Psychoanalysis and the Nuclear Threat

Clinial and Theoretical Studies

Howard B Levine, Daniel Jacobs, Lowell J. Rubin, Howard B Levine, Daniel Jacobs, Lowell J. Rubin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134878017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The analytic literature has heretofore been silent about the issues inherent in the nuclear threat. As a groundbreaking exploration of new psychological terrain, Psychoanalysis and the Nuclear Threat will function as a source book for what, it is hoped, will be the continuing effort of analysts and other mental health professionals to explore and engage in-depth nuclear issues.

This volume provides panoramic coverage of the dynamic and clinical considerations that follow from life in the nuclear age. Of special interest are chapters deling with the developmental consequences of the nuclear threat in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and those exploring the technical issues raised by the occurrence in analytic and psychotherapeutic hours of material related to the nuclear threat. Additional chapters bring a psychoanalytic perspective to bear on such issues as the need to have enemies; silence as the "real crime"; love, work, and survival in the nuclear age; the relationship of the nuclear threat to issues of "mourning and melancholia"; apocalyptic fantasies; the paranoid process; considerations of the possible impact of gender on the nuclear threat; and the application of psychoanalytic thinking to nuclear arms strategy. Finally, the volume includes the first case report in the English language - albeit a brief psychotherapy - involving the treatment of a Hiroshima survivor.

A noteworthy event in psychoanalytic publishing, Psychoanalysis and the Nuclear Threat betokens analytic engagement with the most pressing political and moral issue of our time, a cultivating of Freud's "soft voice of the intellect" in an area where it is desperately needed.

Theoretical Section

Sanford Gifford begins the theoretical section with an historical assessment of Freud’s views of the fundamental nature of mankind and the biological basis for aggression and war. It is striking to be reminded of how, in addressing these issues, Freud returned again and again to explanations rooted in a primordial struggle between the life and death instincts. Although the latter is not often favored as a clinical or theoretical concept in contemporary American psychoanalysis, the vision of humanity on the brink of nuclear destruction may lead one to rethink the meaning and usefulness of the death instinct concept.

For Kleinian analysts, the death instinct is felt to be clinically demonstrable and theoretically useful. Hanna Segal, an eminent Kleinian, examines the psychology of the arms race and the unwillingness of most citizens to realize its implications and possible consequences in the light of the operation of the death instinct and its vicissitudes. Her chapter is of some historical significance, as it is based on a paper read in 1985 at the inaugural meeting of the International Psychoanalysts Against Nuclear Weapons (IPANW), which was held in conjunction with the 34th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Hamburg. In an Afterword written especially for this volume, she uses case examples to illustrate her contention that “all [of her] patients, at some point or other of their analysis, speak about nuclear weapons, nuclear war, or nuclear explosions.” As is discussed in the Clinical Section, this observation is in stark contrast to the experience of most American analysts, Rubin and Mack (both this volume) being notable exceptions.

In contrast to Segal, the other authors in this section explore mankinds warlike nature and inherently destructive potential from theoretical perspectives that do not rest on formulations of the death instinct. Mortimer Ostow and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel present complementary discussions of the psychological basis for apocalyptic thinking. Whereas Ostow examines this phenomenon in relation to attempts to master situations of helplessness produced by actual or threatened external trauma, Chasseguet-Smirgel argues that the failure to attend to the possibilities of world destruction inherent in the nuclear arms race reflects the operation of a secret temptation to realize the archaic wish for unimpeded pleasure and reunion with the smooth and contentless womb of the mother.

William Meissner takes up these issues from still another perspective, that of the paranoid process. Beginning with the view that mechanisms of projection and introjection are closely tied to the organization, development, and maintenance of the self, he proposes that there is a universal— and normative—paranoid process, which can be mobilized by any actual or impending catastrophic trauma, including the threat of nuclear disaster. It is this process and the defenses that it evokes in the attempt to ward off feelings of vulnerability and victimization that Meissner believes are the bases for the reactions to the nuclear threat.

In examining this subject from still another purview, Vamik Volkan understands the “need to have enemies” as a developmental given that arises out of the vicissitudes of the formation and maintenance of group and individual identity. The enemy, whether at the level of individual, social, or political life, functions as a stable and stabilizing “container” for projections of unwanted aspects of self. In this context, war and weapons mediate the distance between the acknowledged self and those disavowed aspects of self that are projected onto our enemies.

