5 - Death Drives: Freud and Proust

Summary

The coming of the Great War as the destruction of high European civilization was nowhere better imaged than in Henry James's letters from early August 1914. For just one example, this to Howard Sturgis on August 5:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

Sigmund Freud was less prescient: like so many others, he at first expressed patriotic solidarity and saw the war as a skirmish that would soon be over. By March of 1915, though, he had changed his mind not only on the duration of the struggle but on its whole meaning:

We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possessions of humanity, confused so many of the clearest intelligences, or so thoroughly debased what is highest. Science herself has lost her impartiality; her deeply embittered servants seek for weapons from her with which to contribute towards the struggle with the enemy. Anthropologists feel driven to declare him inferior and degenerate, psychiatrists issue a diagnosis of his disease of mind or spirit.

Freud the European, the traveler, the amateur archeologist laments the loss of a ‘new and wider fatherland, in which he could move about without hindrance or suspicion’—a Europe of comfortable train travel and tourism, now destroyed.

In this short essay of 1915, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,’ Freud notes that progress of civilization—Kultur—is based on ‘much self-restraint, much renunciation of instinctual satisfaction.’ So the collapse of civilization in war convinces the individual citizen

of what would occasionally cross his mind in peace-time— that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrongdoing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco. A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.