The Psychology of Death in Fantasy and History

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH IN FANTASY AND HISTORY

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH rN FANTASY AND HISTORY Edited by Jerry S. Piven

PRAEGER

Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The psychology of death in fantasy and history / edited by Jerry S. Piven. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-98178-9 (alk. paper) 1. Death—Psychological aspects—History. 2. Fantasy—History. I. Piven, Jerry S. BF789.D4P79 2004 155.9'37—dc22 2003062438 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2004 by Jerry S. Piven All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003062438 ISBN: 0-275-98178-9 First published in 2004 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Byrne Piven Actor, Poet, Father, and Uncle Who faced death with rarest courage


Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6

Acknowledgments Introduction: Approaching Death Jerry S. Piven Death, Fantasy, and the Politics of Self-Destruction Siamak Movahedi Buddhism, Death, and the Feminine Jerry S. Piven Uncanny Dolls: Images of Death in Rilke and Freud Eva-Maria Simms Death, Fantasy, and Religious Transformations Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi Europe's Culture of Death Rudolph Binion Creativity and Death in Psychoanalysis Hans-Jurgen Wirth

7 The Idol and the Idolizers: Ernest Becker's Theory of Expanded Transference as a Tool for Historical Criticism and Interpretation with an Addendum on Transference and Terrorism Daniel Liechty

ix 1 13 37 71 87 119 137

163

viii

CONTENTS

8 Thoughts for the Times on Terrorism, War, and Death Hans-Jurgen Wirth 9 Love, Separation, and Death in a Japanese Myth Yuko Katsuta 10 Fundamentalism, Defilement, and Death George Victor 11 Death, Neurosis, and Normalcy: On the Ubiquity of Personal and Social Delusions Jerry S. Piven 12 Unveiling Mexican Cultural Essences: Death and Spirituality Luz Maria Solloa Garcia 13 Adaptive Insights into Death Anxiety Robert Langs 14 Laughing at Death NeilJ.Elgee Index About the Editor and Contributors

177 203 219

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267 275 291 311 321

Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks are owed those who encouraged and facilitated this anthology without desire for fame or financial reward. I would also like to express my gratitude to Debora Carvalko of Praeger Press for her patience and generosity Of course, I will always thank most my dear wife Miyoko for her love, intelligence, fortitude, assistance, and sense of humor.


Introduction: Approaching Death Jerry S. Piven

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments. —Percy Bysshe Shelley (1821), Adonais, stanza 52 The articles in this volume seek a psychological understanding of death in fantasy and history. Studies of history are rarely psychological, and accounts of death most often chronicle what people consciously stated without questioning whether such statements truly reflected the depths of their emotions and fantasies. One can read countless narrations of medieval deathbed scenes. Do w e assume that the dying individuals merely accepted death quietly, or may w e question this appearance, discern the inspiration of faith in salvation, explore the language and imagery further to learn just h o w one might have conceived of death, the inevitability of decomposition, the thought that a beautiful bride might be consumed by maggots, or rot in Hell? If w e read Victorian poets limning sexual intercourse with corpses, do w e dismiss it as fashionable trope, banal necrophilic perversion, histrionic dramatics, or perhaps, w o n d e r w h y someone might be sexually aroused by death and rotting women? When members of numerous cults bask in apocalyptic imagery and bathe in the joyful thought of being reborn in a purified world, does it not behoove us to delve into their psyches?

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T H E PSYCHOLOGY OF D E A T H I N FANTASY A N D HISTORY

This being said, even psychoanalytic interpretations of history virtually ignore the impact of death, the fear of mortality, nonbeing, and decay. For the most part psychoanalysis disdains the idea that the fear of death plays a central role in our emotions, both reducing death to a displacement of castration or guilt, and adhering to the notion that the fear of death is a symptom of a psychological problem (cf. Piven, in press-a, in press-b). However, this volume follows in the wake of an emerging tradition that sees death as a critical motivation for the genesis of belief systems, fantasies, delusions, and numerous psychopathological syndromes. The psychoanalytic denial of death does not preclude us from interpreting death psychoanalytically and psychohistorically Below I illustrate how death is a deeply intricate, elusive, crucial, and ubiquitous influence on human psychology and history, thus intimating the spectrum of issues examined in this anthology. POINT OF DEPARTURE: THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CULTURE AND HISTORY From a psychoanalytic and psychohistorical perspective, a significant portion of history can be interpreted in terms of childhood conflict and trauma, the repetition and projection of infantile fantasies into religion, social order, and cosmos. How a culture or individual envisions god(s), worship, the worth of humanity, good and evil, derives from the complex matrix of conflict, compromise, rage, terror, and love. God may be vengeful or compassionate. Human beings may be sinful, shameful, and filthy, or they may partake of the cosmic divinity of the gods themselves. Cultural worldviews, religion, and even politics may be understood as transferences: repetitions of past relations and images which not only distort the present and imbue it with imperceptible fantasy, but also serve as defenses against present reality. From a Freudian perspective, religion is a neurotic repetition of the past and a pathological evasion of reality. History can be read as the genesis of particular mental illnesses and the symbolism of their corresponding delusional fantasies on a social scale (Freud, 1907, 1913, 1927, 1930, 1939).1 Psychoanalytic research into childhood discovered how the provision of contact, comfort, and security, not just bodily satiation, are imperative for healthy growth (cf. Eagle, 1984; Fairbairn, 1941; Mitchell & Black, 1995). For the infant there is either pleasure and security or terrifying helplessness and agitation. The child learns to differentiate himself from his mother and emerge from her protection slowly, with much trepidation, and so vulnerably, that disturbances in psychological development centering on object relations and identity formation can lead to critical deficiencies and pathologies.2

INTRODUCTION: A P P R O A C H I N G D E A T H

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Cadences of childhood pain and conflict are manifested in beliefs, fantasies, and the sacred. For instance, one might recognize the longing for an afterlife or salvation, the erection of a church, burial mound, omphalos, 3 or pyramid, as symbolic fantasies of reunion with the mother of infancy. The symbolism of these structures is elusive, and they mean many things at the same time. Egyptian pyramids are not merely massive tombs; they emerged from archaic images of the god being born as a flower from a mound of earth, gradually increasing in majesty and magical immortality for individual pharaohs. A pyramid is a denial of death and disappearance, a testament to narcissistic grandiosity, an alchemical sanctum suspending the mummified corpse while its soul is transported to the afterlife. And the rebirth of the god from the earth is still manifested in its holy symmetry, a womb from which the pharaoh is regestated and reborn. His coffin is a neb ankh, a house or lord of life, inside which the image of the goddess Nut is depicted so that the deceased may pass through her body in rebirth. We can always find fantasies of surrogate wombs, protecting and sheltering architecture, substitutes for the lost body of mother. This matrix is also highly conflicted, which is why the feminine also contains a terrifying and evil aspect beside the nurturing one. In addition to the sheltering womb we find innumerable images of the murderous goddess or siren, all derived from the infantile terror of maternal cannibalism, punishment, and rage. History must also be seen in terms of the male reaction to the feminine, to his fear of her anger, her power to give life, and her sexuality.4 How a culture conceives and derogates the feminine reflects its conflicts and trauma, how terrified, resentful, or loving toward its maternal origins.5 In sum, cosmos is psyche symbolized (Ricoeur, 1967). TERROR, DEVELOPMENT, FANTASY, AND HISTORY It is these intricacies of development and their concomitant terrors that circumscribe history. Amidst these psychosexual tribulations, the terrors of violent injury, abandonment, helplessness, and disintegration saturate the emotional life of the child and lead to defensive responses and derangements. The substratum of psychopathology is the dread of annihilation and death, whether these terms imply a conceptual understanding of death or inchoate and even pre-categorical images or feelings of being killed. The anxiety impelling defense and pathology is ultimately an overwhelming terror, a threat which scares the human organism into fearing for its life, whether it knows death as a concept or not. The impact and defensive management of these terrors evolve into the conscious and unconscious imagery of death: beliefs and concep-

