Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
One reading we may make of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that it is a product not only of its historical context, the Waste Land of postwar Europe, but also that it is imbued with Freud’s own personal tragedy, the death of his daughter Sophie from the Spanish influenza in 1920. In this reading the so called death-drive, as a need of the organism to return to an inanimate state, finds emotional inverse not in the animate/inanimate divide, but rather in the mechanized mass slaughter brought about by the war, followed by the Spanish flu pandemic and, made most real for Freud, by his daughter’s death: her own return to the inanimate.
We will focus on two words: the inorganic and the inanimate. In the text these words seem to be used as near synonyms if not entirely interchangeable. They represent non-living substance, in other words the degree-zero of life. The inorganic/inanimate is what life is derived from, by some force, and it is what life returns to. “The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception” (BPP,1961, p 46). And likewise: “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.” (ibid)
Now, what lies beyond the pleasure principle is the compulsion to repeat. What is repeated is an earlier state of things. The death-drive then is the need to repeat, or return to the earliest state of things, the time of the inorganic before life existed. Freud describes this work as a “far-fetched speculation” (BPP, 1961, p 27); this seems an understatement for it is perhaps the furthest speculation, reaching to the origins of life itself: in other words, a billion-year speculation; this is not a primal fantasy, but a primordial one.
This speculation creates a puzzle for the reader: for if, as we know, that the compulsion to repeat is the acting-out of a memory long repressed in the unconscious, then does our unconscious somehow remember what it was like to be this inanimate state? To further speculate: does the inorganic/inanimate contain an unconscious from which we might make a transference of such feeling?
At this degree of metaphysical fantasy why not speculate another 4 billion years into the past to where the raw material of the earth was a molten sphere, crying out in agony for being forced to exist?
The melancholic may be prone to such wild speculations. Freud, ever self-aware, acknowledges that this may be the case with him. “Perhaps we have adopted the belief because there is some comfort in it. If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime’ Ανάγϰη [Necessity], than to a chance which might perhaps have been escaped. It may be, however, that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions which we have created ‘um die Schwere des Daseins zu ertragen’ note 3[to bear the burden of existence] (BPP, 1961, p 53).
We might conclude then that Freud is using these wild speculations, with their use of the superlatives inorganic/inanimate, in much the same way that his grandson, “this good little boy” (BPP, 1961, p 13), is using the wooden reel and string to play the fort/da game. That is, we might think of both of them as acting-out a simulated repetition of grief that restores “the instinct of mastery” (BPP, 1961, p 15). What they had experienced passively, the loss of mother/daughter, they now take on “an active part” (ibid).
But whereas the grandson simulates a grief over a mother who had only departed temporarily (this same Sophie, some years prior to her death), Freud simulates a grief over his daughter who is now gone forever.