In a clinical addendum, Volkan turns our attention to problems of the representation of actual experience and its relation to past and current intrapsychic conflicts. His case material illustrates how the threat of nuclear destruction serves as a day residue for a dream that recalls childhood fears of the “explosive” separation of the parental couple and the consequent destruction of the nuclear family. As this patient overcomes the need to deny evidence of parental disharmony, she also becomes able to tolerate the recognition of social discord and the determination to try to do something constructive to alleviate it. (The development of social concern is an important issue that is taken up further in the clinical section, particularly in the chapters by Jacobs, Mack, and Rubin.)

In recent years, the psychology of women has been the subject of much analytic scrutiny. Given the different ways that men and women express and experience conflicts and aggression, it is only natural to wonder whether there are gender-related issues that may, at some level, affect international relations and fuel the nuclear arms race. In Malkah Notman’s view, our knowledge in this area is not sufficiently developed to allow us to come to any definitive conclusions. Her chapter provides readers with a framework within which to begin to think about some of the relevant issues.

One often hears objections that in commenting on matters of politics and statesmanship, psychoanalysts are functioning outside the area of their expertise. We are, therefore, fortunate in having a contribution from Professor Blema Steinberg, who is both a political scientist specializing in the study of nuclear arms control and an advanced psychoanalytic candidate at the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis. Professor Steinberg examines the psychological bases that underlie each of the major strategies proposed to deal with the nuclear arms race: deterrence and mutual assured destruction; limited nuclear war and war fighting strategies; defensive strategies; and arms limitation and disarmament. She reaches the sobering conclusion that each is tainted by the wish for a magical solution to a very real problem: how to deal with the feelings of helplessness and anxiety that arise from having one’s fate held hostage by the actions and intent of a terrifyingly powerful enemy.

1
Freud’s Fearful Symmetry

Further Reflections on the Life and Death Instincts

Sanford Gifford

___________________

IN THE SUMMER OF 1982, I was asked by the late Professor Jerrold Zacharias, an eminent physicist long active in the Union of Concerned Scientists, what a psychoanalyst would think of Caspar Weinberger’s five-year program for waging a “protracted nuclear war.” Zacharias sent me clippings about this “Defense Guidance Plan,” whose aim Weinberger insisted was not to wage or to “win” a war but only to “prevail” in case a nuclear war was thrust upon us. Zacharias also enclosed his own op-ed page refutation of the plan’s fallacies, written in crystal-clear, nontechnical language, completely convincing in its common sense logic. The contrast was obvious: what sensible person could read Zacharias’ column and fail to be convinced? And yet, why have we chosen political leaders, like Weinberger, who contrive grandiose, self-destructive fantasies?

In replying to Professor Zacharias, I turned back to the Freud-Einstein correspondence, “Why War?” (Freud, 1933b), which had actually been written during the summer of 1932, exactly 50 years earlier, and found it a compelling document. I even took a certain comfort in its chilling but refreshing pessimism. Its only flaw, I thought, was Freud’s underestimation of our need to believe in the existence of an invulnerable weapon, a wishful fantasy of pure infantile omnipotence. Among its variants, of course, is the need to believe that a nuclear war can be won.

Every analyst reaches his own decision about the usefulness or irrelevance of Freud’s dual-instinct theory on the basis of his own life experience and his personal predilections in scientific theory building. We sometimes choose our theories, as I have noted elsewhere (Gifford, 1971), on the basis of esthetic preferences rather than scientific proof, as if the difference between Ptolomaic and Copernican theory depended on style or poetic imagery rather than absolute truth.

To turn to Freud’s theory of the death instinct itself, the first draft of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) was completed in May 1919 during a period of famine and deprivation. Austria was impoverished and shrunken by the First World War and its aftermath, but Freud seemed to experience a resurgence of his creative powers. A part of Freud’s theory was based on the traumatic war neuroses, in which the repetitive nightmares of combat seemed to represent something “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle” (p. 23). Among Freud’s other observations about repetitive phenomena were, as we know, his grandson’s famous spool, thrown away and recovered over and over again; the need to repeat childhood traumatic experiences in the transference; the “negative therapeutic reaction”; and the unconscious “will to fail” in the careers of “those wrecked by success.” From these clinical manifestations of the repetition compulsion, as a drive to reexperience previous suffering, Freud evolved a biological metatheory of the life and death instincts. Its explanatory scope encompassed nothing less than the origins of life on this planet, the evolution of multicellular from unicellular organisms, and the biological necessity for a predetermined life-span. The most diverse phenomena, from 24-hour biological rhythms to dreams and neurotic symptoms, were seen as manifestations of Thanatos, striving to bring all living matter to rest and restore the inorganic state from which life had reluctantly been forced to emerge by the opposing powers of Eros.

