Many, many years ago I taught a series of undergraduate seminars, all based on the idea that stories are a form of psychoanalysis. It was an attempt to look under the surface of literary classics to see what they were really about, as opposed to what anyone unfamiliar with psychoanalytic theory thought they were about. As you might expect, by the end of the semester, students were speaking mostly in italics, as in, “I know what you’re really saying when you say that,” or, simply, “Interesting,” when anybody ventured an opinion about anything.
They all had become semi-aware pains in the ass. Judge for yourself whether that’s an overall improvement or not.
I can remember a few of the seminar texts: One was Emily Dickenson’s collected poetry, poems so cryptic that you can derive a multitude of contradictory deep meanings from them. When I started a class with Dickinson’s “A Wounded Deer—Leaps Highest/I’ve heard the Hunter tell/’Tis but the Ecstasy of death,” I knew we would spend some time in the crowded dark psyche of the culture. When I presented Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” as a study in paranoia, I knew that my budding psychoanalysts would leave the classroom appalled that their path through life contained a serious risk of eventually mistrusting anybody they couldn’t control—which was everybody, unless they were willing to resort to violence.
It sounds cruel, but it was a kind of empathy training. When we looked at Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, we understood the war-castrated Jake Barnes as a stand-in for Hemingway himself, and then we looked at Hemingway’s various head injuries, divorces, battle traumas, and suicide as symptoms of a familial lack of agency. I know that not many of us would consider a fabulously successful literary career capped by a Nobel Prize in Literature the desperate flailings of an incomplete and ineffectual human being, but in Hemingway’s case, it’s not an unreasonable conclusion.
We read Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men as a narrative of narcissism triumphant, a vision of what happens when ego defenses siphon away the energy needed to construct an authentic self, leaving behind a defective facsimile of a human being in the person of Huey Long, the would-be dictator of America.
The novel itself, in its reduction of human life to a Big Twitch, is a supreme expression of American nihilism. That’s best described as what happens when it’s easier and less terrifying to believe in nothing than to fight the cultural toxins that are the marinade of your life.
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A few paragraphs in, and we’ve reached the weeds. No marinade metaphor is needed to express the lethality of a biosphere-threatening civilization whose every move is prep-work for suicide, whose leaders are in the grip of murderous unconscious impulses, whose systems are poisoning the planet as surely as alcohol-producing yeast cells poison alcohol-producing yeast. Human extinction is a feature of our future, not a bug.
Given that future, it’s not surprising that the humans who make it to the top of the civilizational heap do so in the grip of unconscious death wishes. Their success is strong evidence that the rest of us want to die, too. The collapse of our civilization promises a peace that passes understanding, simply because understanding isn’t possible when you’re dead.
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Recently I’ve started seeing evidence that Sigmund Freud is undergoing reputational rehab. Monographs by neuroscientists, of all people, indicate that psychoanalysis can increase self-awareness, and self-awareness can direct the brain toward life, joy, and community—our cultural libido—instead of toward dead-end ego defenses like denial, self-deception, projection, and dissociation. Happiness can come from consciousness, however counterintuitive that seems.
It’s apparent that when the decision was made to cancel Freud and declare psychoanalysis a pseudoscience, lots of babies were thrown out with the bathwater.
One baby that hasn’t yet been rescued is Freud’s postulate that libidinal impulses are balanced by a wish to die—Eros is countered by Thanatos, in Freudian terms. This idea reached its apotheosis in Civilization and Its Discontents, a 1929 work where Freud casts civilization itself as profoundly opposed to human happiness and humans as profoundly opposed to civilization. In both conflicts, death is put forward as a solution.
But Freud is not talking about biological death. He’s talking about the death of the womb, where consciousness never arises because there’s no need for it, where one has descended into what he calls the “oceanic feeling” of floating in a controlled environment, where all feelings are good ones and all needs are recognized as your needs, and where you feel like an integral part of a limitless whole. If narcissism has a purpose, it’s to get back to that blissful state, no matter how grotesque the effort.
My undergraduate seminar didn’t read E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”—it contained too many spoilers—but it’s probably the best imagining of what happens when a technological society tries to realize the death of the womb. In that story, civilization goes underground due to the poisoning of the air and land. The whole world becomes a collection of subterranean hotel rooms, where humans are fed, clothed, and cleaned by a giant machine that keeps them at the developmental level of a third-trimester fetus. Communication is through screens only. Touching another human is considered vaguely dirty. Wish-fulfillment comes under the rubric of room service.
Then, of course, the machine goes kaput.
E.M. Forster discerned that deep within humanity’s technological thrust lay a desire for a figurative death. He was also perceptive enough to realize that a figurative death eventually turns into the real thing.
