Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [136]
“Why?” asked Younger. “To discharge the fear?”
“For a long time I tried to understand it that way,” replied Freud. “Discharging fear would be pleasurable. At least it would lessen displeasure. Every psychological phenomenon, I thought, was motivated at bottom by the drive to increase pleasure or lessen displeasure. But I was trying to fit facts to theory, when I should have been fitting theory to facts. I had just begun to understand it when you were last here. The war taught me something I should have seen ages ago: we have a drive beyond the pleasure principle. Another instinct, as fundamental as hunger, as irresistible as love.”
“What instinct?” asked Colette.
“A death instinct. More tea, Miss Rousseau?”
“No, thank you.”
“You mean a desire to kill?” asked Younger.
“That’s one side of it,” said Freud. “But fundamentally it’s a longing for death. For destruction. Not only someone else’s; also our own.”
“You think people want to die?” asked Colette.
“I do,” said Freud. “It’s built into our cells, our very atoms. There are two elemental forces in the universe. One draws matter toward matter. That is how life comes into being and how it propagates. In physics, this force is called gravity; in psychology, love. The other force tears matter apart. It is the force of disunification, disintegration, destruction. If I’m correct, every planet, every star in the universe is not only drawn toward the others by gravity, but also pushed away from them by a force of repulsion we can’t see. Within an organism, this force is what drives the animal to seek death, as moths seek a flame.”
“But you can cure it—this death instinct?” asked Colette.
“One cannot cure an instinct, Miss Rousseau,” said Freud. “One cannot eliminate it. One can, however, make it more conscious and in this way relieve its pathological effects. When an instinct creates in us an impulse that we don’t act on, the impulse does not go away. It may subsist unaffected. It may intensify. It may be turned to other objects, for better or worse. Or it may produce pathological symptoms. Such symptoms can be cured.”
“I wouldn’t have thought,” said Younger, “that Luc’s muteness aimed at death.”
“No, his muteness has another function. That would be the point of analyzing him—to uncover that function. It’s undoubtedly connected to his parents’ death, but there’s something more too. Possibly their death reminded him of a scene he had witnessed even earlier. Did your father mistreat you, Miss Rousseau?”
“Mistreat me? In what way?”
“In any way.”
“Not at all,” said Colette.
“No? Did he favor you?”
“Luc was his favorite,” said Colette. “I was a girl.”
Freud nodded. “Well, it’s a pity you can’t remain in Vienna, but I don’t see how it’s possible. Vienna is a much smaller city than New York. You’ll be noticed here. The police will have everyone watching; someone will report you.”
“May I ask you a question, Dr. Freud?” asked Colette.
“Of course.”
“These two forces you describe,” she said. “They’re good and evil, aren’t they? The instinct for love is good, and the instinct for death is evil.”
Freud smiled: “In science, my dear, there is no such thing as good or evil. The death instinct is part of our biology. You’re familiar with chromatolysis—the natural process by which cells die? Every one of our cells brings about its own destruction at its allotted time. That’s the death instinct in operation. Now if a cell fails to die, what happens? It keeps dividing, reproducing, endlessly, unnaturally. It becomes a cancer. That’s what cancer is, after all—cells afflicted with the loss of their will to die. The death instinct is not evil,