Abstract
This is an ambitious book. “It aims to show how and why death has been marginalized or repressed in psychoanalysis” (p. 1). The author, having worked on his subject for over a decade, is enormously well informed and thoughtful. Although he vigorously challenges Freud’s view of death in psychic life, he does so with respect and, especially toward the end of the book, with increasing admiration.
He finds that Freud fails to attend to death: It all starts from a few statements by Freud about death’s inaccessibility to the unconscious (1915, pp. 289, 296–7; 1923, pp. 57–9; 1926, pp. 129–30, 140). Death is negative, abstract, it involves time, and cannot, therefore, be part of unconscious thought. Accordingly, if people are afraid of death, these fears should be understood as secondary, as indications of another “deeper” problem, mostly castration. This is where it all starts but not where it all ends. For this position reverberates throughout the history of psychoanalysis, finding various expressions. It consists in a kind of disbelief in death, an unwillingness to recognize death as a possibly influential psychic factor [pp. 1–2].
Then, again, he writes: However, as sometimes happens, Freud’s position on death is more ambivalent, vacillating, and complex than the positions of many of his followers. Even when reductionistic, it is multifariously so. Freud’s work, particularly in its less reductionistic manifestations, contains fruitful intuitions and sharp insights into the nature of our attitude toward death. It often betrays a tension between reductionistic tendencies and attempts to attribute the utmost significance to death. Many times, only Freud’s more reductionistic statements were adopted by future generations of theoreticians and analysts [p. 2].
This is a thoughtful, scholarly work but, perhaps because it is a compilation of many individual publications, unnecessarily repetitive. The author tends to present so many sides to his argument, crediting with one hand, dismissing with the other, that it is frequently hard to accept his conclusions.
At bottom, Freud’s claims against the presence of death in the mind are simply unconvincing. Sometimes they are unsound, sometimes they seem ad hoc, sometimes they do not appear to reflect concerns that should have occupied Freud, and occasionally a plausible answer seems to have been at Freud’s finger tips, had he only wanted it. The arguments discussed above seem more to be part of an attempt to justify a broader theoretical stance—that the fear of death is not a dominant psychic factor—a stance that precedes the arguments rather than emanates from them [p. 24].
Razinsky is arguing with texts here, and he has studied them closely. Many of his arguments, however, are as susceptible to criticism as the ones he opposes. I believe Razinsky is mistaken in making the claims that “it all starts from a few statements by Freud about death’s inaccessibility to the unconscious” (p. 1); that Freud is unwilling “to recognize death as a possibly influential psychic factor” (p. 2); and that “Freud’s claims against the presence of death in the mind are simply unconvincing” (p. 24). It begins not with statements but with Freud’s observations and his theoretical conclusions from them that he found no representation of death in the unconscious. This was not an a priori assumption, as Razinsky holds. Freud, who suffered from death anxieties, as Razinsky frequently points out, but who also devoted significant attention to suicide, mourning, and annihilation anxiety, did not claim that death is not an influential psychic factor. He claimed rather that death is not represented in the unconscious and that death anxieties regularly arouse other unconscious anxieties. Razinsky’s overinclusive shift to “the presence of death in the mind” blurs the line between representation in the unconscious and presence in the mind, which also contains significant conscious components. That defensive processes—particularly denial and its congeners—may be directed against awareness of death does not accord death a place in the unconscious any more than it makes room there for other external sources of danger.
It seems to me that Razinsky’s main point is that Freud’s psychoanalysis contains no existential viewpoint and, hence, can find no psychoanalytic understanding of death (pp. 26–30). Razinsky states his own existential position forcefully: Death affects us in profound ways, as I shall show. It guides our global evaluation of life. It is a shadow behind our perspective on things, behind choices, behind our basic sense of presence in the world, behind our feelings and commitments. Concern about death is often something that operates silently, something fundamental to human existence, a question posed which precedes life, so to speak, and accompanies it. It is like a background to life, a basis on which psychic life is erected. As such, it does not always find direct concrete expression. Unless the theory says something about it, a substantial part of the most inner substrates of the psyche risks remaining in the dark [p. 10].