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tions about the end of life, and the fantasies which contain the terror, expiate its danger, arrest its conscious awareness, deny its permanent reality. It is this horror of death which generates fantasy, illusion, and history. Within the matrix of conflict and illusion, the terror of death always holds sway as impulsion for religious fantasies, and the psychological investigation of history must contend with the horrific facts of human frailty, transience, and putrefaction. Culture itself may be understood as the innumerable ways societies defend themselves against helplessness and annihilation, how they mould and recreate the world in accordance with their wishes and anxieties, the social mechanisms employed to deny annihilation and death. Whether one speaks of the construction of massive burial tombs, magical transformations of death into eternal life, or afterlives and resurrections, the need to cope with death and deny its awesome terror and affect are the sine qua non of religion, culture, ideology, and belief systems in general. These are imagined in order to palliate the terror of death, decay, and annihilation. For some this should be obvious. Can one explore the history of religion without perpetually being struck by the sheer terror of death motivating the invention of afterlives, necromancies, and mortuary cults? Robert Jay Lifton (1970) arrives at similar conclusions with his concept of "symbolic immortality," where societies transform their belief systems in accordance with their changing needs in order to defend themselves against the threat of annihilation and impending mortality. Ernest Becker (1973) describes death as "the worm at the core" of human fantasies of importance and significance. The belief system must enable the society to feel as though it were protected and had a place in the continuity of life and the divine. The sacred must be able to instill a cohesive conviction of the meaning and significance of life, that individuals may find some measure of immortality in the belief system. Indeed it is because these beliefs and practices deny death, the threat of annihilation, and insure symbolic immortality that they are sacred. As such the sacred often becomes the impetus for mass movements and revolutions, which provide feelings of moral victory, personal meaningfulness, and transcendence through the ceremony, ideology, and fervor driving them. Lifton (1970) calls this "revolutionary immortality," the "shared sense of participating in revolutionary ferment, and of transcending individual death by 'living on' indefinitely within this continuing revolution" (p. 34). Symbolic immortality can take a variety of forms, all of which are reflected in the sacred and transcendent, whether ideological, revolutionary, religious, even secular and occupational. One can live symbolically through works of art or literature:


5

Now stands my task accomplished, such a work As not the wrath of Jove, nor fire nor sword Nor the devouring ages can destroy. Let, when it will, that day, that has no claim But to my mortal body, end the span Of my uncertain years. Yet I'll be borne, The finer part of me, above the stars, Immortal, and my name shall never die. (Ovid, 8 C.E., p. 379) One can live through the continuance of nature: "The state may collapse but the mountains and rivers remain" (Lifton, 1979, p. 22). Or one can live through one's children, in the comfort that part of one will survive. However, as mentioned, social ideologies, religious beliefs and practices, may be viewed as transference phenomena, imbued with conflict, fantasy, and denials of reality. In sum, this unites the developmental complexity and fantasy-life of individuals with group semiotics and the sacred.6 This is a framework in which we can view cultural development and change as transference dynamics, regression, restitution, and the projection of defense mechanisms and compromise formations into new modes of belief and practice which insure symbolic immortality. Lifton (1970) states aptly "the shifting modes of immortality mark the great turning points in history" (p. 38)7 The analysis of religion in history should demonstrate the universality of death terror, and numerous empirical studies support the proposition that death anxiety is a general phenomenon, not an aberration or anomalous case.8 If infinite fantasies on death emerge from development, death anxiety cannot be reduced to childhood conflict or trauma because death anxiety is universal and exerts its influence on the psyche regardless of upbringing, trauma, or abuse. The particular problems of infancy will impact on the severity and particular evolution of death anxiety in the individual. Thus the gradual expansion of consciousness and self-awareness will include its own burgeoning of terror management or disorder. In recent decades, researchers have been exploring the manner in which childhood development and character disorder reflects the management of death anxiety. James McCarthy's (1980) analysis of clinical findings indicated that death anxiety correlates with depression and separation-individuation phenomena. Irvin Yalom (1980) also did extensive studies of children and their relation to conception and imagery of death, arguing further that death pervades our fundamental emotions, fantasies, and occupations. Noel Walsh (1996) explored how death anxiety impacted on development and the stratification of neurosis. While empirical studies seem to indicate the universality of death anxiety, terror management depends on both cultural and individual factors.

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Recently Leifer (1997) and Loy (1996) have deftly elucidated Buddhist wisdom on death and its importance for psychology. One of the most radical perspectives on death anxiety comes from Langs (1997, in press-a, in press-b), who asserts that there is a fundamental, defensively motivated flaw in the basic psychoanalytic focus on intrapsychic processes like unconscious memories, needs, fantasies, relational patterns, and narcissistic needs. Langs points out that biological organisms have evolved and are designed to adapt first and foremost to environmental conditions, especially those that are traumatic and life threatening. Inherent to the appreciation of the role played by external dangers in emotional life is the recognition of the fundamental role played by death and death anxieties in the vicissitudes of both emotional health and maladaptations. Indeed, according to Langs, the very core of psychoanalytic thinking is, in part, constructed as a defense against the experience and processing of the death anxieties that humans acquired when they evolved language capabilities and which, to this very day, plague us all even as they fuel our most creative moments in life. AWAKENING TO DEATH How is this useful for psychoanalytic or psychohistorical inquiry? This dimension has been thus far both neglected and resisted in a true psychoanalytic sense. Death anxiety and mortal terror have been salient and driving forces which have shaped history and culture. One can barely examine the Egyptian mortuary cult, its obsession with disrupting decay, with demanding eternity and denying evanescence, without incorporating an understanding of the symbology and psychological complexity of death anxiety Weary, weary are the members of Osiris! They shall not be weary, they shall not putrefy, they shall not decay, they shall not swell up! May it be done to me in like manner, for I am Osiris. (The Egyptian Book of the Dead, chapter 45)9 Here the pharaoh recites the incantation which catalyzes his godhood and denies the corruptibility and putrescence of his mortal flesh. It is a magical act of denial and undoing, a hallucinatory act of narcissistic inflation which transforms the reality of death into the fulfillment of the wish for transcendence and immortality. Nor can one grasp the complexity of Christianity and Buddhism without recognizing the horrific disgust with the flesh, with that which decays, with the noisome feminine, and the obsessive fantasy of purification and rebirth.10 St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) echoes Augustinian disgust: "Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a sack of


