The Earth and its Relation to the Sun

by Aaron Murphy, JD UC Berkeley, GCAS MA researcher in psychoanalysis

IN THE BEGINNING there is only pleasure and unpleasure, relative tension; then reality breaks in. The stage is set, the opponents marked. We become human in the open space between straining inhuman force.

Freud first formulated this picture - of a mind seeking pleasure and avoiding pain - in his Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1895. It mutates throughout the rest of his writings, reappearing dressed as the “unpleasure principle” in his opus, The Interpretation of Dreams. Pleasure is buttressed by the reality principle, the limits and margins set by the ego. But it is always working to escape. Freud saw dreams as wish-fulfillments, the psyche working out its litany of desires underneath the cover of night and slumber. Our desires are polyphonic and capable of subtle gradation, but their architecture is more or less comprehensible. Pleasure, too, has its endlessly supple variations, but we are always chasing it, whether or not we realize that is what we are doing.

So much, so straightforward. But then came World War I, and with it a flood of soldiers bringing ghosts back home from the front. They dreamt of the same terrible things, again and again, every night. They woke gasping, covered in sweat, overwhelmed by dread. Their dreams had nothing whatsoever to do with pleasure, no wish they were trying to win and realize. These dreams - trauma dreams, hallmarks of post-traumatic stress - were a problem for Freud and his careful theories. Trauma dreams thrust us back to the source and overwhelm our defenses. Energy overflows and swamps our interiority. Our psyches, usually so wily and creative, so adept at getting what we barely recognize we want, are paralyzed.

Even worse - we cannot dream our way through the experience. We keep waking up. “The mind seems”, as philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes, “actively to disrupt the dream process, and traumatize the person all over again.” The dreaming mind tries to master the trauma in retrospect, but it cannot - it is disrupted, short-circuited. Meaning is sought but never captured, and our psyches defeat all attempts to make this widening senselessness sensible. Nothing is resolved, nothing is healed or understood.

Faced with this challenge, Freud went back to his theories. He revised them, something he did often, with apparent ease. In a discipline otherwise marked by arrogance and edict, Freud stands out for his willingness to rework his previous notions. In his tinkering, Freud discovered that wish-fulfillment was not, in fact, the original purpose of dreams. They are in thrall, as are we, to something older, something primeval.

Freud’s reconstruction centers on the compulsion to repeat. We do what we do not want to, we do not do what we want. We revisit and revive the very worst parts of our lives, the worst habits of mind and body, the things that swallow us in anxiety and in dread. We do this all the time, whether we are in therapy or not. We do this even though it causes obvious distress. “Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity”, says Freud. “None of these things can have produced pleasure in the past, and it might be supposed that they would cause less unpleasure today if they emerged as memories or dreams instead of taking the form of fresh experiences.”

Our circularity is not, as Freud originally supposed, simply how the cards fall in the perpetual struggle between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Rather, both pleasure and reality are arrayed in Eros, the life force, against a far stronger and older opponent, “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon, under the pressure of external disturbing forces.” We are compelled, Freud thinks, to move backwards - to dissolve, to disintegrate, to return to the inorganic things we were before.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, Freud tells us he's found “the final goal of all organic striving”, the motive force moving beneath our feet. “The aim of life”, writes Freud, “is death.”

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a strange, dense text, rich in speculative philosophy set amidst the minutiae of a life science primer. Jacques Lacan called it “an extraordinary text, unbelievably ambiguous, almost confused” (he would know). Throughout it Freud states his uncertainty more limpidly than his theories, and his thought - normally clear and coursing - seems shrouded at times, wrapped inside an essential bewilderment. Still, the death drive strikes me as a grand concept, a theory of elemental and tectonic force. The careful language of early-century microbiology masks its import and its impact on our lives. As Jacqueline Rose writes in her pandemic-era meditation on the death drive, Freud is saying that there is, somewhere in all of us, “an unconscious demonic principle driving us to distraction.”

Psychoanalysts, by all accounts, have never known exactly what to do with the death drive. It is essentially a creature of shadow and protean murk; in the light of day it can appear vaguely embarrassing. It seems flatly wrong as a description of conscious activity - we hold life very dear, after all. We cannot imagine our own non-existence. We abhor death, run aground on it. While alive we scrub away all death’s traces, burying them as though we possessed, in the words of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, “some kind of chthonic instinct, something deep within us that urges us to move death down to the earth whence we came.” When death arrives for us we seem surprised, as if we did not realize we were mortal.

There are powerful theoretical objections, too. For Freud, the death drive is an outgrowth of repetition-compulsion, following on from it like a logical proof. Lear has no truck with either concept. Freud tends to talk, he says, as if we are compelled simply to repeat - as if repetition itself were the aim of the compulsion instead of a symptom, a signal of some other disruption. Instincts drive us forward, repetition beats us back - why would we see this as some dumb and total law, inscribed on our chromosomes, instead of a definite attempt by the mind to revisit a wound in service of healing? The true drama, thinks Lear, lies in the mind’s disruption of mental activity, in our waking from the dream, rather than in some mysterious edict of repetition and destruction we are helpless to contest. “There is no primordial principle beyond the pleasure principle; there is mental breakdown.”

