Psychoanalysis, Literature and War

Papers 1972-1995

Hanna Segal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134742172
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Salute mentale in psicologia

Many of the themes which were elaborated in Hanna Segal's earlier work return in this volume of her most recent papers. Two act as connecting strands and give the book its unity: the clinical usefulness of the concept of the death instinct and the relationship between fantasy and reality.

A past mistress at capturing the vitality of the clinical session on the page, Segal shows how the same conflicts between life and death instincts, fantasy and reality, are experienced in the consulting room, reflected in literature, and played out by nations in their attitudes to war.

Edited by John Steiner, this collection of writings by a leading psychoanalytic thinker provides a rich source of clinical insights and challenging theory for all analysts practising today.

PART ONE

Clinical psychoanalysis

1

On the clinical usefulness of the concept of the death instinct¹

At the end of Jack London’s Martin Eden, Martin commits suicide by drowning. As he sinks he automatically tries to swim.

It was the automatic instinct to live. He ceased swimming, but the moment he felt water rising above his mouth his hands struck out sharply with a lifting movement. ‘This is the will to live,’ he thought, and the thought was accompanied by a sneer.

London brings out vividly the hatred and the contempt Martin feels for that part of him that wishes to live. ‘“The will to live,” he thought disdainfully.’ As he drowns he has a tearing pain in his chest. ‘“The hurt was not death” was the thought that oscillated through his reeling consciousness. It was life—the pangs of life—this awful suffocating feeling. It was the last blow life could deal him.’

All pain comes from living. Freud described the death instinct first in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920). He linked it with the drive to return to the inorganic—the organism reacting to any disturbance to the status quo.² He postulated that the life instinct aims at combining elements into bigger units; it aims at life and propagation. (Hence, sexuality is part of it.) The death instinct aims at destructuralization, dissolution, death.

I think that Freud emphasizes the biological aspect which later allowed others, and sometimes himself, to describe his ideas about the death instinct as a biological speculation, partly defensively; he expected that his new idea would be found shocking and meet with great resistance, which, indeed, it did. We must not forget, however, that he was motivated in those speculations by purely clinical considerations about the repetition-compulsion, the nature of masochism, the concept of the death instinct, the murderousness of the melancholic superego, and so on. In The Ego and the Id (Freud, 1923) he makes clear the psychological aspect of the death instinct and the relevance of the concept, not only to melancholia and masochism, but to neuroses in general. ‘Defusion and a marked emergence of the death instinct are amongst the most noteworthy effects of many severe neuroses.’

One could formulate the conflict between the life and death instincts in purely psychological terms. Birth confronts us with the experience of needs. In relation to that experience there can be two reactions, and both, I think, are invariably present in all of us, though in varying proportions. One, to seek satisfaction for the needs: that is life-promoting and leads to object seeking, love, and eventually object concern. The other is the drive to annihilate: the need to annihilate the perceiving experiencing self, as well as anything that is perceived.

Sometimes Freud refers to this rejection of disturbance as the nirvana principle. Originally he thought that the nirvana principle was part of the pleasure-pain principle since it is a search for constancy, which he originally thought of as part of the pleasure principle. But later he equated it with the death instinct—the drive to return to the inorganic, that is death. The organism defends itself against the death drive by deflecting it so that it becomes aggression. The term ‘nirvana principle’, however, carries an implicit idealization of death, linked with some idealized fusion like the oceanic feeling. Nevertheless it is destructive since it aims at destroying all life, and Freud mainly emphasizes its destructiveness in such manifestations as repetition-compulsion, sado-masochism and the murderousness of the melancholic superego.

I think that the destructiveness towards objects is not only a deflection of self-destructiveness to the outside, as described by Freud—important though it is—but that also from the very beginning the wish to annihilate is directed both at the perceiving self and the object perceived, hardly distinguishable from one another. I shall return to this point later.

Freud says that the death instinct mostly operates silently within the body and that we can never see its pure manifestations—only manifestations in fusion with the libido. But he also speaks of defusion. I think that now with new technical developments, we have become more adept at teasing out the components belonging to the death instinct in the fusion. Also, with our access to more disturbed patients, we can often detect the operation of the death instinct in an almost pure form in conflict with the life forces, rather than in fusion, and that not in the psychotic only.