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Consider Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump. If you believe in the Great Man Theory of History, these four can be considered Great Jerks of History, or Great Authors of Our Current Troubles, or Great People Who Can Distract Us From Thinking About Climate Change, or Great Death-Wish Guys Whose Go-To Phrase Is “After You.” They’ve all brought way more death into the world than life, way more misery than joy, and exponentially more conflict than peace. They are the death wish personified.
That said, they’ve paid close attention to the fine distinction between death and death in the womb, and they’ve opted for the latter, using their power to insulate themselves from work and pain, from empathy, from conscience and self-consciousness. Bathing in cultural amniotic fluid, they have constructed selves adequate to their environs.
They are not people who will have novels written about their inner lives. If they end up in anyone’s artistic effort, it will be as characters forged by some monstrous event. To return to my ancient stare-beneath-the-surface seminars, think of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, the murderous dead-eyed Popeye in Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Cathy Ames in Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Psychopaths, all of them, seeking power with no purpose.
Psychopaths make good literary villains. They can hold a novel together, although it will be a novel with casualties.
They’re less effective outside of literature, in what we call reality. They exert their undiluted will on history, but it’s temporary. A generation after they succumb to old age or assassination, they’re remembered with scorn or embarrassment, even by their offspring and hangers-on.
They lead a world heading for a fatal repeat of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. If they hadn’t been born, our lives would be different and probably better. They have ensured that civilization won’t do anything about the heat-death of the planet until it’s too late.
It’s worth looking at what they have in common.
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All of them have PTSD. Anyone with the condition has gone through a self-destroying event, one where an unforgettable and unforgivable event has eliminated any connection between past and future.
A new self has to be constructed, often in the absence of language adequate to the job. Too often, the new self resembles a suit of armor against whatever wrecked the old self. To borrow from Freud: Where id was, ego shall be. Where ego was, overwhelming ego defenses will be. Any opposition must be completely and utterly destroyed.
The trouble is that there’s nobody in there.
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Netanyahu’s older brother was killed in combat in 1976 while leading a raid at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda.
Xi’s half-sister hanged herself at the military academy where she had been confined because she and Xi’s father had been declared an enemy of the state during China’s cultural revolution. Xi himself spent seven years of forced labor during his adolescence and early adulthood.
Putin was raised alone, but two older brothers had died before he was born, one as an infant and one at the age of two, of starvation and diphtheria during the Siege of Leningrad in 1942.
Trump’s older brother died at the age of 42 of an alcohol-induced heart attack, after failing as an airline pilot and husband and being attacked by his father and Donald for quitting the family business. This was a family that practiced capital punishment.
Psychoanalysts are notorious for saying there is no such thing as an accident, which is probably overstating the case. But it’s no accident that the people now running our world were born into an environment of unimaginable violence, both societal and familial. Along the way they learned to use death as a survival tool.
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It’s no accident that these four leaders all experienced sibling death.
The death of a brother or sister, even if it occurred before your own birth, forces a family to add an extra room in the house. Often enough it’s a closet, but the closet door doesn’t have a lock, and something real but unseen lives there. Over time, that something gets more solid, more visible, and more mobile, even if it’s only the sharp outline delineating words not spoken, sounds not heard, memories not visited. Eventually it brings with it a terrifying wordless presence.
For the child who has lost a sibling, life becomes an exercise in looking in the mirror and seeing somebody else. Pretending that what’s in the mirror doesn’t exist is like pretending that the giant elephant turd in the living room is a footstool.
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Even if you’ve mastered every conceivable psychological defense, a missing sibling is a flaw in the armor, the microbe that slips through the mask, the arrow that finds its way to the soft spot of the heel.
You’re forced into a kind of angry empathy with the dead, a need to avenge a crime that eventually, due to your inability to do anything about it, becomes your fault. Your own defenses turn against you. Ghosts start beckoning, and it occurs to you that they might switch places with you if they get a chance.
You start talking to them. In your sleep, at first. One of the first questions you ask is, “What do you want?” You find that they’ve already prepared an answer, and it has to do with a life usurped.
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One of the reasons this world is riding the rails toward doom is that we accept our leaders at face value. We shouldn’t.
We should at least ask if they’re as conscious as we are, and if not, why not. We should ask about their blind spots and cognitive traps and what caused them. We should subject them to as much psychoanalysis as we can muster, treat them as the invented characters that they are, and start searching for their authors.
The people who constructed their life stories have a lot to answer for.
It’s not an accident that Freud and his deconstructive invention were cast into outer darkness. His perceptions have become anathema to a certain type of literal-mindedness, one favoring black-and-white issues rather than ambiguity, action in the face of thought, cruelty in the face of empathy, the simplicity of genocide in the face of complex cultural differences.
If we won’t forgo literal-mindedness about ourselves, we should at least be literal about death, because that’s the track our leaders are following.