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dung, the food for worms. . . . You have never seen a viler dunghill" (Seldes, 1985, p . 41). Consider Gautama's thoughts after encountering the sufferings outside his castle, as written in the Digha Nikaya, xiv [the Mahapadana suttanta]: "Shame verily be u p o n this thing called birth, since to one born the decay of life, since disease, since death shows itself like that!" (Eliade, 1967, pp. 472-475). We read in the Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification): When this being is born in the mother's womb, it is not born inside a blue or red or white lotus, etc., but on the contrary, like a worm in rotting fish, rotting dough, cess-pools, etc., he is born in the belly in a position that is below the receptacle for undigested food (rectum), between the belly-lining and the backbone, which is very cramped, quite dark, pervaded with very fetid draughts redolent of various smells of ordure, and exceptionally loathsome. And on being reborn there, for ten months he undergoes excessive suffering, being cooked like a pudding in a bag by the heat produced in the mother's womb (Faure, 2003, pp. 80-81) In the Bhikkhunisamyutta, a Buddhist n u n laments: "I am repelled and humiliated by this foul, putrid b o d y " (Bodhi, 2000, p . 224). Such sentiments are not anomalous but comprise recurring strains of Buddhism and Christianity and are ripe for psychological analysis of death, disgust, and misogyny. Finally, an examination of fanatical and ecstatic violence remains elusive without recognizing the terror of death, helplessness, and nothingness which suffuse fantasies of eternal reichs and leaders. What an abyss of insignificance, non-being, vulnerability, and incipient decay is decimated by ecstatically crushing and slaughtering an enemy! On my right was mounted a heavy machine gun. The gunner (normally the cook) was firing away with what I can only describe as a beatific smile on his face. He was exhilarated by the squeezing of the trigger, the hammering of the gun, and the flight of his tracers rushing out into the dark shore. It struck me then (and was confirmed by him and many others later) that squeezing the trigger—releasing a hail of bullets—gives enormous pleasure and satisfaction. These are the pleasures of combat, not in terms of the intellectual planning— of the tactical and strategic chess game—but of the primal aggression, the release, and the orgasmic discharge. (Grossman, 1995, p. 136) I secured a direct hit on an enemy encampment, saw bodies or parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of the wounded or the runaways. I had to confess to myself that it was one of the happiest moments of my life. (Bourke, 1999, p. 19) Death is never death plain and simple. As I have attempted to explain, the manifest imagery of death is intricate and overdetermined,

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elusive, stratified, displaced, and repressed. Thus this volume is an intimation of how the complex nature of death anxiety may be incorporated into further researches by capable psychoanalysts and p s y c h o historians w h o can determine the specifics of how the imagery and conceptuality of death were formulated, nurtured, and inculcated in a particular culture or individual, h o w that culture symbolized death, and defended itself against the terror of annihilation and decay. In what manner did a people experience trauma, strife, catastrophe, bliss, or conquest such that they w o u l d conceive death in their o w n way? With w h a t imagery did they deny death and proclaim their eternity, immortality, or aplomb in the face of impending disintegration and putrescence? What w a s conscious and unconscious about death? The purpose of this introduction was to introduce a set of salient propositions into the extant corpus of psychoanalytic and psychohistorical theory I have argued that the complex fear of death pervades the psychic life of the h u m a n organism and is inextricably b o u n d with the matrix of psychopathology, fantasy, and illusion. If indeed w e evade and deny death anxiety, even resist awareness of its significance in h u m a n motivation, then incorporating this awareness will complicate any analysis of culture or history. It will complicate the manner in which inquiry is conducted in the first place, if w e are excluding death from our own cognitive processes. I hope that this volume may influence readers to ponder these ideas, as it seems essential to the history of the psyche that death has always lingered as an immanent source of terror and despair. NOTES This introduction contains elements previously published in The Journal of Psychohistory 29 (2), 143-158, and later expanded into "Death, Fantasy, and History" (unpublished manuscript). 1. It should of course be stated that the pathological elements do not comprise all worldviews, or all religion. One might even suggest with Jung and Campbell that religion is a defense against the experience of God. The imagination and the depths of the unconscious are only pathological when externalized and taken literally as concrete realities. It is this pathology which I am analyzing here. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that some theology is iconoclastic and illusion demolishing rather than idolatrous and illusion creating. The religion which dispels illusion will have to be treated elsewhere, as it is beyond the scope of this introduction. 2. Cf. Eagle (1984), pp. 25 and 73; Winnicott (1953), p. 266; Lax (1980), pp. 346-363. 3. Omphalos literally means "navel" in Greek. It is white stone ovoid, hemisphere, or pillar which is thought to be a navel, womb, or egg (occasionally a clitoris has been suggested), representing a symbolic world center from which life emanates.


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4. There are also several works on the psychology of male reactions toward women worth examining. I cite as just a few examples, Bettelheim (1954); Burke (1998); Rheingold (1967); Homey (1967); Lederer (1968); Monick (1991); Neumann (1994). 5. One may object that this argument blames women for all the violence toward children and ensuing psychopathology in history. Nothing could be farther from the argument of this paper. I am proposing that children are born into a world where their own helpless neoteny renders them susceptible to severe physical and emotional injury. Both the mother and father contribute toward guiding a child into mature and healthy adulthood or arresting them in traumatized and deranged infancy. What I was emphasizing here is that, in addition to what Freud said about oedipal trauma and conflict, pre-oedipal injury is also significant and engenders significant fear, loathing, and envy of women. It should also be noted that these feelings toward women are not found only among men. 6. Semiotics is the study of signs, that is, the study of significations of meaning, how language refers to phenomena by attributing meaning. 7. See also Lifton (1973), p. 277. 8. In the past decade, a host of studies undertaken by the team of Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski have aptly demonstrated the salience of death anxiety in normal individuals. The authors describe the transformation of death anxiety into security-inducing fantasies as "Terror Management." For a concise summary of their work, see Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski (in press). Hurvich (in press) has also demonstrated the ubiquity of annihilation anxiety and realistic (rather than unrealistic, or neurotic) death anxiety. 9. This is the "Chapter for Not Putrefying in the God's Domain." It should be noted here that the pharaoh is saying the prayer and becomes the undecaying God through the liturgy. 10. One must of course examine the specific Christianity or Buddhism in question, since these theologies and philosophies were complex, variegated, and diverse enough to have sects which opposed one another dramatically. One must always ask "which Buddhism?" and "which Christianity?" REFERENCES Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press, 1975. Bettelheim, B. (1954). Symbolic wounds. Glencoe: The Free Press. Bodhi, B. (Trans.). (2000). The connected discourses of the Buddha: A translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. Somersville, MA: Wisdom Publications. Bourke, J. (1999). An intimate history of killing: Pace to face killing in 20th century warfare. New York: Basic Books. Burke, N. (Ed.). (1998). Gender and envy. New York: Routledge. Eagle, M. N. (1984). Recent developments in psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. The Egyptian book of the dead: The book of going forth by day (1250 B.C.E./1994; R. Faulkner, Trans.). San Francisco: Chronicle, 1998. Eliade, M. (1967). Essential sacred texts from around the world. San Francisco, CA: Harper.