Mrs A is not psychotic. She is intelligent, sensitive, perceptive and capable of affection. She is, however, fragile. Her life, in some ways, was a perpetual torture. She was troubled by widespread feelings of persecution, subject to tormenting persecutory guilt and a variety of psychosomatic and hypochondriacal, forever shifting, fears. She was very inhibited in constructive external aggression. Her phantasy and emotional reactions to any stimulus of deprivation, anxiety, jealousy or envy were of extreme violence. ‘I want him dead. I want to kill all of them’, and so forth, was an almost immediate reaction to discomfort, and was genuinely and strongly felt. But more than that, there was constant violence against herself. She really came close to believing that the only immediate cure to the slightest headache was to cut one’s head off. She was constantly wishing to get rid of her limbs, her organs, in particular her sexual organs, not to experience any perception or impulse which could lead to frustration or anxiety. These attacks on herself, clearly going beyond attacks on internal objects, gave rise to somatic manifestations such as partial anaesthesia of sexual organs, migraines, and so on, as well as to constant hypochondriacal anxiety.

We had of course analysed various situations leading to her aggression, to projections into the objects—accounting for persecution and the re-internalization of persecutory objects—giving rise to persecutory guilt, and so on. We also analysed often her attacks on her perceptual apparatus, physical and mental. But one session seemed to have brought it together in a simple way, which she found particularly convincing and which I think led to a real shift in her functioning. Mrs A is of mixed East-European and English descent. She is often preoccupied with the East-West conflict and the dread of a nuclear war. The session I wish to report was last but one before a break. She had started the session by referring to a CND meeting which she wanted to go to, but didn’t, and complained of her own passivity and her inability to get herself together to do things she wants to do or things that she thinks are right. She then spoke briefly about her fears of nuclear warfare, in particular of the question of whose finger was on the button. At that time there was particular preoccupation about American control over nuclear weapons sited in England. One of the reasons why she did not go was that she did not want to ring a friend whom she suspected of looking down on her, and from then on she went on to some other diffuse persecutory fears, obviously involving, in greater or lesser measure, all her objects. I felt as though the analytic space was getting filled with persecutory objects of a very fragmentary kind.

I felt it pointless to follow individual bits of projection and persecution, and was more concerned by two elements in the session. One, that she felt unable to confront and counteract something she disapproved of (represented by not being able to attend a discussion meeting of the CND); and the second, that there was no reference to the approaching end of term. I thought that the increase of fragmentation and persecution was related to the approaching break. I mentioned that to her. Her reaction was immediate and violent. She said: ‘I hate last sessions—can’t stand them. I wish I could just push a button to make it disappear.’ I reminded her of the beginning of the session—and said that now we knew whose finger was on the button. She relaxed and the whole atmosphere of the session changed. She said she knew that she wouldn’t mind a nuclear war. In fact, she might wish for it if she could be sure that she and her child would die immediately. What she couldn’t bear was the thought of surviving in a post-nuclear-war world—perpetual fall-out and all. I pointed out to her that she was alive and looked devotedly after her child. She was in fact surviving; there was a living part of her wishing herself and her child to survive or she wouldn’t be here. But it seemed that after pushing the ‘mental button’, as she frequently does, she often felt as though she was living in a mental post-war situation and subjected to a perpetual fall-out. The diffuse experience of persecution in a large part of the session was like the fall-out.

Her associations to pushing a button and to the fall-out threw a vivid light on how she dealt with her death drive. Pushing the button was an expression of the death instinct, but combined with immediate projection, so that the threat of death was felt to come from outside—the fall-out. I think that in that session she got in touch with an almost direct experience of her own wish for total annihilation of the world and herself. The interpretation on these lines immediately lessened the persecution and put her in touch with the psychic reality of her own drives. The impact of that realization and subsequent relief were very striking and lasting. It did not do away with her problems, of course, but the intensity of destructiveness and anxiety was much diminished.

A confrontation with the death instinct, in favourable circumstances, mobilizes the life instinct as well. This was vividly demonstrated by Mr B.