In its broad metapsychological form, Freud’s theory conceived of the primal instincts as a “silent force” (Bibring, 1936), to be used in explaining biological phenomena like the rhythms of sleep and waking. It was seldom invoked in a clinical context, except to account for unusual states of instinctual “de-fusion,” when destructive energies could be observed in “pure culture.” Without reviewing the response of Freud’s followers to “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), we know that most analysts, then as now, rejected his theory of the primal instincts while eagerly accepting the structural hypothesis that Freud proposed in the same paper. The only major exceptions were Bernfeld and Feitelberg (1931), who related the death instinct to the thermodynamic theory of entropy, and Menninger (1942), who popularized the concept of unconscious guilt and a version of William James’s “moral equivalent of war.” Ironically, another exception was Melanie Klein, who used the death instinct in a clinical form that Freud would have rejected. The most elegant solution to the problem of what to do with Freud’s unwelcome theory was proposed by Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein (1949). They separated the grand metatheory of Eros and Thanatos from the clinical theory of sexual and aggressive drives, found the latter useful, and subjected it to a much needed exegesis and revision. The metatheory of the primal instincts was disposed of as purely biological speculation, an unnecessary “theoretical superstructure.”

Since, 1919, when Freud completed “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” we have, of course, seen another world war and innumerable minor ones, including the fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities, the extermination of the European Jews, and the first use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even without this knowledge, the death instinct seems to fit the First World War as “the war that nobody wanted” but everyone felt drawn into by irresistible forces; in Hamlet’s words “the imminent death of 20,000 men that for a fantasy and trick of fame, go to their graves like beds.” Freud’s (1915) thoughts at the time were profoundly sad, musing upon transience, the loss of truth and beauty, and the evanescence of civilized morality in the regressive atmosphere of war. A decade later, having created the theory of the primal instincts, he could imagine, in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930), the possibility of mutual self-destruction: “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man” (p. 145).

This was his answer to “the fateful question for the human species … whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbances of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” He thought this question might have a special interest at “precisely the present time.” But then, with his characteristic need for balance, Freud concluded his essay with a touch of optimism: “And now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers,’ eternal Eros, will make an effort to reassert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary.” And, at the very last, in a final sentence added in 1931, Freud expressed his doubt: “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?” (p. 145).

This essay, with its even balance and counterbalance, led Eissler (1985) to question whether Freud was “a pessimist contrecoeur,”in spite of himself, against his own natural temperament. But Freud had also left us data for making an equally plausible opposite interpretation—that he was consistently anti-Utopian, a staunch believer in the non perfectability of man. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” his theory required a certain symmetry between Eros and Thanatos, as two opposing forces, that both sex and aggression were equally important. But the reader is left with the impression that Death is in the ascendancy, and that the voice of Eros, as a “disturber of the peace,” is a feeble one. Toward the end of his essay, Freud himself questioned whether the whole dual instinct theory had evolved because there was “some comfort in it,” because the notion of an instinct, or some primordial force, provided an illusory sense of intellectual mastery in dealing with our basic helplessness. These afterthoughts of Freud’s echo his youthful enthusiasm for Feuerbach (McGrath, 1986), the mid-19th century philosopher who had also greatly influenced Marx. Feuerbach proposed that all religions, as well as the consolations of philosophy itself, reflect man’s feeble efforts to cope with the merciless powers of nature. In 1873, Freud had called Feuerbach the “man I honor and admire more than any other philosopher” (p. 104).

In his original formulation of the death instinct Freud (1920) concluded that “we have unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. For him death was the ‘true result and to that extent the purpose of life,’ while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the “will to live” (p. 50). Freud also attributed the discovery of the Unconscious to Schopenhauer, not to himself, and placed him next to Copernicus and Darwin in the pantheon of heroes who had put an end to man’s illusions about his own omnipotence (1917). Freud’s most eloquent reflections on war and the death instinct, as we know, occur in “Why War?” (1933b), a short essay that used the letter form to sum up his theories and reflections in a witty, conversational, half-bantering style. Freud also allowed himself an elegiac, almost poetic, freedom of expression, without minimizing his deep pessimism about the future of mankind. The exchange of letters began with Einstein’s acknowledging the noble aims of the League of Nations (one of whose agencies had...