The Denial of Death (17 page)

It becomes also clear that Freud fought deliberately against certain spiritual trends within himself… . [He] seems to have been in a state of searching and painful conflict in which the positivist scholar (conscious) and the potential believer (unconscious) fought an open battle.
²⁸

Zilboorg then makes the following conclusion about these spiritual trends, a conclusion that supports our view that Freud was toying ambivalently with yielding to transcendent powers, being very tempted in that direction:

These trends tried to assert themselves by way of the well-known mechanism of distortion and secondary elaboration, described by Freud as characteristic of the unconscious and dreams. The trend took the form of anxious little superstitions, of involuntary and unreasonable beliefs in what the common jargon calls spiritualism.
²⁹

In other words, Freud gave as much vent to his spiritual trends as his character allowed him to, without his having to remake the basic foundations of that character. The most he could do was to give way to common superstitions. I think this conclusion is beyond dispute on the basis of Jones’s reports alone; but we also have Freud’s telling personal admission that “my own superstition has its roots in suppressed ambition (immortality)… .”
³⁰
That is, it has its roots in the strictly spiritual problem of transcending death, a problem that for Freud was characteristically one of
ambition,
of striving, and not of trust or yielding.

The very next logical and vital question is this: what makes the matter of yielding an ambivalent one, so difficult for Freud? The same reason that makes it so for everyman. To
yield
is to disperse one’s shored-up center, let down one’s guard, one’s character armor, admit one’s lack of
self-sufficiency
. And this shored-up center, this guard, this armor, this supposed self-sufficiency are the very things that the entire project of coming-of-age from childhood to manhood is all about. Here we have to recall our discussion in Chapter Three where we saw that the basic task that the person cuts
out for himself is the attempt to father himself—what Brown so well calls the “Oedipal project.” The
causa-sui
passion is an energetic fantasy that covers over the rumbling of man’s fundamental creatureliness, or what we can now more pointedly call his
hopeless lack of genuine centering on his own energies to assure the victory of his life
. No creature can assure this, and man can only attempt to do so in his
fantasy
. The ambivalence of the
causa-sui
project is based on the ever-present threat of reality that peeks through. One suspects at all times that one is fundamentally helpless and impote
nt, but one must protest against it. The fathers and mothers always cast their shadow. What, then, is the problem of yielding? It represents nothing less than the abandonment of the
causa-sui
project, the deepest, completest, total emotional admission that there is no strength within oneself, no power to bear the superfluity of experience. To yield is to admit that support has to come from outside oneself and that justification for one’s life has to come
totally
from some self-transcending web in which one consents to be suspended—as a child in its hammock-cradle, glaze-eyed in h
elpless, dependent admiration of the cooing mother.

If the
causa-sui
project is a lie that is too hard to admit because it plunges one back to the cradle, it is a lie that must take its toll as one tries to avoid reality. This brings us to the very heart of our discussion of Freud’s character. Now we can talk pointedly about his engineering of his
causa-sui
project, and we can connect it with his absolute denial of threatening reality. I am referring, of course, to the two occasions on which Freud fainted. Fainting represents, as we know, the most massive denial, the refusal or inability to remain conscious in the face of a threat. The two occas
ions on which a great man loses complete control of himself mus
t contain some vital intelligence about the very heart of his life-problem. Fortunately we have Jung’s first-hand reports of both incidents, and I would like to quote him in full.

The first fainting took place in Bremen in 1909, while Freud and Jung were on their way to the United States to lecture about their work. Jung says that this incident was provoked—indirectly—by his interest in the “peat-bog corpses”:

I knew that in certain districts of Northern Germany these so-called bog corpses were to be found. They are the bodies of prehistoric men who either drowned in the marshes or were buried there. The bog water in which the bodies lie contains humic acid, which consumes the bones and simultaneously tans the skin, so that it and the hair are perfectly preserved… .

Having read about these peat-bog corpses, I recalled them when we were in Bremen, but, being a bit muddled, confused them with the mummies in the lead cellars of the city. This interest of mine got on Freud’s nerves. “Why are you so concerned with these corpses?” he asked me several times. He was inordinately vexed by the whole thing and during one such conversation, while we were having dinner together, he suddenly fainted. Afterward he said to me that he was convinced that all this chatter about corpses meant that I had death-wishes toward him.
³¹

The second fainting incident occurred in 1912 at the time of a special strategy meeting that brought Freud and some of his followers together in Munich. Here is Jung’s intimate report of the incident:

Someone had turned the conversation to Amenophis IV (Ikhnaton). The point was made that as a result of his negative attitude toward his father he had destroyed his father’s cartouches on the steles, and that at the back of his great creation of a monotheistic religion there lurked a father complex. This sort of thing irritated me, and I attempted to argue that Amenophis had been a creative and profoundly religious person whose acts could not be explained by personal resistances toward his father. On the contrary, I said, he had held the memory of his father in honor, and his
zeal for destruction had been directed only against the name of the god Amon, which he had everywhere annihilated; it was also chiseled out of the cartouches of his father Amon-hotep. Moreo
ver, other pharaons had replaced the names of their actual or divine forefathers on monuments and statues by their own, feeling that they had a right to do so since they were incarnations of the same god. Yet they, I pointed out, had inaugurated neither a new style nor a new religion.

At that moment Freud slid off his chair in a faint.
³²

The Faintings in Relation to Freud’s
General Life-Problem

There has been a lot of interpretation of the meaning of these fainting episodes by many sensitive students of Freud’s life; Freud and Jung both gave their own interpretations. I am lingering on this subject not only because it may unlock the problem of Freud’s character, but because it confirms better than anything, I think, the whole post-Freudian understanding of man that we have sketched in the first five chapters. We get the clearest understanding when we can reflect abstractions in the living mirror of a great man’s life.