Mr B was facing the prospect of having to end his analysis. This patient normally manifested little anxiety and generally little feeling. Soon after facing that prospect he came to a Monday session feeling shattered. He said he had had an experience on Sunday which was deadly. He was walking in the park with his family and suddenly he felt all cold and totally invaded by death. He didn’t actually feel anxious, just physically and mentally cold and progressively paralysed. He didn’t know if he could reach his car. He reached it and felt a bit safer inside it. He was sure he would die or else was dead, and the only way he could think of getting rid of this deadness inside was to come and to kill me. When he got home and felt a little better he tried to think whether he wanted to kill me out of hatred or as a punishment for having brought him to this pass. But it didn’t seem to feel right. All he knew was that that was the way for him to get rid of the deadness. The experience not only made a shattering impact on him; it had a strong impact on me. One could dismiss it as a simple agoraphobic attack, but I had no doubt in the session that we were dealing with life-and-death forces.

Later in the week, as we were analysing the event, he asked me for a replacement session the following week. He had had a fairly long notice that that week I was having to be away on the Monday. He said he couldn’t face a short week and asked if I would see him on Saturday instead. I agreed, and he had an unusually strong emotional reaction. He cried, and said he had never in his life asked for anything meaningful from anyone and had not expected to get it. Later it appeared that part of his experience of paralysis in the park was that he felt as though he had no limbs, no eyes, no mouth, and it struck me that he was describing something like a yet-unformed embryo. In subsequent sessions he told me that when he asked for the replacement session he felt as though he now had arms that could reach, eyes that could cry and a mouth that could ask. Soon after, object concern appeared. He was horrified at the thought of what it would have done to me if he had had a spectacular breakdown or died towards the end of his analysis. He also said that he always knew he was self-destructive, but not how self-destructive; he did not know he actually wanted to die, but having experienced what it feels like to be invaded by death he knew now that he didn’t really want it.

This patient had always had an enormous resistance against any idea of separateness. He could not conceive of separateness or separation otherwise than as a catastrophic birth. His reaction to the prospect could be seen as a wish to return to the womb. But once there is a taste of life the return to the womb is a violent, mutilating procedure: to become an unformed embryo he had in his phantasy to chop off his limbs and his senses—not a benign return to the womb but a violent expression of the death instinct.

The experience of the real consequences of giving in to this death drive mobilized his life forces in opposition. His later phantasy of acquiring limbs and senses was under the aegis of the life instinct; it was an acknowledgement of needs, of the wish to live and a hopeful reaching for a satisfying object. In those sessions, and subsequent ones, he could feel need, love, gratitude and anger with a strength and depth never experienced by him before.

Freud said that the death instinct is dealt with by deflection and turned against objects. My patient’s impulse to come and kill me, as the one way of dealing with the death within, seems almost like a textbook example. Klein’s view, as I understand it, is that this deflection is not only a conversion into aggression, but predominantly a projection. At the same time, the death instinct inside becomes aggression (Freud’s deflection) directed to the bad object created by the original projection. It is a projection that accounts for Mrs A living in the fall-out.³ In the analytical situation the projection of the death instinct is often very powerful and affects the counter-transference. It can take many forms. For instance, with Mr B, I was often invaded by paralysis and a sense of deadness; with other patients, pessimism and despair. Sometimes the projection stimulates aggression. Both A and B were past masters at stimulating aggression in others and getting themselves into situations where they were misunderstood, misjudged, exploited and persecuted. The analyst was constantly pushed and pressed to become a persecutory superego.

Sometimes, on the contrary, the patient projects his life instincts into the analyst, leaving the matter of survival in the analyst’s hands, and stimulates excessive protectiveness and concern. Mrs A’s fragility and refusal to fight for herself could have that effect. It is important in the session to be aware of those projections or the analysis may become very static, or the analyst is pushed into an acting-out of their protective impulses.

There is always a great deal of pain involved in the operation of the death instinct. The question arises: if the death instinct aims at not perceiving, not feeling, refusing the joys and the pain of living, why is the operation of the death instinct associated with so much pain? I think the pain is experienced by the libidinal ego originally threatened by the death instinct. The primary source of pain is the stirring of the death instinct within, a dread of annihilation. As the instinct is projected it becomes the dread and pain of persecution and guilt. Freud described the superego of the melancholic as ‘a pure culture of the death instinct’. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud (1930) had come to the conclusion that, in depth, all guilt feeling arises from the operation of the death instinct. For Klein both anxiety and guilt have their origins in it. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud (1926) says that the first fear is a fear of annihilation. This seems in conflict with his statement that the child has no concept of death. But maybe the two statements are not as contradictory as they seem. I came to the view that death wishes and fear of death, with the possibility of symbolic survival, are a later and different experience from the primitive dread of annihilation and the terrors associated with it.

