterized the 1909 meeting was that Freud, after some argument, persuaded Jung to drink wine during the luncheon party and so broke Jung’s fanatical abstinence. It was “just after that” that Freud fell down in a faint.
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At the later 1912 meeting, a similar thing happened. There had been some strain between Jung and Freud, and after a “go
od fatherly lecture” Jung became “extremely contrite, accepted all the criticisms” of Freud, and “promised to reform.” Freud was in very high spirits, having won Jung round again. Jones concludes that what characterized both meetings was that Freud had won a victory over Jung.
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What relationship does victory have to fainting? Only with the genius of Freud’s own theory can such a relationship be meaningfully explained. As we saw in Chapter Four, it was Freud who discovered the idea of being “wrecked by success”: that when a person achieves the truly superlative, it is often felt as an intolerable burden because it means that he has won out in competition with the father, having excelled him. No wonder, then, that when Freud himself later analyzed the fainting attacks, he could lean on his own discovery with a probing and ruthless honesty. He explained that as a
child he had often wished the death of his baby brother Julius, and when Julius did die when Freud was a year and seven months old, it left Freud with a terrible sense of guilt. Jones comments:

It would therefore seem that Freud was himself a mild case of the type he described as “those who are wrecked by success,” in this case the success of defeating an opponent [Jung]—the earliest example of which was his successful death-wish against his little brother Julius. One thinks in this connection of the curious attack of obfuscation Freud suffered on the Acropolis in 1904, one which, when he was eighty-one years old, he analyzed and traced to his having gratified the forbidden wish to excel his father. In fact Freud himself mentioned the resemblance between that experience and
the type of reaction we are considering.
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In other words, all victories over a rival, including his own father, reawaken the guilt of victory and trigger the reaction of being unable to bear it. We have to understand what “victory” means in Freud’s cosmology in order to get the impact of the anxiety and understand why one would faint. It is explained by the dynamics of the classic Oedipus complex. The victory “prize” is of course the mother whom the boy covets, and to win out against the father means to do away with him. If the child loses, the vengeance will be terrible; and if he wins, the guilt is naturally overwhelming.

Now the classic Oedipus complex does undoubtedly explain some cases of fear of victory; but Freud himself later abandoned the strictly sexual dynamics of the problem, at least in his own case. He frankly admitted toward the end of his life that his reluctance to surpass his father was based on a feeling of “piety” for him.
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This was the meaning of the attack on the Acropolis that Jones mentions. Today, as some writers are arguing, we would guess that the word “piety” might be a euphemism for other feelings that Freud had toward his father: that he was really troubled by the weakn
ess of his father, which cast a shadow on his own strength, and that for that reason he felt exposed and anxious when he thought about his own success.

We are thus already on a broader and more existential ground in explaining the overwhelmingness of victory. Already two generations of students have raised their eyebrows over how a 19-month-old Freud could be so acutely analytic about his experience that he could reproach himself that his jealousy and evil wishes resulted in his brother Julius’s death. Even Freud himself discounted this level of awareness in his own theoretical work: he said that it was almost impossible for a child that young to be jealous of a newcomer. Jones, who recorded all this, evidently cannot make sense out of it.
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Jones says that Freud’s own “wrecked-by-success” analysis of his fainting is confirmed by the fact that on the occasion of each fainting there was an argumentative discussion on the topic of death-wishes. This is perfectly true, but not in the precise way that Freud wanted to show it, as tied to the strength of victory. Very likely Freud is making a mistake that he often makes, of trying to peg down too precisely what is actually part of a complex symbol and a much larger problem. I mean of course the sen
se of the overwhelmingness of experience, of being carried too far off one’s home base, of not having the power to support the superlative. That sense is what characterizes both fainting incidents, in addition to the specific presence of Jung. It is reasonable to broaden the burden placed on Freud beyond that of a reaction to Jung alone. After all, he supported on his shoulders one of the great iconoclastic movements of human thought, against all competition, all hostility, all denigration, all the other more “spiritual” (“occult”) meanings that mankind held so sacred, all the other minds who thought
such sublime thoughts, insisted on such widely-held truths, enjoyed so much support and acclaim throughout the ages. His organism in its deepest layers is well entitled to feel impossibly burdened by such a weight and to sink beneath it in pleasureful oblivion. Would we dare to imagine that one can support all this superordinacy easily, without superhuman powers on which to lean? How to take a stance toward all this impersonal and historical, as well as personal, concrete, and physical transcendence: the pyramids, the peat-bog corpses, one’s own new religion? It is as though one’s whole or
ganism were to declare: “I can’t bear it, I haven’t the strength to stand up to it.” Admittedly, the strong and large figure of Jung, an original thinker, standing independently and even arguing and opposing Freud, adds to all this; but Jung’s concrete presence is only one aspect of a general power problem. In this sense, even to finally win out against Jung was for Freud to put the whole weight of the psychoanalytic movement squarely on his own shoulders. We can see how apt the “wrecked-by-success” insight is, though not according to the specific dynamics that Freud had in mind.

