Freud - Complete Works (510 page)

  
¹
Cf.
Totem and Taboo
, Essay
IV.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3085

   His own death was certainly just
as unimaginable and unreal for primaeval man as it is for any one
of us to-day. But there was for him one case in which the two
opposite attitudes towards death collided and came into conflict
with each other; and this case became highly important and
productive of far-reaching consequences. It occurred when primaeval
man saw someone who belonged to him die - his wife, his child, his
friend - whom he undoubtedly loved as we love ours, for love cannot
be much younger than the lust to kill. Then, in his pain, he was
forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself, and his whole being
revolted against the admission; for each of these loved ones was,
after all, a part of his own beloved ego. But, on the other hand,
deaths such as these pleased him as well, since in each of the
loved persons there was also something of the stranger. The law of
ambivalence of feeling, which to this day governs our emotional
relations with those whom we love most, certainly had a very much
wider validity in primaeval times. Thus these beloved dead had also
been enemies and strangers who had aroused in him some degree of
hostile feeling.¹

   Philosophers have declared that
the intellectual enigma presented to primaeval man by the picture
of death forced him to reflection, and thus became the
starting-point of all speculation. I believe that here the
philosophers are thinking too philosophically, and giving too
little consideration to the motives that were primarily operative.
I should like therefore to limit and correct their assertion. In my
view, primaeval man must have triumphed beside the body of his
slain enemy, without being led to rack his brains about the enigma
of life and death. What released the spirit of enquiry in man was
not the intellectual enigma, and not every death, but the conflict
of feeling at the death of loved yet alien and hated persons. Of
this conflict of feeling psychology was the first offspring. Man
could no longer keep death at a distance, for he had tasted it in
his pain about the dead; but he was nevertheless unwilling to
acknowledge it, for he could not conceive of himself as dead. So he
devised a compromise: he conceded the fact of his own death as
well, but denied it the significance of annihilation - a
significance which he had had no motive for denying where the death
of his enemy was concerned. It was beside the dead body of someone
he loved that he invented spirits, and his sense of guilt at the
satisfaction mingled with his sorrow turned these new-born spirits
into evil demons that had to be dreaded. The changes brought about
by death suggested to him the division of the individual into a
body and a soul - originally several souls. In this way his train
of thought ran parallel with the process of disintegration which
sets in with death. His persisting memory of the dead became the
basis for assuming other forms of existence and gave him the
conception of a life continuing after apparent death.

  
¹
Ibid., Essay II.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3086

   These subsequent existences were
at first no more than appendages to the existence which death had
brought to a close - shadowy, empty of content, and valued at
little until later times; they still bore the character of wretched
makeshifts. We may recall the answer made to Odysseus by the soul
of Achilles:

  
‘For of old, when thou wast alive, we Argives honoured thee
even as the gods, and now that thou art here, thou rulest mightily
over the dead. Wherefore grieve not at all that thou art dead,
Achilles.’

   So
I spoke, and he straightway made answer and said: ‘Nay, seek
not to speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I should
choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling off
another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small,
rather than to be lord over all the dead that have
perished.’¹

Or in Heine’s powerful and bitter
parody:

                                               
Der kleinste lebendige Philister

                                               
Zu Stuckert am Neckar

                                               
Viel glücklicher ist er

                                               
Als ich, der Pelide, der tote Held,

                                               
Der Schattenfürst in der Unterwelt.
²

  
¹
Odyssey
, XI, 484-91.

  
²
[Literally: ‘The smallest living
Philistine at Stuckert-am-Neckar is far happier than I, the son of
Peleus, the dead hero, the shadow-prince in the
underworld.’]

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   It was only later that religions
succeeded in representing this after-life as the more desirable,
the truly valid one, and in reducing the life which is ended by
death to a mere preparation. After this, it was no more than
consistent to extend life backwards into the past, to form the
notion of earlier existences, of the transmigration of souls and of
reincarnation, all with the purpose of depriving death of its
meaning as the termination of life. So early did the denial of
death, which we have described as a ‘conventional and
cultural attitude’, have its origin.

   What came into existence beside
the dead body of the loved one was not only the doctrine of the
soul, the belief in immortality and a powerful source of
man’s sense of guilt, but also the earliest ethical
commandments. The first and most important prohibition made by the
awakening conscience was: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It was
acquired in relation to dead people who were loved, as a reaction
against the satisfaction of the hatred hidden behind the grief for
them; and it was gradually extended to strangers who were not
loved, and finally even to enemies.

   This final extension of the
commandment is no longer experienced by civilized man. When the
furious struggle of the present war has been decided, each one of
the victorious fighters will return home joyfully to his wife and
children, unchecked and undisturbed by thoughts of the enemies he
has killed whether at close quarters or at long range. It is worthy
of note that the primitive races which still survive in the world,
and are undoubtedly closer than we are to primaeval man, act
differently in this respect, or did until they came under the
influence of our civilization. Savages - Australians, Bushmen,
Tierra del Fuegans - are far from being remorseless murderers; when
they return victorious from the war-path they may not set foot in
their villages or touch their wives till they have atoned for the
murders they committed in war by penances which are often long and
tedious. It is easy, of course, to attribute this to their
superstition: the savage still goes in fear of the avenging spirits
of the slain. But the spirits of his slain enemy are nothing but
the expression of his bad conscience about his blood-guilt; behind
this superstition there lies concealed a vein of ethical
sensitiveness which has been lost by us civilized men.¹

  
¹
Cf.
Totem and Taboo
(1912-13).