It was Paul Roazen who, in his recent brilliant interpretation, revealed the central meaning of these fainting spells.
³³
Like Rank, Roazen understood that the psychoanalytic movement as a whole was Freud’s distinctive
causa-sui
project; it was his personal vehicle for heroism, for transcendence of his vulnerability and human limitations. As we will see in the following chapters, Rank was the one who showed that the true genius has an immense problem that other men do not. He has to earn his value as a person from his work, which means that his work has to carry the burden of ju
stifying him. What does “justifying” mean for man? It means transcending death by qualifying for immortality. The genius repeats the narcissistic inflation of the child; he lives the fantasy of the control of life and death, of destiny, in the “body” of his work. The uniqueness of the genius also cuts off his roots. He is a phenomenon that was not foreshadowed; he doesn’t seem to have any traceable debts to the qualities of others; he seems to have sprung self-generated out of nature. We might say that he has the “purest”
causa-sui
project: He is truly without a family, the father of himself.
As Roazen points out, Freud had soared so far beyond his natural family that it is no surprise that he should indulge in fantasies of self-creation: “Freud came back again and again to the fantasy of being raised father-less.”
³⁴
Now, you cannot become your own father until you can have your own sons, as Roazen so well says; and natural-born sons would not do, because they do not have “the qualities of immortality associated with genius.”
³⁵
This formulation is perfect. Ergo, Freud had to create a whole new family—the psychoanalytic movement—that would be his distinctive immortality-vehicle. Wh
en he died the genius of the movement would assure his eternal remembrance and hence an eternal identity in the minds of men and in the effects of his work on earth.

But now the problem of the
causa-sui
project of the genius. In the normal Oedipal project the person internalizes the parents and the superego they embody, that is, the culture at large. But the genius cannot do this because his project is unique; it cannot be filled up by the parents or the culture. It is created specifically by a renunciation of the parents, a renunciation of what they represent and even of their own concrete persons—at least in fantasy—as there doesn’t seem to be anything in them that has caused the genius. Here we see whence the genius gets his extra burden
of guilt: he has renounced the father both spiritually and physically. This act gives him extra anxiety because now he is vulnerable in his turn, as he has no one to stand on. He is alone in his freedom. Guilt is a function of fear, as Rank said.

It is no surprise, then, that Freud would be particularly sensitive to the idea of father-murder. We can imagine that father-murder would be a complex symbol for him, comprising the heavy guilt of standing alone in his vulnerability, an attack on his identity as a father, on the psychoanalytic movement as his
causa-sui
vehicle, and thus on his immortality. In a word, father-murder would mean his own insignificance as a creature. It is just such an interpretation that the fainting episodes point to. The years around 1912 were the time when the future of the psychoanalytic movement crysta
llized as a problem. Freud was looking for an heir, and it was Jung who was to be the “son” whom he had proudly chosen as his spiritual successor and who would assure the success and continuation of psychoanalysis. Freud literally burdened Jung with his hopes a
nd expectations, so prominent was his place in Freud’s life-plan.
³⁶
Thus we can understand how completely logical it is that Jung’s defection from the movement would—all by itself—invoke the complex symbol of father-murder and stand for the death of Freud.
³⁷

No wonder that on the occasion of the first fainting Freud accused Jung of “death-wishes” toward him and that Jung felt himself entirely innocent of any such wishes. He says that he “was more than surprised by this interpretation.”
³⁸
To him these were fantasies of Freud’s, but fantasies of great intensity, “so strong that, obviously, they could cause him to faint.” Of the second occasion Jung says that the whole atmosphere was very tense; whatever other causes may have contributed to Freud’s fainting, the fantasy of father-murder was evidently again involved. In fact, the atmosphere of
rivalry hovered over the whole luncheon meeting. It was a strategy meeting loaded with possibilities of dissention in the psychoanalytic ranks. Jones communicated this in his version of the 1912 faintings:

… as we were finishing luncheon … [Freud] began reproaching the two Swiss, Jung, and Riklin, for writing articles expounding psychoanalysis in the Swiss periodicals without mentioning his name. Jung replied that they had thought it unnecessary to do so, it being so well known, but Freud had sensed already the first signs of the dissension that was to follow a year later. He persisted, and I remember thinking he was taking the matter rather personally. Suddenly, to our consternation, he fell on the floor in a dead faint.
³⁹

Jung is hardly convincing in his graceful denials of rivalry with Freud, in his disingenuous explanations for why the Swiss were omitting to mention Freud’s name. Even in his denial of harboring death-wishes toward Freud, he makes plain his competitiveness.

Why should I want him to die? I had come to learn. He was not standing in my way; he was in Vienna, I was in Zurich.
⁴⁰

On the one hand he admits that he is in a learning relationship to Freud the master; on the other he attempts to establish that he stands on his own, on equal footing. Freud could surely se
nse the threat to his priority, which would actually be an act of filial treason to him.
⁴¹
Jung was drifting away from the fold, threatening a rivalry with the Swiss branch of psychoanalysis. What would happen to the “father” then, and all he stood for? The fact is that Freud fainted at the precise moment that Jung made light of the matter of priorities in the founding of a new Egyptian religion by Amenophis IV. This threatened Freud’s whole life’s missionary work. Freud had a picture of the Sphinx and the pyramids prominently displayed in his consulting room, his innermost sanctum. T
his was for him no romantic image or archaeological hobby. Egypt stood for the whole mysterious and dark past of mankind that psychoanalysis was chosen to decipher.
⁴²
There is, Roazen says, a direct association between twentieth-century psychoanalysis and ancient Egyptology, between Amenophis’ scratching out his father’s name on the steles and Jung’s doing the same from Zurich. Jung was attacking Freud’s immortality.