Abstract
Reviewed by: Jeffrey Kaufman, PA, USA.
In Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death, Liran Razinsky, Lecturer in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Han University in Israel, is concerned with the absence of death in psychoanalytic theory. With close attention to the Freudian texts, Razinsky shows where death is considered or approached as a topic in his writings and how Freud, again and again, turns away, marginalizing and otherwise refusing to recognize death’s place in the psyche. Razinsky shows that death, in Freud, has no representation in the mind and the psychic presence of death is accordingly denied recognition in psychoanalytic theory. He notes how Freud reduces death anxiety to, for example, super-ego anxiety. That is, the reality of death is diminished solely to guilt and to castration anxiety. Razinsky points out that in psychoanalysis, the primacy of death anxiety in human existence is regarded to be, in fact, a manifestation of some other anxiety, such that finally the fear of death is conceptually explained away.
While Razinsky clearly demonstrates the disavowal of death in psychoanalytic theory, he also shows Freud’s repeatedly returning to questions about death. His reading of the Freudian literature shows how Freud excludes death from the psychodynamic configurations and explanatory forces that make up the primary psychoanalytic theories. Thus, death is quarantined from psychoanalytic theory. Yet, he also finds in Freud’s writing considerable and recurring concern with death, personally and theoretically. When Freud does confront the centrality of death in the psyche, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920), Razinsky observes that he makes death into an abstract principle, which has virtually no bearing on clinical understanding nor upon psychoanalytic self-understanding.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Freud, 1926), Freud, considering the possibility that “war neurosis” is caused by direct exposure to danger, recognizes that this would constitute a neurosis which is not caused by sexual instincts and argues that such a neurosis is, indeed, based in the (libidinal) instinct for “self-preservation.” Freud, here, maintains that the “objective presence of danger” (Freud, 1926, p. 129) does not lead to neurosis “without any participation of the deeper levels of the mental apparatus” (Freud, 1926, p. 129), thinking that the “deeper levels” have to do with sex (libidinal instinct), not death.
Razinsky shows Freud’s texts at many places both approaching and repeatedly and decisively turning away from a psychology of death anxiety. Freud is reluctant to “admit death into the system” (p. 21); he has, indeed, constructed a depth psychology that fundamentally excludes death, hiding the pervasive presence of death, the significant influence of death, and the primacy of death in psychical existence. Razinsky holds up one Freudian text after another, and also post-Freudian psychoanalytic texts, to show that while death is considered, the fear of death is not really accounted for.
Razinsky makes a case that even with psychoanalytic thinkers who approach death with greater openness to its psychological presence and significance, their ideas are “merely a different manifestation of earlier reductive tendencies in Freud” (p. 13). For example, Rank and Becker recognize only the human propensity to fight against recognizing one’s finitude; Klein sees death as central but treats it as a drive and identifies it with aggression; Lacan sees death as central but subordinates it to the symbolic.
Razinsky’s criticism of psychoanalytic authors intends to lay groundwork for an existential psychoanalysis receptive to the emotional presence and psychological influence of death realized in the void of the existential presence of death as absent. He envisions a psychoanalysis of death open to and grappling with the strange, intrusive otherness of death anxiety, bringing psychoanalysis closer to its inherent subject matter.
While Razinsky critiques Freud for his observation that death cannot be represented, he does not actually disagree with the understanding that death cannot be represented. Rather, he disagrees with the conclusion Freud draws from his view that death cannot be represented. For Razinsky, the awareness that death cannot be represented serves as a starting place for a psychoanalytic understanding of death. He points toward the experiential significance of death’s nonrepresentational psychic presence, offering existential and other narratives for approaching and clinically working with death anxiety. His awareness and conceptualization of the nonrepresentational presence of death is the crux of the book.
But he gets to this rather late in the book, writing that “it is time we get to the fundamental question of the nature of death’s psychic presence” (p. 265). This late arrival at the “fundamental question” may be due in part to his intention to place a psychology of death within psychoanalysis by first deploying a scholarly approach of grounding his argument in a close analysis of Freud’s texts. Whatever the reason, too little attention is devoted to developing an existential psychoanalysis of the nonrepresentational presence of death. His bringing forward the question of the presence of death in psychological existence and framing its nonrepresentational nature is beautiful, but it is no more than a brief introduction to the difficult and far reaching existential psychoanalysis he proposes.
Most critically, his account lacks a clinical foundation, including a clear sense of clinical processes and a base in clinical observation. I also think his recommendation that the psychoanalytic clinician cultivate a personal openness to his or her own death, clearly a crucial part of such an approach, requires an in-depth examination rather than just the brief mention he allows in this book.
What Razinsky does offer is a variety of philosophical reflections about death anxiety as the existential presence of the absence of death. In his introductory chapter, he observes the profound ways that death affects us: “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 our commitments” (p. 10). Death “is inextricably intermingled with life . . . ” and “the rejection of death becomes the material life is made from” (p. 261). Regarding the fundamental of absence of death and its impact he writes, “death is psychically active exactly in its being absent, unclear, unsettled” (p. 265). Further, the “lack of a clear representation of death in the mind is a source of anxiety” (p. 267). He suggests that death is an omnipresent discontinuity; although it is the center of psychic life, it cannot be assimilated into psychic life. It is a “hole in our capability to understand the world around us” and “our system of representations” (p. 268). Since death is “placed outside the rest of our system of representations, and foreign to it, death can act to negate all other meanings” (pp. 268–269).
We should also note that Razinsky is not proposing a psychoanalytic knowledge of death, but rather something more difficult: a cultivation of being “open” to unknowable death as an unrepresented disruptive presence.
After considering death as nonrepresentational, offering a preliminary sense of the strange and consequential way that its nonrepresentational presence (as absent) haunts existence, Razinsky says that death is also psychically represented in diverse ways, such as, the “lack of control over aspects of our lives” (p. 259). It is interesting how easily representations emerge with a sense of having the power to represent the unrepresentable. It is true that, in this instance, the lack of control is an anxiety we may associate with death. Thus, the metaphor that death is the extreme of being out of control, fits. It may be inevitable, even reasonable, to consider such representations along with the primary anxiety of being in the presence of one’s own unrepresentable death, but such representations do resemble the psychoanalytic representations he discredits, and should be accounted for more clearly in this book.
Adapting the well known psychoanalytic wisdom that being receptive to what is unknown, dysphoric, and disavowed is therapeutic, Razinsky says that even in face of the impossibility of knowing the nonrepresentational presence of death, the very determination to be open to this presence can help a person live more easily with their mortality. And, I think, that openness to invisible death’s haunting nonrepresentational psychological presence can be psychospiritually healing for persons who live with the unfamiliarity of death so common in our culture.
A primary audience for the book are persons with an interest in psychoanalysis and the history of psychoanalytic theory. Those interested in the intersection of psychoanalysis and existentialism will also appreciate the book, as will readers conversant with present day psychoanalytic theory concerns with the effects of the “unrepresented” in the psyche and in relationships. But, most of all, readers interested in death as central to psychical existence and human relationships and struck by death’s persistent hiddenness in theory and in awareness will find much of special interest here.