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Faure, B. (2003). The power of denial: Buddhism, purity, and gender. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1941). A revised psychopathology of the psychoses and psychoneuroses. In P. Buckley (Ed.), Essential papers on object relations (pp. 71-101). New York: New York University Press, 1986. Freud, S. (1886-1939). The standard edition of the complete works ofSigmund Freud (J. Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth, 1953. Freud, S. (1907). Obsessive acts and religious practices. SE 9 (pp. 115-128). Freud, S. (1913). Totem and taboo. SE 13 (pp. 1-161). Freud, S. (1927). The future of an illusion. SE 21 (pp. 5-56). Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. SE 21 (pp. 64-145). Freud, S. (1939). Moses and monotheism. SE 23 (pp. 7-137). Grossman, D. (1995). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. New York: Little, Brown. Horney, K. (1967). Feminine psychology. New York: Norton. Hurvich, M. S. (in press). The place of annihilation anxieties in psychoanalytic theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 51 (2). Langs, R. J. (1997). Death anxiety and clinical practice. London: Karnac. Langs, R. J. (in press-a). Fundamentals of adaptive psychotherapy and counseling. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Langs, R. J. (in press-b). Death anxiety and the emotion-processing mind. Psychoanalytic Psychology. Lax, R. F. (1980). The rotten core: A defect in the formation of the self during the rapprochement subphase. In R. F. Lax (Ed.), Essential papers on character neurosis and treatment. New York: New York University, 1989. Lederer, W. (1968). The fear of women. New York: Harcourt. Leifer, R. (1997). The happiness project. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion. Lifton, R. J. (1970). On psychohistory. In R. J. Lifton (Ed.), Explorations in psychohistory (pp. 21-41). New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974. Lifton, R. J. (1973). The sense of immortality. On death and the continuity of life. In R. J. Lifton (Ed.), Explorations in psychohistory (pp. 271-287). New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974. Lifton, R. J. (1979). The broken connection. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996. Loy, D. R. (1996). Eack and transcendence: The problem of death and life in psychotherapy, existentialism, and Buddhism. New Jersey: Humanities Press. McCarthy, J. (1980). Death anxiety: The loss of the self New York: Gardener. Mitchell, S. A., & Black, M. J. (1995). Freud and beyond: A history of modern psychoanalytic thought. New York: Basic Books. Monick, E. (1991). Castration and male rage. Toronto: Inner City Books. Neumann, E. (1994). Fear of the feminine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ovid (8 C.E.). Metamorphoses (A. D. Melville, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Piven, J. (in press-a). Introduction. Psychoanalytic Review, special issue on death. Piven, J. (in press-b). Death and delusion: A Freudian analysis of mortal terror. Westport, CT: Information Age Publishing. Rheingold, J. C. (1967). The mother, anxiety, and death. Boston: Little, Brown.


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Ricoeur, P. (1967). The symbolism of evil. Boston: Beacon. Seldes, G. (Ed.). (1985). The great thoughts. New York: Ballantine. Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T (in press). Fear of death and human destructiveness. Psychoanalytic Review, special issue on death. Walsh, N. (1996). Life in death. In C. Strozier & M. Flynn (Eds.), Trauma and self (pp. 245-254). Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. In Playing and reality (pp. 1-25). New York: Routledge, 1971/1994. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.


CHAPTER I

Death, Fantasy, and the Politics of Self-Destruction Siamak Movahedi

Jacques Lacan's (1966/1977) notion of the pleasures of death, no matter how macabre it may strike us at first glance, is a profound statement on the symbolic nature of the human body and its destruction or death. The human body is as much a social object as is a biological entity, and death is as much a physical happening as it is a social event. The biologically living body may be symbolically dead, and the physically dead may be more powerful than the living. Mortification of the human soul in an alienated and castrating symbolic order may bring about a "second death" separate from the animal death of the biological body (Ragland, 1995). In the same vein, a self-destructive political act aimed as a challenge to an entropic order of oppression and domination— the genesis of the death drive—might be characterized paradoxically as death in the service of life. The redefinition of life, the politicization of death, and the Utopian pursuit of immortality through the destruction of the biological body, as exemplified in the ongoing ritualistic bombing suicides in the Middle East or in America on 9/11 are not new phenomena. The "carnival of atrocity," as described by Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1982; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1982), through its use of excessive violence acted against the body with the audience as its cheerleaders, has been with us for centuries. What is now running in various power theaters by both the oppressor and the oppressed in the East and in the West under various

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ideological headlines is an old script written for that carnival. Not a novel political reaction is also the "experts 7 " practice of objectivizing the subject in their pursuit of "object-ive" knowledge. The only thing that may strike us as new is the subject's audacity to assume the role of the sovereign in the violent destruction of his or her own body and in its use as a weapon for resistance. This is enough for the subject to gain the experts' trusts in himself or herself as paranoid, psychotic, psychopath, or perverse. One method in the study of the economy of power relations is to focus on forms of resistance (i.e., antagonistic strategies against different forms of power). That is, to study sanity, legality, and antiterrorism, the researcher should try to investigate what is happening in the field of insanity, illegality, terrorism, and other forms of resistance (Foucault, 1982). When the two sides reinvent one another in a game of power, how can we study the terrorism of the slave without investigating the terrorism of the master? Although the investigation of the subject as an object outside of its historical context—the conceptualized object—has been deemed "intentionally" confused (Foucault, 1982), I have here undertaken such an analysis by default. In what follows, I have attempted to present a version of a theory of the object relatively devoid of historical contexts. Yet, it is an analysis of some texts similar to what Foucault has called "death speeches" which exemplify the resistance of subjects in asymmetric equations of power. These death speeches consist of a collection of notes that a Middle Eastern freelance writer had been compiling to edit as an anthology of the human experience of war. These notes were all final letters or wills and testaments of some militant men who had volunteered for dangerous or suicidal missions. These missions involved various regional conflicts in the Middle East between 1980 and 1990. The letters were either sent by the volunteers to their families right before a dangerous mission that took their life or were found in their possession when they later discovered their bodies. The war anthology never took form. A severe depression of the writer hampered the completion of the work. He later committed suicide. Within limits set by confidentiality, I was permitted to study the letters.1 I thought I might have stumbled over some symbolically significant psychoanalytic texts. A communication that a person makes while he or she is anticipating an impending death is an overloaded message. It may be comparable to the first or the last dream in psychoanalysis. It may provide important clues not only to the person's immediate psychic experience—needs, feelings, or images—but also to one's characteristic mode of encounter with the object world.

