Freud - Complete Works (509 page)

   Thus the transformation of
instinct, on which our susceptibility to culture is based, may also
be permanently or temporarily undone by the impacts of life. The
influences of war are undoubtedly among the forces that can bring
about such involution; so we need not deny susceptibility to
culture to all who are at the present time behaving in an
uncivilized way, and we may anticipate that the ennoblement of
their instincts will be restored in more peaceful times.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3079

   There is, however, another
symptom in our fellow-citizens of the world which has perhaps
astonished and shocked us no less than the descent from their
ethical heights which has given us so much pain. What I have in
mind is the want of insight shown by the best intellects, their
obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments and
their uncritical credulity towards the most disputable assertions.
This indeed presents a lamentable picture, and I wish to say
emphatically that in this I am by no means a blind partisan who
finds all the intellectual shortcomings on one side. But this
phenomenon is much easier to account for and much less disquieting
than the one we have just considered. Students of human nature and
philosophers have long taught us that we are mistaken in regarding
our intelligence as an independent force and in overlooking its
dependence on emotional life. Our intellect, they teach us, can
function reliably only when it is removed from the influences of
strong emotional impulses; otherwise it behaves merely as an
instrument of the will and delivers the inference which the will
requires. Thus, in their view, logical arguments are impotent
against affective interests, and that is why disputes backed by
reasons, which in Falstaff’s phrase are ‘as plenty as
blackberries’, are so unfruitful in the world of interests.
Psycho-analytic experience has, if possible, further confirmed this
statement. It can show every day that the shrewdest people will all
of a sudden behave without insight, like imbeciles, as soon as the
necessary insight is confronted by an emotional resistance, but
that they will completely regain their understanding once that
resistance has been overcome. The logical bedazzlement which this
war has conjured up in our fellow-citizens, many of them the best
of their kind, is therefore a secondary phenomenon, a consequence
of emotional excitement, and is bound, we may hope, to disappear
with it.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3080

   Having in this way once more come
to understand our fellow citizens who are now alienated from us, we
shall much more easily endure the disappointment which the nations,
the collective individuals of mankind, have caused us, for the
demands we make upon these should be far more modest. Perhaps they
are recapitulating the course of individual development, and to-day
still represent very primitive phases in organization and in the
formation of higher unities. It is in agreement with this that the
educative factor of an external compulsion towards morality, which
we found was so effective in individuals, is as yet barely
discernible in them. We had hoped, certainly, that the extensive
community of interests established by commerce and production would
constitute the germ of such a compulsion, but it would seem that
nations still obey their passions far more readily than their
interests. Their interests serve them, at most, as
rationalizations
for their passions; they put forward their
interests in order to be able to give reasons for satisfying their
passions. It is, to be sure, a mystery why the collective
individuals should in fact despise, hate and detest one another -
every nation against every other - and even in times of peace. I
cannot tell why that is so. It is just as though when it becomes a
question of a number of people, not to say millions, all individual
moral acquisitions are obliterated, and only the most primitive,
the oldest, the crudest mental attitudes are left. It may be that
only later stages in development will be able to make some change
in this regrettable state of affairs. But a little more
truthfulness and honesty on all sides - in the relations of men to
one another and between them and their rulers - should also smooth
the way for this transformation.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3081

II

OUR
ATTITUDE TOWARDS DEATH

The second factor to which I attribute our
present sense of estrangement in this once lovely and congenial
world is the disturbance that has taken place in the attitude which
we have hitherto adopted towards death.

   That attitude was far from
straightforward. To anyone who listened to us we were of course
prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life,
that everyone owes nature a death and must expect to pay the debt -
in short, that death was natural, undeniable and unavoidable. In
reality, however, we were accustomed to behave as if it were
otherwise. We showed an unmistakable tendency to put death on one
side, to eliminate it from life. We tried to hush it up; indeed we
even have a saying [in German]: ‘to think of something as
though it were death’. That is, as though it were our own
death, of course. 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 psycho-analytic school
could venture on the assertion that at bottom no one believes in
his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way, that in
the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own
immortality.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3082