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3088

   Pious souls, no doubt, who would
like to believe that our nature is remote from any contact with
what is evil and base, will not fail to use the early appearance
and the urgency of the prohibition against murder as the basis for
gratifying conclusions as to the strength of the ethical impulses
which must have been implanted in us. Unfortunately this argument
proves even more for the opposite view. So powerful a prohibition
can only be directed against an equally powerful impulse. What no
human soul desires stands in no need of prohibition;¹ it is
excluded automatically. The very emphasis laid on the commandment
‘Thou shalt not kill’ makes it certain that we spring
from an endless series of generations of murderers, who had the
lust for killing in their blood, as, perhaps, we ourselves have
to-day. Mankind’s ethical strivings, whose strength and
significance we need not in the least depreciate, were acquired in
the course of man’s history; since then they have become,
though unfortunately only in a very variable amount, the inherited
property of contemporary men.

   Let us now leave primaeval man,
and turn to the unconscious in our own mental life. Here we depend
entirely upon the psycho-analytic method of investigation, the only
one which reaches to such depths. What, we ask, is the attitude of
our unconscious towards the problem of death? The answer must be:
almost exactly the same as that of primaeval man. In this respect,
as in many others, the man of prehistoric times survives unchanged
in our unconscious. Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its
own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. What we call our
‘unconscious’ - the deepest strata of our minds, made
up of instinctual impulses - knows nothing that is negative, and no
negation; in it contradictories coincide. For that reason it does
not know its own death, for to that we can give only a negative
content. Thus there is nothing instinctual in us which responds to
a belief in death. This may even be the secret of heroism. The
rational grounds for heroism rest on a judgement that the
subject’s own life cannot be so precious as certain abstract
and general goods. But more frequent, in my view, is the
instinctive and impulsive heroism which knows no such reasons, and
flouts danger in the spirit of Anzengruber’s
Steinklopferhans
: ‘Nothing can happen to
me
’. Or else those reasons only serve to clear away
the hesitations which might hold back the heroic reaction that
corresponds to the unconscious. The fear of death, which dominates
us oftener than we know, is on the other hand something secondary,
and is usually the outcome of a sense of guilt.

  
¹
Cf. Frazer’s brilliant argument
quoted in
Totem and Taboo
.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3089

   On the other hand, for strangers
and for enemies we do acknowledge death, and consign them to it
quite as readily and unhesitatingly as did primaeval man. There is,
it is true, a distinction here which will be pronounced decisive so
far as real life is concerned. Our unconscious does not carry out
the killing; it merely thinks it and wishes it. But it would be
wrong so completely to undervalue this psychical reality as
compared with factual reality. It is significant and momentous
enough. In our unconscious impulses we daily and hourly get rid of
anyone who stands in our way, of anyone who has offended or injured
us. The expression ‘Devil take him!’, which so often
comes to people’s lips in joking anger and which really means
‘Death take him!’, is in our unconscious a serious and
powerful death-wish. Indeed, our unconscious will murder even for
trifles; like the ancient Athenian code of Draco, it knows no other
punishment for crime than death. And this has a certain
consistency, for every injury to our almighty and autocratic ego is
at bottom a crime of
lèse-majesté
.

   And so, if we are to be judged by
our unconscious wishful impulses, we ourselves are, like primaeval
man, a gang of murderers. It is fortunate that all these wishes do
not possess the potency that was attributed to them in primaeval
times;¹ in the cross-fire of mutual curses mankind would long
since have perished, the best and wisest of men and the loveliest
and fairest of women with the rest.

  
¹
See
Totem and Taboo
, Essay
IV.

Thoughts For The Times On War And Death

3090

   Psycho-analysis finds as a rule
no credence among laymen for assertions such as these. They reject
them as calumnies which are confuted by conscious experience, and
they adroitly overlook the faint indications by which even the
unconscious is apt to betray itself to consciousness. It is
therefore relevant to point out that many thinkers who could not
have been influenced by psycho-analysis have quite definitely
accused our unspoken thoughts of being ready, heedless of the
prohibition against murder, to get rid of anything which stands in
our way. From many examples of this I will choose one that has
become famous:

   In
Le Père Goriot
,
Balzac alludes to a passage in the works of J. J. Rousseau where
that author asks the reader what he would do if - without leaving
Paris and of course without being discovered - he could kill, with
great profit to himself, an old mandarin in Peking by a mere act of
will. Rousseau implies that he would not give much for the life of
that dignitary. ‘
Tuer son mandarin
’ has become a
proverbial phrase for this secret readiness, present even in modern
man.

   There are also a whole number of
cynical jokes and anecdotes which reveal the same tendency - such,
for instance, as the words attributed to a husband: ‘If one
of us two dies, I shall move to Paris.’ Such cynical jokes
would not be possible unless they contained an unacknowledged truth
which could not be admitted if it were expressed seriously and
without disguise. In jest - it is well known - one may even tell
the truth.