So the operation of the death instinct produces fear, pain and guilt in the self that wishes to live and be undamaged. But there is also the problem of the pleasure in the experience of pain. This is the problem that exercised Freud in his consideration of masochism. I think the pleasure in the pain is a complicated phenomenon. Partly, it is the sheer satisfaction of an instinct. The death instinct, like the life instinct, seeks satisfaction, and the satisfaction of the death instinct, short of death, is in pain.

Mr C had the following dream. He was in a deep, dark, wet cave, extremely gloomy and oppressed. In the dream he asked himself, ‘Why do I want to stay here?’ This type of gloomy dream was not new and we had often had occasion to analyse his melancholic identification with his father, a miner who had died in a mining accident. What was new in the dream was the question not ‘Why do I have to stay here?’ but ‘Why do I want to be here?’. This dream brought the patient great insight into his unconscious primary masochism. As with Mr B, there were of course womb elements in the dream, but it was a death womb, preferable to a life womb because a life womb implied the possibility of birth and life.

In enjoying pain there is also the satisfaction of triumph of the death-dealing part over the wish to live. Martin Eden thinks of his wish to live with a sneer. This sneer of triumph, conscious or unconscious, is an important component in the negative therapeutic reaction—not only the sadistic pleasure of triumph over the defeated analyst but also the masochistic pleasure of the triumph over that part of oneself that wishes to live and to grow.

The pleasure in pain arises also because of the invariably present libidinization and sexualization. Mr D is very self-destructive and used to spend his life in an endless and fairly successful pursuit of uninterrupted sexual pleasure. His libido is used to make acceptable, and cover up, a sadism and masochism which, prior to his analysis, were completely unconscious. The conscious, sensuous pleasure masks the fact that the deeper pleasure is inflicting pain and destruction on others and oneself. Generally, except in overt perversions, the pleasure in the pain, and the active seeking of pain, is deeply unconscious. To Mr C the fact that he wanted the pain was a revelation.

Libidinization is always present as part of fusion of the life and death instincts. But fusion can take many different forms. In healthy development the fusion of the life and death instinct is under the aegis of the life instinct, and the deflected death instinct, aggression, is at the service of life. Where the death instinct predominates the libido is at the service of the death instinct. This is particularly evident in perversions. A delicate balance is established between the life and death forces and a disturbance of this balance in the process of analysis is perceived as a great threat.

Mr D had the following dream:

There was an area in which everything and everybody was immobile and nearly dead. Around that area, at regular intervals, there were nuclear weapons facing outwards. If anybody approached the area the weapons would automatically trigger off. Amongst the near-dead people in the area were his parents.

That dream illustrates vividly those states of mind described by Betty Joseph (1982) as near death, in which life is allowed to continue only just so long as nothing is really alive and functioning. The dream is meant to warn the analyst that approaching this area, which would disturb the deathly balance, would mobilize unbound destructiveness.

Since the publication of Klein’s Envy and Gratitude (1957), the problem of the interrelation of death instinct and envy has preoccupied many analysts. Klein had noticed that envy and the death instinct have a main common feature. They attack life and sources of life. Klein, however, simplified the relation, saying that envy is the outward manifestation of the death instinct. Envy is necessarily an ambivalent feeling, since it is rooted, as she herself noticed, in need and admiration. But like all ambivalent feelings there may be a predominance of libidinal or destructive forces. T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• The New Library of Psychoanalysis
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Clinical psychoanalysis
• 1 On the clinical usefulness of the concept of the death instinct
• 2 Phantasy and reality
• 3 On symbolism
• 4 A delusional system as a defence against the re-emergence of a catastrophic situation
• 5 Early infantile development as reflected in the psychoanalytical process: steps in integration
• 6 Some clinical implications of Melanie Klein’s work: emergence from narcissism
• 7 The Oedipus complex today
• 8 Paranoid anxiety and paranoia
• 9 Termination: sweating it out
• 10 The uses and abuses of counter-transference
• Part Two: Literature and politics
• 11 Joseph Conrad and the mid-life crisis
• 12 Salman Rushdie and the sea of stories; a not-so-simple fable about creativity
• 13 Silence is the real crime
• 14 From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and after: socio-political expressions of ambivalence
• Reference
• Name index
• Subject index