Talks with dead men

Tonight I am discussing Freud. My 1000 attempts of trying to quit smoking found some relief in finding out Freud himself had this habit and even though it threatened his health during his later years, he simply could not quit. As I am trying to find reasons why I keep going back to cigarettes (reduce my cognitive dissonance), this seemed like a pretty good one to hold on to.

As most geniuses, Freud had what himself described as an obsessive personality: concerned with cleanliness, order and control, he was very meticulous and accurate. Even further, he had a superstition about numbers and even he found religious beliefs to be ‘illusory’, he believed in telepathy. He spent his entire life studying other people’s lives, but he did not reveal much about his personal life. Freud’s autobiography is concentrated almost entirely on psychoanalysis. In 1885 he destroyed all his manuscripts, notes and letters over the last 14 years.

I especially appreciate about him the complete and utterly significant belief in his work. Although he had a tendency to generalise his findings, even though the results could have been isolated, he fell in love with his own ideas so much that nobody could dispute them. Think about it: all the great men have to believe in their own work because that is how change and evolution takes place. Nobody listens at first, but if it weren’t for Freud, we did not have psychoanalysis today.

Although he claimed his entire life he was a scientist, Freud also came up with a philosophical concept on life and death and human condition. He calls is ‘the death instinct’. All inorganic matter became organic due to external forces. So, for the rest of the organic matter existence, it is continuously searching for that primordial state of balance, where everything was inert. So, ‘the aim of life is death’.

Discussing this further, Freud believes there are 2 basic instincts: Eros – the force that wants to bring together mankind and the Death Instinct that wants to destroy things. So Freud came up with this dualistic model of Eros and Death as 2 forces in a struggle for the life of human species. This ambivalent pattern of thinking is another characteristic of obsessional personalities.

Basically, love keeps us together as human beings but we also have an inherent instinct to destroy all well around us. Maybe this is why the birth rates have been declining in the more advanced economies – the death instinct, the inorganic matter is calling us all. Or maybe not.

How about the also instinctual fear of death? We spend our life shivering at the mere thought of anybody dear to us dying. Our own end is something which we can’t even conceive until we are too close to it. That is self-preservation, this wish to live forever, the fascination we have with immortality. Isn’t that against all that Freud stated? How much of our fear of death is innate and how much is socialisation? We now know that all human behaviour is influenced by both our genetic code and environmental factors.

So, which is which? Are we born with the wish to live or to die? But, more important, do we only have these 2 options?