D E A T H , FANTASY, A N D THE POLITICS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION

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Although one cannot speak of a writer separate from his or her linguistic and cultural forms of self expression, differences in the pattern of such expressions should reveal something about the writer's own psychic voice. For this analysis, I tried to bracket off the notes from external data as much as possible to see whether I could detect any pattern that I could attribute to the individual's characteristic state of mind. This was not to underestimate the importance of the sociocultural context for the intelligibility of human action. Rather, I wished to focus primarily on a written piece of work to see how much we could legitimately trace to the writer's psychic dispositions. A writer does more than just describe things, make contact, or express his or her feelings and desires. Somewhere in that description or contact the writer presents a self. The self resides in the projected consciousness of the object. The internal representation of the object is not separate from that of the self. Reading, listening, observing, and understanding are all forms of contextual interpretations. A pure phenomenological method is an illusion. We need instructions to observe and understand. A theory serves exactly that function. My focus being the inner dialogues of individuals, rather than the social institutions that structure them, I tried to conduct a psychoanalytic reading of the notes. That is, I tried to read them as though they were clinical process notes, and "listen" to layers of "messages" through a psychoanalytic "ear." Just as in the analytic situation, my intention was to be able to feel myself into the writer's self-experience to pick up his dominant affects, identify his wishes and defenses, unearth his inner representations of self and other, and depict his world view. For an observational instruction or conceptual lens, I relied on certain formulations of the object relation theory. Works of Bateson (1968) on communication and Shneidman (1993) on suicide notes served as my magnifying glasses. I began with the assumption that unconscious object relation fantasies structure the person's attitudes and expectancies about the external world. Contact with the world, as articulated in one's writings, should reflect such attitudes and expectancies. Within the same social-cultural environment, people display a unique pattern of interaction with one another and with things. Through the medium of social-cultural patterns people also express their own characteristic syntax of object relations.2 A letter exhibits an object relation event, a communication episode. It represents a ritual of engagement with an audience, a manifestation of a wish for relatedness, an attempt to contact a symbolic world. A letter, as with any other mode of communication, carries what Bateson (1968) terms a "report" and a "command." The report component of a

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message, or its content, conveys information about the external world. The command aspect, on the other hand, addresses the particular relationship between the communicants. It carries instruction as to how the message is to be taken, that is, metacommunication. The major function of communication is not to convey some content but to negotiate a particular relationship with internal or projected objects. This is where the psychoanalyst departs from the literary deconstructionist. A psychoanalytic deconstruction involves a close reading of the metacommunication levels of a text rather than its discursive content. Final letters, near-death, or suicide notes have a particularly demanding, commanding, and pleading quality. They are intended to produce a certain effect on the survivors (Leenaars, 1988). Such notes are not "pointless" accounts of some sort. As for their structure, they strongly exhibit what Brunner (1992) calls the "tell-worthiness" of a narrative. For a narrative to be tell-worthy, it should be about the breach of a human plight, a deviation of a canonical script. Suicide and intentional pursuit of death are tell-worthy events. Jacobs's (1971) analysis of suicide notes suggests that many suicidal individuals experience a need verbally to justify their violation of the sacred trust of life. The final dialogue with the object world, in reality or in fantasy, may hold the key to the person's subjective relational script. Yet, we cannot be totally blind to the possibility of dealing with the manifestations of social institutions rather than individual psychic expressions. Given the political nature of the self-destructive acts to be discussed here, it is plausible that an engulfing and enslaving group identity may masquerade as individual self-expression (Durkheim, 1897/1951). On the other hand, we may argue that the group furnishes only a menu from which the individual may choose a self-destructive course of action. PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON THE THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF NEAR-DEATH NOTES The bulk of research that might bear on this topic is in the area of suicide notes. Many writers have undertaken thematic analyses of suicide notes (see Leenaars, 1988 for a comprehensive bibliography on suicide notes research). Shneidman and Farberow's (1957a, 1957b) classic studies of suicide notes are the most notable. They undertook a content analysis of 717 suicide notes to gain some understanding into their writers' cognitive-affective dispositions and attitudes toward life and death. They failed to find what they had expected. The notes sounded "surprisingly commonplace, banal, and even sometimes poignantly pedestrian and dull" (Shneidman, 1993, p. 94). They attributed this to the person's attempt to reinforce the suicide decision by shutting off the field of consciousness.

D E A T H , FANTASY, A N D THE POLITICS OF S E L F - D E S T R U C T I O N

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They then compared those notes with some thirty-two simulated suicide notes written by a group of nondepressed and nonsuicidal graduate students whom they instructed to put themselves emotionally in the place of a person who had reached the point of committing suicide. The difference between the two sets of notes was quite revealing. The genuine notes were primarily content oriented, whereas the simulated notes were full of processes.3 The genuine notes often contained specific information, such as names of people, places, and things, and instructions concrete enough to be carried out. The simulated notes, in contrast, contained many "thinking" words, suggesting the operation of problem-solving modes. It seemed that the decision to commit suicide was problematic for the graduate students whose notes displayed much thinking, reasoning, or rationalizing. An entirely different sense of self emerged in the two sets of notes. The simulated notes reflected a self as experienced by the individual himself or herself, that is, the person's own experience of pain, ache, sensation, and feeling. The genuine notes reflected a self as the individual felt others experienced it. That is, they were frequently concerned with their reputation or with what others might think of them.4 Other studies (Gottschalk & Gleser, 1960; Darbonne, 1969) all report similar findings. Suicide notes exhibit a truncated vision of the world. However, they convey an overriding preoccupation with making contact or maintaining some tie with a love object. The suicidal person usually wishes to produce some tenacious effect on the object. Only one researcher (Henken, 1976) has compared the ordinary suicide notes with the notes of those who were either facing forcible death or believed their death would soon be imminent. A preoccupation with self rather than object seemed to reflect the experience of an impending death. The forced-death notes were abstract and exhibited an obsession with nonspecific objects and with political responsibility. Reviewing over a dozen studies of suicide notes, Shneidman (1993) contends that a person who wants to commit suicide cannot write a "good" note. A person who can write a "good" note will not commit suicide. To write a "good" suicide note, Shneidman contends that the person has to write it in an open frame of mind at least two weeks before the act. He would then prefer to call such a note a journal or diary rather than a suicide note. In a similar vein, the notes to be analyzed in this paper are not really suicide notes. They were not written right before engagement in suicidal acts. Most important, the writers did not commit suicide. They did undertake dangerous missions that may be characterized as suicidal. Yet that is not to say that the writers would have killed themselves if they had survived their missions. Nevertheless, it should be added that a few of the writers had persistently sought additional assignments each time after surviving a dangerous mission.

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TOWARD AN ANALYSIS OF THE NOTES The preceding studies all involved cases of quantitative content analysis. Written materials always lend themselves to some form of quantitative analysis with fixed groupings. However, when rigid categories such as word counts are automatically imposed on a writing, the outcome will be a "boring" and tortured picture that put the writings in some kind of order while destroying their authors. This was one thing that I consciously tried to avoid. There were 106 notes. I approached them in some phenomenological mode similar to a reading of clinical process notes. My aim was to read between the lines, decode, decipher, and interpret while remaining faithful to the content and structure of the notes. I began this task trying to identify the author, the audience, the message, and the mode of expression in a note. I then tried to see what I could find in and about a note. Notes as texts are open systems that yield many different readings. I found myself making a distinction between the communication of content and communication of relationship. I was looking for what was being communicated and what was being communicated about the communication, that is, metacommunication. I looked also for themes, patterns, feeling states, self-object modes of encounter, forms of self-object representations, and modes of final engagement or disengagement with the external world. I was cognizant of the following: 1. The audience—the object—of the note: To w h o m is the writer speaking? 2. The nature of the emotional appeal: What types of self-object experience are being evoked? 3. The nature and the imageries of the enemy (e.g., external, internal, real, imaginary, concrete, abstract, clearly identified, or vague). 4. The nature of the discourse (e.g., ideological preaching, emotional connection, expression of the need for affiliation, expression of the need for power, communication about concrete things or events). 5. The style of the discourse (personal, semi-personal, editorial). 6. The level of abstraction of the note. 7. The process versus the static level of the discourse. 8. The length of the note.