Freud was a gifted speculative thinker and fantasist, which history has not forgiven him for. His “talking cure” perseveres, but the man and his ideas move in and out of fashion. He is a genius to some; to others a cheat and a charlatan. His scientific work, in particular, is of a time and place; much of it is already eclipsed. But his poetry still remains. Freud was a committed materialist doomed, I think, to be a mystic. He knew that any whole theory of the mind must be a theory of life and everything in it, an entire history “of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun.” For Freud, as culture critic Sam Kriss puts it, “our neuroses are made of the same stuff as myth. They speak to us from our animal prehistory and the inorganic world that was there before.”

Motive forces operating deep inside the unconscious can, now and again, break into conscious awareness. The death drive has a mythic movement to it, a centrifugal pull and a cadence, and I think we know it. We must grow up, we can never grow up, we must move forward, we are trapped in stasis. There is some senseless thing that pulls us downwards, towards quiescence and the grave. It does not feel like destruction disguised as wish-fulfillment, or an automatic but splintering attempt to work something out, to reach a resolution. It is something stranger and less explicable. “On every new thing”, W.G. Sebald writes in his novel The Rings of Saturn, “there lies already the shadow of annihilation”, and annihilation moves inside the laws of its own strange geometry.

It makes sense, then, that the great theorist of the hidden and the subterranean might one day encounter and describe for us tidal forces we all know and perceive, however dimly. In all of Freud’s work, submerged things surface offshore and secrets glimmer darkly in mirrors. To me, the death drive has the special gravity of truth at its most mysterious, heavy and squat, positioned at right angles to reality, warping the world’s skin. Freud’s theory is in the breath we inhale, inside the architecture of our lives. The poets know this, even if therapists do not.

But theory, however suggestive, needs some link to everyday experience to have an afterlife. It is no accident, I think, that the death drive is a product of a specific and singular loss. Freud’s favorite daughter, Sophie, died with her unborn child in 1920, during the third and final wave of the Spanish Flu. At the time, Freud was only half-finished with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and there was no inkling of the death drive in his working draft. The drive appears first in Freud’s personal correspondence, a few weeks after Sophie’s death. Afterwards, as Jacqueline Rose explains, “[a]n entire new chapter, Chapter Six, the longest by far, was added to a later draft, taking up almost a third of the published text.” The death drive transforms Beyond the Pleasure Principle; it becomes an entirely different sort of book. It is therefore “fair to say”, writes Rose, “that Freud owes the genesis of this unprecedented concept” to Sophie, and to her loss.

Freud’s biological speculations in Beyond are, in Rose’s view, simply an excuse to allow him to go on thinking about the things that really interest him, the things of genuine importance to our souls and psyches. Endearingly, Freud is always crafting theories he needs to hear, whether or not he is aware of this (usually he is not). An early dream-memory of his father pronouncing that he will “never amount to anything” generates the propulsive force of Freud’s whole life and the entirety of psychoanalysis, including his intuition that a father’s words carry heavy weight, and that we all carry early wounds. Freud’s own principle of repetition-compulsion flickers on and off throughout his life, as he establishes and severs intense connections with a string of surrogate sons - Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Sándor Ferenczi. There is always uncertainty at work, and a roaming curiosity. In Beyond, Freud admits that he does not understand repetition-compulsion, this titanic thing he has hauled into view and assigned such power. This, Jonathan Lear complains, is “tantamount to an admission that Freud does not yet understand the principles of psychoanalysis”, the discipline he founded. Perhaps he does not - perhaps that is the point. To follow the Freud of Beyond, writes philosopher Todd Dufresne, is to follow him “beyond psychoanalysis proper.” The hereafter undercuts the everyday; death subverts psychotherapy.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle we find Freud working out his grief for Sophie via cosmic speculation and the stuff of myth, inside the whole history of the earth and its relation to the sun. He makes sense of her death by positioning it as a violation of natural law. The natural organism, posits Freud, wishes to die “in its own fashion”, under its own authority, on its own terms. But Sophie’s death is sudden and terrible; it breaks with the long slow parade of the death drive, becoming something offensive and unbearable. It is easier, in Freud’s words, to “submit to a remorseless law of nature” than to think we can bend fate to our will but have somehow failed to do so.

In this I think Freud is half-aware of what he is doing, and how it sits alongside what he needs. The death drive may function best as a motivated or constructed truth, a shelter or safe haven where he, and we, can wait out life’s disasters and try to bear the weight of the world as we are able.

Where does all of this leave us? Between Eros and Thanatos there is life as such, the world as it is. We begin at the beginning, mewling and undifferentiated. We seek pleasure, we avoid pain. Then we grow and change; reality mediates our desires and our deficits. The reality principle becomes, in a strange sense, the protector of whatever pleasures remain. We encircle our delights and hold them close, tending our fantasies and private revelations, keeping ourselves warm. Beyond that is mist, and storm surge, and whatever lies at the far end of death. The unique domain of psychoanalysis, writes Rose, is found in “the complex reckoning with life and with death.” Not so unique, I think - we are always reckoning with these things. Perhaps that is simply what it means to live.