I cannot imagine many psychoanalysts disagreeing with those propositions. Yet the author repeatedly asserts that psychoanalysts do not attend to the question of death. Some analysts, he writes, contend that death and death anxiety play no part in psychoanalysis (p. 10), while others claim “practitioners are well aware of death and its importance, and deal with it frequently” (p. 11). In this otherwise carefully researched and documented study, no references are given to exemplify these points of view.
“How many analysts have read Becker’s (1973) Denial of Death, for example?” (p. 12), Razinsky asks rhetorically. Forty years ago, many of us did. I find it difficult to accept the author’s assertion that both groups of analysts fail to give death sufficient attention, as my own first psychoanalytic publication, a translation of Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth’s 1912 paper “The Child’s Concept of Death,” not cited by the author, and my subsequent experience contradict it. It would be easier to accept Razinsky’s view had he limited his claim to the perennial need for analysts to attend to defenses against awareness of death.
Razinsky writes as though analysts today confine their theoretical views to those Freud arrived at more than seventy-five years ago, although, citing Sandler (1983), he allows for individual analysts to espouse one theory but use another (p. 11). And he adds: Of course, the psychoanalytic world has a well-based tradition of constantly putting its premises in question and updating them. Many times, however, in what concerns death, even when certain faults or lacks are explicitly recognized, and an attitude that deviates from the dominant theory is expressed, one is still limited in the extent to which one is able to recognize the nature of the problem [p. 6].
Renewed attention to trauma and considerations of representability in psychoanalytic writings may go some distance toward filling the gap.
The author seems to conflate death anxiety with the fact of death, the finitude of life, as he speaks of it. Freud’s view held, above all, that the anticipation of death evokes other unconscious anxieties, not principally a fear of not being. First among them, in my experience, is the fear of loss and separation from loved ones. We really do hear of finitude, however, as in the words of the young narrator of Alice Munro’s “Walker Brothers Cowboy” (1968), musing on the origins of Lake Huron: The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive—old, old—when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown [p. 5].
I recall, too, when signing my first will, still young enough to hold thoughts of death at bay, my wise, elderly attorney telling me that at this point many people cry. “Why?” I asked. “Because it refers to when they are dead.” There is no doubt that Razinsky is right that death, the finitude of life, is omnipresent. The great life insurance industry attests that, as does the health insurance industry (although, despite all the progress of modern medicine, the death rate remains one per person). So, he argues, psychoanalysis needs a positive account of death.
The author’s main argument focuses on the limitations of a drive-based theory of the mind. He favors a psychoanalysis that emphasizes existential viewpoints: “something about psychoanalytic hermeneutics impedes theorizing when it comes to the subject of death” (p. 236); “existential awareness of our transience hardly finds a place in Freud’s analysis” (p. 95). His position seems strongest to me when he views the death drive as an inadequate solution to the problem of death, weakest when he contradicts Freud’s conclusion that there can be no representation of death in the unconscious—Freud’s theory of the unconscious, rather than Razinsky’s. He opposes what he sees as Freud’s reductionist views, in which fears of dying are always representations of other fears (fear of separation, fear of castration, fear of the superego). He wants Freud’s psychoanalysis to be existential and thinks it ought to be. Discussing Freud’s “Father, don’t you see I’m burning” dream, he writes: “Death is a reality, right next to us, in the next room, and it will not be dismissed by simply superficially acknowledging it” (p. 104).
I cannot take the reader through the rambling intricacies of the author’s arguments, all of which are aimed at demonstrating a “hole in the kettle” of psychoanalytic thinking about death. Let me instead allow the author the final word.
Above the specific concern of how to include a certain fear of or concern about death within the psychoanalytic worldview, what is important to recognize is how the very fact of death influences life, how the most fundamental notions of what it is to be, of having a personality and uniqueness as a human being, of life and time having a direction, of acts being singular, and of possibilities being limited, all derive their acuteness, their meaning, and their nature from the fact of finitude. In thinking psychoanalytically about death’s influence, the direct fear of death as an experience is perhaps less important than the more general presence of finitude in our minds [p. 278].