Methodologically, these letters are highly selective. They represent the universe of letters that families wanted to share with a stranger or with the public. This excludes the letters that may be addressed to a highly private audience concerning private family issues. In that sense, the letters have certain features of public documents.


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DIFFERENT MODES OF RELATEDNESS TO THE WORLD Although these notes were all collected from the same socio-historical context, and belonged to the same political discourse, they did tend to fall into three distinct types: disengaged, abstract, and intimate object relation modes. Differences between these types can be most simply explained by the variation in the quality and intensity of the object relation content of the notes. The three types may each represent a different m o d e of contact with the world. Disengaged Mode These notes (17 out of 106, or 16%) display a pattern of resolute disengagement from the world. They are formal, descriptive notes consisting of instructions about the m a n a g e m e n t of p r o p e r t y or the settlement of debts. The text is instrumental in that it structures around someone formally asking someone else to do something for the writer. The audience is a moral-legal self that requires the person to settle his affairs before he departs. There is no expression of anxiety, anger, conflict, hope, or regret. There are no emotional or ideological appeals, and no evidence of being a zealot: In the Name of God. If I am killed in this mission, I like to be buried next to my father in . . . . I have X money in X Bank. Use that fund for my funeral expenses. Give the rest to the needy. Give my house with all the furniture to my mother. Sell my X property and give the proceed to any family that has lost its breadwinner in the war. Give my car to my brother, X. In the Name of God. I do believe I will not return alive from this trip. I want Mr. X to serve as the executor of my will. I have several debts. He has the list. He should sell the store to settle all those accounts. The rest should be given to my wife. I leave my house and my car for my wife. I seek forgiveness from all my friends and relatives. The writer gives no justification for his voluntary quest of danger. Nevertheless, the notes convey some sense of fatalism and resignation. The person seems ready to die. The notes are short and parsimonious. The object relation content is somewhat narrow. There is no description of the immediate external world and no reference to its affective ambiance. Little reference is m a d e to the self. The notes are cross-sectionally static. They lack any movement or dynamism. The average writer of this type of note is over thirty-five years of age, married with two or three children, and not in the military There is enough

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evidence in the notes that the person has volunteered for the mission. However, based on the content of the notes, no plausible inference can be m a d e as to the individuaTs conscious or unconscious reason for the pursuit of death. Abstract Mode These notes (71 out of 106, or 67%) represent long philosophical and ideological monologues. The communication mode tends to be cognitive rather than evocative. There is m u c h editorializing about moral principles such as truth, justice, virtue, and religious piety: I believe in the creator of the universe, he who has designed the world in perfect harmony, and has under his control every movement of that universe. I believe in the fact that he has made all his faithful followers immune of all deviations from truth and justice. And has asked us to be equally considerate of all the manifestations of his creation, material and spiritual. To insure the realization of his desires, he has sent us prophets to guide us. I believe that after this life, there is a higher level of existence that begins on the judgement day, when and where the ultimate evolution of the mankind will take place. And it is at that time that the reward and punishment that are one's due, and for one reason or another were not awarded in this life, will be administered. It is at that time that you have to give back anything that you have unjustly seized from your fellow man. The private self is h i d d e n behind a public self that is either heroic or undefined: We follow the footsteps of great historical heroes. We are responsible to the generations of the past, present, and future.... We cannot be concerned with personal needs and shortcomings. The object of the address is vague. References are made to abstract entities such as community, society, nation, generation, class, or to some symbolic socio-political entity or historical heroes. The spouse, parents, or other family members are not the manifest objects of the notes. They are rarely addressed directly. When there are references to them, they are addressed indirectly in the third-person pronoun and in formal language. The self is presented as transcendent and beyond need for self-validation. Nevertheless, there is much preoccupation with how the self is viewed. The writer frequently requests that his letter be read during his funeral service or be conveyed to all young people or to all college students. Death is sought to prove the writer's sense of moral superiority, virtue, religious piety, and his uncompromising sense of justice:


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We are ready to destroy this morally corrupt enemy. We will inflict on it the greatest blow while calling its bluff even if it costs our lives. Hopefully we all will return unharmed. If I do not return, I want you to stay loyal to our leaders. I want you to pursue our sacred cause. I expect you to follow my path since this is the only sincere path to the salvation of our spirit. One day we will all die. Why not die in pursuit of truth and justice? The enemy is challenged, discounted, and belittled. In contrast, the projected self experiences no fear, no intimidation, and is beyond any seduction and compromise. The writer presents a persona that is unimpressed, unshaken and u n m o v e d by threats and power. By challenging death, the writer attempts to disarm the hostile other of its pride of power. The note is intended as a communication that no venture can induce fear in the heart of the writer. With this nonchalant attitude toward life and death, the writer intends to remain in a superior moral position. The private audience is asked to present the same front in public. The community is to congratulate the spouse or parents for the writer's self-sacrifice. The spouse and parents are to act p r o u d and happy. They are enjoined against the public cry or expressions of grief since such responses might be interpreted as weakness and delight the enemy. Through their reactions, the family members should save face by impressing the enemy that no degree of death and destruction may cause fear or submission: I like you to be proud of me, and pay no attention to the critics' empty commentaries. Do not cry for me. I want all of you to stand united like an invincible pillar. I want you to be dignified rather than the object of others' mercy or sympathy. Paradoxically, in the notes the enemy similarly remains diffused, abstracted, and undefined. Although the writer is in the midst of a revolutionary or military mission against a clear-cut external power, the enemy is not clearly named. Although there are references to superpowers, they do not seem to represent the psychological object of anger in the notes. The anger is more often expressed against some vague domestic political groups with competing ideological agendas. The dangerous enemy seems most likely to be internal. The external enemy's incentives and moves are predictable. The internal enemy is a wolf in sheep's skin, deceptive and unpredictable: All this has generated much worry for the deceitful enemy and its proxies including the liberals that has used all possible schemes to incite war and bloodshed to prey on our innocent brothers and sisters How stupid are those

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who think they can succeed in fighting the voice of people through coercion and intimidation. And how naive are those liberals, who swallow the rhetoric of this cunning enemy who has no agenda but treachery and exploitation.