   When it comes to someone
else’s death, the civilized man will carefully avoid speaking
of such a possibility in the hearing of the person under sentence.
Children alone disregard this restriction; they unashamedly
threaten one another with the possibility of dying, and even go so
far as to do the same thing to someone whom they love, as, for
instance: ‘Dear Mummy, when you’re dead I’II do
this or that.’ The civilized adult can hardly even entertain
the thought of another person’s death without seeming to
himself hard-hearted or wicked; unless, of course, as a doctor or
lawyer or something of the kind, he has to deal with death
professionally. Least of all will he allow himself to think of the
other person’s death if some gain to himself in freedom,
property or position is bound up with it. This sensitiveness of
ours does not, of course, prevent the occurrence of deaths; when
one does happen, we are always deeply affected, and it is as though
we were badly shaken in our expectations. Our habit is to lay
stress on the fortuitous causation of the death - accident,
disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray an effort
to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event. A number of
simultaneous deaths strikes us as something extremely terrible.
Towards the actual person who has died we adopt a special attitude
- something almost like admiration for someone who has accomplished
a very difficult task. We suspend criticism of him, overlook his
possible misdeeds, declare that ‘
de mortuis nil nisi
bonum
’, and think it justifiable to set out all that is
most favourable to his memory in the funeral oration and upon the
tombstone. Consideration for the dead, who, after all, no longer
need it, is more important to us than the truth, and certainly, for
most of us, than consideration for the living.

   The complement to this cultural
and conventional attitude towards death is provided by our complete
collapse when death has struck down someone whom we love - a parent
or a partner in marriage, a brother or sister, a child or a close
friend. Our hopes, our desires and our pleasures lie in the grave
with him, we will not be consoled, we will not fill the lost
one’s place. We behave as if we were a kind of Asra, who die
when those they love die.

   But this attitude of ours towards
death has a powerful effect on our lives. Life is impoverished, it
loses in interest, where the highest stake in the game of living,
life itself, may not be risked. It becomes 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. Our 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 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 paralysed by the thought of who is to take the
son’s place with his mother, the husband’s with his
wife, the father’s with his children, if a disaster should
occur. Thus 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 live.’)

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3083

   It is an inevitable result of all
this that we should seek in the world of fiction, in literature and
in the theatre compensation for what has been lost in life. There
we still find people who know how to die - who, indeed, even manage
to kill someone else. There alone too the condition can be
fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves
with death: namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we
should still be able to preserve a life intact. For 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. In the realm of
fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with
the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive
him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another
hero.

   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; and no longer one by one, but many, often tens of thousands,
in a single day. And death is no longer a chance event. To be sure,
it still seems a matter of chance whether a bullet hits this man or
that; but a second bullet may well hit the survivor; and the
accumulation of deaths puts an end to the impression of chance.
Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its
full content.

   Here a distinction should be made
between two groups - those who themselves risk their lives in
battle, and those who have stayed at home and have only to wait for
the loss of one of their dear ones by wounds, disease or infection.
It would be most interesting, no doubt, to study the changes in the
psychology of the combatants, but I know too little about it. We
must restrict ourselves to the second group, to which we ourselves
belong. I have said already that in my opinion the bewilderment and
the paralysis of capacity, from which we suffer, are essentially
determined among other things by the circumstance that we are
unable to maintain our former attitude towards death, and have not
yet found a new one. It may assist us to do this if we direct our
psychological enquiry towards two other relations to death - the
one which we may ascribe to primaeval, prehistoric men, and the one
which still exists in every one of us, but which conceals itself,
invisible to consciousness, in the deeper strata of our mental
life.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3084

   What the attitude of prehistoric
man was towards death is, of course, only known to us by inferences
and constructions, but I believe that these methods have furnished
us with fairly trustworthy conclusions.

   Primaeval man took up a very
remarkable attitude towards death. It was far from consistent; it
was indeed most contradictory. On the one hand, he took death
seriously, recognized it as the termination of life and made use of
it in that sense; on the other hand, he also denied death and
reduced it to nothing. This contradiction arose from the fact that
he took up radically different attitudes towards the death of other
people, of strangers, of enemies, and towards his own. He had no
objection to someone else’s death; it meant the annihilation
of someone he hated, and primitive man had no scruples against
bringing it about. He was no doubt a very passionate creature and
more cruel and more malignant than other animals. He liked to kill,
and killed as a matter of course. The instinct which is said to
restrain other animals from killing and devouring their own species
need not be attributed to him.

   Hence the primaeval history of
mankind is filled with murder. Even to-day, the history of the
world which our children learn at school is essentially a series of
murders of peoples. The obscure sense of guilt to which mankind has
been subject since prehistoric times, and which in some religions
has been condensed into the doctrine of primal guilt, of original
sin, is probably the outcome of a blood-guilt incurred by
prehistoric man. In my book
Totem and Taboo
(1912-13) I
have, following clues given by Robertson Smith, Atkinson and
Charles Darwin, tried to guess the nature of this primal guilt, and
I believe, too, that the Christian doctrine of to-day enables us to
deduce it. If the Son of God was obliged to sacrifice his life to
redeem mankind from original sin, then by the law of talion, the
requital of like by like, that sin must have been a killing, a
murder. Nothing else could call for the sacrifice of a life for its
expiation. And the original sin was an offence against God the
Father, the primal crime of mankind must have been a parricide, the
killing of the primal father of the primitive human horde, whose
mnemic image was later transfigured into a deity.¹