午夜剧场

The global pandemic of COVID-19 is often compared to the global outbreak of the Spanish flu about 100 years ago. The Spanish flu is a common name for a new type of influenza that originated in the United States and Europe around March 1918 and spread worldwide. At the time, the virus had not been identified and was considered an unknown viral infection. Consequently, infection control measures reportedly included patient isolation, behavioral restrictions for contacts, personal hygiene, disinfection, postponement of gatherings, and the wearing of masks. These measures are almost identical to those we are taking against COVID-19 today. The difference is that in the Spanish flu, 99% of deaths occurred in people under the age of 65, with the highest number of deaths among young people aged 15 to 35. While the cause is not certain, it is not difficult to imagine that it also stems from the fact that the Spanish flu pandemic began in the midst of World War I and caused many infections on the battlefield.

However, in a place far removed from the battlefield, Sophie, the beloved daughter of Freud—the founder of psychoanalytic theory (and therapy)—died of the Spanish flu at the young age of 26. This occurred on January 25, 1920. According to "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud," a biography written by Ernest Jones, one of Freud's closest associates, her death was a bolt from the blue and a major psychological blow to him. He reportedly wrote in a letter to his close associate Eitingon, "(Sophie's death) has paralyzed me to the point where I don't know what to say."

In the summer of the same year, Freud completed a paper titled "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." This paper was distinct from his previous works based on clinical experience, being more speculative and philosophical. In it, he mentioned and discussed the "death drive" for the first time.

According to Jones, Freud made a strange request to Eitingon, asking him to "be a witness that (this paper) was already half-finished when Sophie was in the best of health." On the other hand, it is also said that February 20, 1920, was the first time he mentioned the "death drive" to Eitingon (James Strachey, "The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud"). Furthermore, it seems that the first time Freud mentioned the "death drive" to Jones was two weeks after Sophie's death. Jones stated, "If it were not for the fact that (in a letter two weeks after Sophie died) he accidentally mentions that he had been writing about the 'death drive' for some time, the suspicion might have arisen that his new ideas were a sign of an inner rejection of the influence of the disappointment of losing his daughter."

Even if the "death drive" theory was conceived before Sophie's death, as their testimony suggests, I cannot help but feel that her death had some influence on the construction of that theory. This is because I sense something like a protest against "unreasonable death" in Freud's "death drive" theory.

In the aforementioned paper, Freud fundamentally reformulated his theory of drives. Specifically, he broadly divided drives into two categories: the "death drive (ego drive)" and the opposing "life drive (sexual drive)."

As a premise for the "death drive," he considered that "living things are derived from inanimate matter," and stated, "If we may assume that living things die from internal reasons and return to inorganic matter, we can only say that the goal of all life is death," and that "the fact that higher animals have a certain average lifespan is, of course, proof of death from internal causes."

Some researchers consider this "death drive" to affirm the existence of "aggression directed toward oneself," but this is not necessarily the case. This is because Freud believed that the "death drive," also known as the "ego drive," included the "instinct for self-preservation." He stated, "The organism wishes to die in its own fashion, and these guardians of life were originally guardians of death. In this way, the paradox arises that the living organism resists most violently those actions (dangers) that might help it reach the goal of life by the shortest route (by a so-called short circuit)." In other words, the "death drive" attempts a literally desperate resistance to protect itself from external threats (dangers). At that time, the Spanish flu that took his beloved daughter's life may have been on Freud's mind.

On the other hand, Freud considered the "life drive (Eros)" to be the drive for passing on traits to the next organism through the joining (reproduction) of organisms. Since it is a drive to maintain "infinite life," so to speak, it stands in opposition to the "death drive."

Psychoanalyst Symington stated, "Talcott Parsons (an American sociologist) pointed out that this binding substance (Eros) in Freud's thought is similar to Durkheim's concept of society as an organic unit in which individuals are integrated into the whole organism through a value system with a binding effect. ... It is likely through Eros that people working in a company or institution have some form of group identity."

In that sense, I feel it could be said that Freud's "death drive" theory was raising an unconscious voice of protest, a "no," against the group identity of a society that caused and continued the war. Thinking of it this way, Freud's words that he had "conceived it before Sophie's death" might also be true.

Furthermore, in the aforementioned paper, Freud hypothesized that the human mind has a "stimulus barrier" to prevent it from being overwhelmed by stimuli from the outside world (emotions caused by stressors). He then considered "psychological trauma" to be the breach of this stimulus barrier caused by sudden exposure to intense external stimuli (energy) without the anticipation of anxiety. When a large amount of energy flows in from the outside due to such a breach of the stimulus barrier, the mind falls into great chaos. In any case, it tries to mobilize internal energy to control (push back) the flood of energy invading from the outside. He thought that as a result, energy that normally floats freely in the mind becomes bound to the single destroyed location and fails to reach other parts of the mind, leading to emotional paralysis and an inability to think. Freud immediately after Sophie's death seems to have been in exactly this state.

By the way, Freud's phrase "dreams are wish fulfillments" is famous, but in the aforementioned paper, he presented a different view of dreams. This was born from his understanding of the dreams of patients with war neurosis. They repeatedly reproduced traumatic experiences in their dreams. Regarding this, Freud came to believe that "...since the failure of anxiety to develop was the cause of the traumatic neurosis, these dreams are following the repetition compulsion... attempting to restore control over the stimulus while developing anxiety..."

Repetition compulsion refers to the tendency to repeatedly experience similar stressful situations due to various motives. In other words, their traumatic dreams were understood as an attempt to repair the "psychological trauma" by activating the defensive mechanism of "anxiety" while repeatedly reproducing the traumatic experience.

To me, the paper "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," completed after Sophie's death, seems like an attempt by Freud to approach the "essence of life and death" by gaining understanding from the treatment of people scarred by war, even while carrying the grief of his beloved daughter's death.

Freud used the word "Instinkt (instinct)" for animals and "Trieb (drive)" for humans. However, when translating Freud's works into English, "Trieb" was also translated as "instinct," so some literature in Japan has also translated it as "honno" (instinct). In this article, citations from such literature have been unified to "drive."

Ernest Jones, "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud" (Translated by Yasuhiko Taketomo and Haruhiko Fujii), Kinokuniya Shoten, 1982 Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" in "Collected Works of Freud" Vol. 6 (Translated by Keigo Okonogi et al.), Jimbun Shoin, 1970 James Strachey, "The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud" (Supervised and edited by Osamu Kitayama), Jimbun Shoin, 2005 Laplanche / Pontalis, "The Language of Psycho-Analysis" (Supervised translation by Jin Murakami), Misuzu Shobo, 1977 Neville Symington, "The Analytic Experience: For the Clinics" (Supervised translation by Yoshihiro Narita), Sogensha, 2006