There is frequently a sense that some close family members are indirectly being attacked for failing to understand the writer's political position. They seem to have disagreed with the writer, opposed his decision to join a suicide brigade, or failed to validate his ideological commitment. In a few notes, there are some angry remarks, such as: "You would rather I die like a sick old woman in bed, would you not?" The self is not experienced as satisfactorily validated. Others are not perceived as responsive. They have not cooperated with the writer in self-validation. They have failed in their understanding of the writer's point of view. There is much anger toward others for their mere "stupidity." Pursuit of death or suicidal missions seems to function as an ultimate attack on those who did not share the writer's perspective. They now have to be quiet and take notice. The writer's sincerity, piety, and ideological commitment are now beyond reproach. His blood has fortified his position. One who is more interested in preserving his own life or property than in defending his principles has no moral stand to pass judgment on the writer. How could one argue with a view secured by blood?5 In the entire note, the writer seeks the audience's undivided attention. He commands certain critical courses of action, demands ideological loyalty, asks for a change in the survivors' lifestyles, and offers moral advice. The mother and father are asked to act like certain religious and historical legends. They are reminded that they are parents to the writer, himself a historical hero. These letters all begin with some religious quotations assuring immortality for those who lose their lives in defense of justice. There is a clear affective distinction between getting killed and dying. Getting killed in a just mission is different from death or annihilation. The audience is assured that the writer is not really dead. He is to be assumed as observant on a much higher level of existence. "Those who lose their life in the pursuit of truth and justice will never die. They just transcend to a higher level of existence." These notes, despite their length, contain no description of the "external" reality. They do not allude to the emotional ambiance of the writer's immediate situation. The communication contains quite constricted interactional content between self and object-representations. The object remains precarious. However, compliance with one's cherished wishes is demanded.


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Intimate Mode These notes (18 out of 106, or 17%) display a highly romantic rapprochement with the object world. A profound sense of loneliness in the shadow of impending death calls for the most nostalgic reminiscences of the shared experiences between the self and object. The writer struggles to recreate and regenerate a particular feeling state that is familiar to him through his past relationship with the object. The mother represents the most emotionally intense part of the object field. The letters are mostly addressed to her. Although there are references to others (e.g., the father, brothers and sisters, wife, and children), the mother remains the principal recipient of the communication: My Very Dear mother, There is a wet curtain of tears between me and the letter that I am writing you. I can hardly see what I am writing. I am thinking about you while I am trying to look through this wet curtain at these mountains. I see a tired mirage of a dream fading high into infinity too afraid to look back. That is my life, my hopes and fantasies. They are painfully trying to kiss your memory goodbye, and leaving the ruins of the humanity by gently stepping over the tired body of my brothers who are lying everywhere in blood, like red poppies cut so harshly and so soon.... I am sitting here under a huge rock that may explode anytime without leaving any piece large enough to become my tombstone My dear mother, please forgive me for the blood all over this letter. This is the only gift I can send you. I like you to keep it for ever. These are the blood of my brave brothers whose beautiful bodies were just destroyed by the enemy guns. Yet their spirits are standing tall in front of me cleaning my tears and laughing at the stupidity of those who think their gun can destroy our souls. Please be proud of me. Tell everyone that my son willingly embraced death to defend his homeland. The wish is for the mother to protect the child, to give him reassurance, to make his internal world safe again. The wish is to "re-feel" the m o t h e r ' s soothing presence. The mother is often requested to pray for the writer's safe return. When the writer visualizes his impending death, the wish is to be missed profoundly by the mother: My Dear mother, I am tired. As I am getting ready to take my final nap, I hear your voice singing lullabies for me in those comforting warm summer nights when I was a little boy. Do you remember when you used to read me stories of love and hope? But, my dearest mother, here I hear the story of death and destruction, of cruelty and inhumanity. I wish that tonight I could hear one of your stories before I close my eyes permanently. The writer empathizes with the mother over the death of her dear son. He begins the m o t h e r ' s mourning over such a devastating loss. He

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then pleads to the mother to be strong and bear this loss. There is a common appeal to the mother not to cry. Yet the writer reminds the mother of all the wonderful times that she had with him as a little boy, and how tragic it would be to lose such a beloved young son to a cruel death. Such passages are often so sad that they may easily bring tears to the eyes of a stranger, let alone the writer's own mother. In this sense, the rendezvous with the object at times feels sadomasochistic. It may be pondered if the mother is being punished for not rescuing the son from an angry father who set him up for self sacrifice. These notes read as poetry and engage the reader's passion and strong sense of empathy. The reader may easily emerge in the writer's feeling state and in his representational world. The notes are all in the process mode. They involve feelings, needs, wishes, conflicts, and action. They function to elicit wish-fulfilling responses from the object. They contain little abstract, philosophical, or intellectual content. They convey detailed, emotionally laden descriptions of the immediate external reality of the writer that feels dangerous, cruel, and lonely. The writers in this category are mostly military officers or draftees. In light of certain information in the notes, some of these writers might have volunteered either out of social or professional obligations or were simply assigned to missions that claimed their lives.6 Discussion On a first reading of the notes we may not discern any marked tendency toward the dominance of a collective identity over the individual identity. However, in the notes of the abstract type, the writers' identities share a common boundary with a socio-historical order. On the manifest level, the objects are abstract and social; the audience is a collectivity of some sort; and the self is defined in reference to some public cause. This group comes close to exhibiting some of the features of Durkheim's ideal type of altruistic suicide. Although this study was a qualitative analysis, contrasting my findings with previous research reveals some interesting similarities. The disengaged group displays a pattern similar to that of genuine suicide notes in previous studies, whereas the intimate object relation group shares many features of the simulated notes. The notes in the disengaged mode represent a discourse of relatively concrete and simple events. They are primarily static, whereas the notes in the intimate mode are quite dynamic. The notes in the abstract mode fall in between, exhibiting certain features of both the genuine and the simulated suicide notes. They come closer to Henken's (1976) forced-death documents. One marked feature of the abstract type note is a preoccupation with what others may think of the writer. The overemphasis on the self as


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experienced by others is seen by Shneidman and Farberow (1957a) to be a characteristic feature of cultural and religious suicides. That observation is also consistent with Durkheim's (1897/1951) notion of altruistic suicide. The subjective experience of identity is an established pattern of anticipated responses of others to one's act. This anticipation is confirmed constantly in fantasy. Anticipated responses of others, the voice of the internal objects, may even structure one's will to live, die, kill, or be killed. In the abstract type, the notes are populated by bad and persecutory objects, which are to be controlled and attacked. The ego is in a retaliatory mode. The enemy is experienced as a diffused toxic entity to be ejected from the personal world. Our sense of self is always conveyed in a dialogue with the "other." When the "other" is abstract and public, the self will display similar features. That seems to be happening in this group. That is perhaps why it is difficult to empathize with these writers. The notes are lacking the necessary affect for such an object relational engagement. There is plenty of intellectualized anger that might resonate only with an equally angry and intellectualized reader. Although abstract notes are addressed to a public audience, they are conversations with the self. The long pedantic notes are for the writer's own defensive consumption. He needs to persuade himself that the course of action that he has undertaken is sane, rational, and desirable. There are strong identifications with certain socio-political heroes who sought martyrdom for similar causes. When the fantasy of one's death actualizes the person's ideal ego, one may suspect the working of self-destructive drives. However, these fantasies may serve the defensive function of reducing the volunteer's own cognitive dissonance through culturally prepackaged means. Certainly the abstract writers are using many defenses to bolster their denial of death. Their writings all display a tough-minded, rigid, impersonal, distancing, and ritualized mode of object relationship. In the abstract discourse, the self and object are fully masked to avoid any genuine affective contact. The internal dialogue takes place through some illusory dramaturgical characters that function to shield the writer from the overwhelming reality of death and to separate him from his "flesh and blood self." Hoffer's (1951) comment on a need for a makebelieve grandiose self-object world here is quite apt: Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. There is a need for some kind of make-believe to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a