The Emotional Ambivalence of
Causa Sui

The crux of our whole discussion is contained in one confession of Freud’s to Karl Abraham: that helplessness was one of the two things that he always hated most.
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(The other was poverty—because it means helplessness.) Freud hated helplessness and fought against it, and the emotional feeling of utter helplessness in the face of experience was too much for him to stand. It gave full pla
y to the underside of dependency that he tried to control. This kind of continued self-shaping by a man thrust into Freud’s leadership position must have consumed enormous amounts of energy. No wonder that, as Freud was coming to after his second fainting, he was heard to say: “How sweet it must be to die.”
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And there is no reason to doubt Jung’s report of the occasion, which is all of a piece:

As I was carrying him, he half came to, and I shall never forget the look he cast at me as if I were his father.
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How sweet it must be to let go of the colossal burden of a self-dominating, self-forming life, to relax one’s grip on one’s own center, and to yield passively to a superordinate power and authority—and what joy in such yielding: the comfort, the trust, the relief in one’s chest and shoulders, the lightness in one’s heart, the sense of being sustained by something larger, less fallible. With his own distinctive problems, man is the only animal who can often willingly embrace the deep sleep of death, even while knowing that it means oblivion.

But there is the ambivalence that Freud—like all of us—was caught in. To melt oneself trustingly into the father, or the father-substitute, or even the Great Father in the sky, is to abandon the
causa-sui
project, the attempt to be father of oneself. And if you abandon that you are diminished, your destiny is no longer your own; you are the eternal child making your way in the world of the elders. And what kind of world is that, if you are trying to bring into it something of your own, something distinctively new, world-historical, and revolutionary? That is why Freud had to
fight against yielding—he risked effacing his whole identity. He was spinning his own web; how could he suspend himself in someone else’s? It was Rank more than anyone who understood the problem of mere mortals who are saddled with the works of genius: Where are they to get the support for their own daring and overshadowing creations? We will see Rank’s views in the next chapter; here it is already obvious that Freud chose to pursue his
causa-sui
project by using his own work and his own organization—the psychoanalytic movement—as a mirror
to reflect power back upon himself
. We said earlier that the
causa-sui
project is a lie tha
t must take its toll; now we can understand that this toll is an emotional one that must always carry both the temptation to admit helpless dependence and the fight against that admission. One lives with a certain amount of tight-lipped determination.
^‡

There is further support for this view in Freud’s fifteen-year relationship with Fliess. Brome is of the opinion that this relationship was an emotional one more powerful than any previous biographer has acknowledged; and he cites Freud’s own admissions of his very profound and “obscure” feelings in relation to Fliess. It is more than a coincidence, then, that years earlier Freud had suffered symptoms in relationship to Fliess similar to those he suffered toward Jung—and in the very same room of the same hotel as at the 1912 meeting. At that earlier time the symptoms were not
so intense, and they were directed not toward a strong opposing figure but toward an ailing Fliess. When Freud analyzed this he said that “there is some piece of unruly homosexual feeling at the root of the matter.” Jones reports that Freud several times remarked on the “feminine side of his nature.”
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Even though Freud’s self-analytic honesty was unusual, we still have to be skeptical about it. It is possible for any man to have specific homosexual urges, and Freud need be no exception. Still, knowing Freud’s lifelong tendency to reduce vaguely anxious feelings to specific sexual motivations, we are entitled to assume that his “unruly” urges could just as well have represented the ambivalence of dependency needs. Jones himself has honestly averaged the problem of homosexuality into his appraisal of Freud’s character, and I think gave it its proper weight. Jones says that this
was part of the underside of dependency in Freud, a dependency that led him astray in some ways, for example, in his tendency to overestimate certain people—Breuer, especially Fliess, and also Jung. Jones goes so far as to say that this side of Freud stemmed from “some impairment of self-confidence.”
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Certainly Freud loat
hed this side of his nature and welcomed the self-dependence he earned when a part of his “homosexual” dependency was revealed for the weakness that it was. He wrote to Ferenczi on October 6, 1910, that he had overcome the passivity he experienced toward Fliess and that he no longer had any need to uncover his personality completely:

Since Fliess’s case … that need has been extinguished. A part of homosexual cathexis has been withdrawn and made use of to enlarge my ego.
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The ego is the thing; it alone gives self-governance, the ability to have a certain freedom of action and choice, to shape one’s own destiny as much as possible. Today we generally see homosexuality as a broad problem of ineptness, vague identity, passivity, helplessness—all in all, an inability to take a powerful stance toward life. In this sense, Jones would be right to talk about an impairment of self-confidence in Freud, as he showed it both toward the strong figure of Jung and the ailing one of Fliess. In both cases it is one’s own strength that is threatened with an added burden.

On the other hand, our modern understanding of homosexuality goes to an even deeper level of the problem—to the level of immortality and heroism that we have already discussed in relation to Freud and to genius in general. Rank wrote about this subject brilliantly. We will want to talk about his work in Chapter Ten, but we need to linger on it here in specific relation to Freud. We said that the truly gifted and free spirit attempts to bypass the family as the instrument of distinctive procreation. It is only logical, then, that if the genius is going to follow to the letter the
causa-sui
project, he comes up against one large temptation: to bypass the woman and the species role of his own body. It is as though he reasons: “I do not exist to be used as an instrument of physical procreation in the interests of the race; my individuality is so total and integral that I include my body in my
causa-sui
project.” And so, the genius can try to procreate himself spiritually through a linkage with gifted young men, to create them in his own image, and to pass the spirit of his genius on to them. It is as though he were to try to duplicate himself exactly, spirit and body. After all, anyth
ing that detracts from the free flight of one’s spiritual
talent must seem debasing. The woman is already a threat to the man in his physicalness; it is only a small step to bypass sexual intercourse with her; in that way one keep’s one’s carefully girded center from dispersing and being undermined by ambiguous meanings. Most men are content to keep their meanings firmly in hand by refraining from extramarital infidelity; but one can narcissistically harbor his meanings even more by refraining from “heterosexual infidelity,” so to speak.