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staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance, (p. 64) The destructive fantasies in notes of the abstract type may not be explained simply in terms of impulses, urges, or tension reduction mechanisms. The apparent limited mentalization in these cases is partial and defensive. The dynamic is more in line with that of sadism in that the anticipation of the other's suffering is part of the act (Fonagy & Target, 1995). This is particularly true about the cases involving revenge, or missions undertaken on the anniversary of the loss of a loved one. The rehabilitation of an offended sense of dignity fits the puzzle better than the acting out of some impulse. An aggressive act may rehabilitate the ego if and only if the ego can conceive of the alter's reactions, thoughts, and feelings toward the retaliatory act. Contrary to the moralistic and dry character of the abstract type, the intimate type notes exhibit the fullest spectrum of object relationships. There is a marked tendency to attach oneself to an object experienced as good. One gets the impression that attachment is sought to extend the self, to revitalize the spirit, and to escape annihilation. The dialogue with the mother is the most striking feature of the notes in the intimate mode. The need for a primary soothing object may be so strong that no other object can replace her in fantasy. Some of these writers speak of holding on strongly to certain objects that may be considered as transitional, such as the mother's medallion or her last letter. It is the relationship with the mother that harbors the child's core sense of selfhood. Therefore, it makes sense that in a time of danger, she should be sought to dispel any threat of self-annihilation. The mother is as much a party to the birth of the self as to its death. Lewin (1946) maintains that the wish to die represents the infantile wish to sleep in union with the mother. The fantasy of returning to her body or hiding in it is a common oral fantasy. The mother seems to play various emotionally powerful roles in the dynamics of most suicides. Tabachnick (1957) cites the disturbance in the interpersonal relationship with the mother as the single most recurring pattern. Patients in his study all reported a strong ambivalent attitude toward the mother. They typically found it impossible to express any dissatisfaction with her. Despite much interpersonal conflict, they never defied her. Suicide was an attempt either to escape the anger toward the mother or to seek punishment for harboring such feelings. Sometimes, suicide represented a kind of symbolic killing of the hateful self-object. In other cases, the destruction of body repre-


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sented the fantasy of merging with the idealized mother and insuring the survival of the self. Campbell (1995) similarly observes a pattern of an inner struggle with an image of a mother who is felt to be ungiving, dangerous, and untrustworthy. In the suicidal patient's fantasy, the body comes to symbolize a bad mother. Getting rid of this bad mother becomes the object of attack on the body. The conflict between the wish to merge with the mother and the subsequent primitive anxieties about annihilation of the self is worked through in the suicide fantasies. In this study, the notes containing intimate dialogue with the mother display the least suicidal themes. They all exhibit a strong will to survive the misadventures. Although in some notes, the pattern of fantasy relationship with the mother has a touch of sadomasochism, the mother is clearly perceived as good and soothing. This is in contrast to the abstract notes in which the mother is absent, and the fantasies as articulated in the notes rarely contain any soothing or transitional objects.7 SELF-DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR AS OBJECT RELATIONSHIPS Psychoanalysis involves both understanding and explanation. Both tasks involve nothing but interpretation, although on different levels. Using Ricoeur's (1993) language, we understand through our personal engagement with a text, and explain through our disengagement with it by means of the language of cause, functions, structures, or demands. This analysis began with the intention of understanding the neardeath notes. Although the line between understanding and explanation is never clear, I found myself being increasingly engaged in explanation. I became intrigued by the question of possible links between the structure of the note and the writer's personality organization. Since I had analyzed notes rather than characters, I did find myself on quite shaky ground for any strong inference as to such links. Nevertheless, as in any meaningful analysis of this form, I felt the need for all kinds of bold conjectures and interpretations on interpsychic and intrapsychic levels. In classical psychoanalytic thinking, there has been much interest in the psychology of heroism. The heroic pursuit of death may be viewed as a manifestation of narcissism (Becker, 1973). On one hand, the narcissistic omnipotent self-image disposes the person to feel immortal and impervious to danger, to march into open fire in wars convinced of his invincibility. On the other hand, the pursuit of danger serves as a defense against the fear of death, the ultimate source of narcissistic injury. The heroic pursuit of danger may also represent the enactment of oedipal wishes (Segal, 1990). If we were to follow that theoretical line

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in this paper, we would have to put the complex in the context of a power relationship in which the son had either to die or be castrated, and usually both. The heroic pursuit of death would then become a symbolic challenge of the authority. Symbolically the hero would become heroic because he dared to challenge the repressive authority. The repression had to be so overwhelming that the father would be disguised as a corrupt and cruel "alien" for whose destruction one had to obey a "benevolent" father. This will always culminate in the hero's death. He is never victorious. The power he achieves relies on his challenge of the oppressive power at the known cost of his life, a symbolic fulfillment of a wish in action. He loses the battle of earthly power, but wins the war of dignity. For Brown (1959), Oedipus complex is the project of becoming God through flight from death. Flight from death is the flight from helplessness, and obliteration. There is a widespread belief that those who commit suicide, particularly religious or altruistic suicides, attempt to seek immortality rather than death. It has also been suggested that ritualized homicides and suicides in various societies throughout time are based on a belief in immortality through union with the departed (Lewin, 1946; Pollock, 1975,1976; Zilboorg, 1936). Methodologically, we are not able to decipher the individual writer's unconscious motivations in this study. However, on the manifest level, communications about death or immortality may be understood more plausibly as the expression of the pursuit of power in life rather than the search for immortality through death. Psychically we cannot pursue something of which we have no experience. Fenichel (1945) argues that even the so-called "fear of death" was not about the real death. He contended that since the idea of one's own death is subjectively inconceivable, every fear of death would in all likelihood function as covers for other unconscious ideas. In this study, I see no direct or disguised allusion to immortality in the disengaged type notes. The individual has psychically prepared himself for death and shows no eagerness to establish a bridge to some symbolic order. In the notes of intimate mode, there are some references to immortality. However, the fear of object loss is so intense that the defense of immortality is not of any use. Death is experienced as a lonely life. The writer pleads to the mother not to forget him if he is killed. However, every abstract type note is prefaced with a claim to immortality. One might interpret this as a defense against annihilation anxiety. The constricted and impersonal quality of object relations in this group may very well represent a psychic reaction that Hopper (1991) calls encapsulation. Encapsulation is a psychic strategy of fending off the fear of annihilation by enclosing, encasing, and sealing off


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the threatening sensations, affects, and internal representations. In abstract type notes, the impersonal and detached representations of self and object protect the ego, particularly against the overwhelming dependency needs that might surface when the security and safety are threatened. Insistence on immortality is part of a dialogue of the self with itself. Such a dialogue is more likely to follow when the self is aware of its own impending destruction and needs reassurance. In intimate type notes, the writer continues to hope for a safe return. He sees the danger, but not the death. However, in the abstract type, there is no hope for a safe return. A safe return on one mission is the occasion for the need to move onto the next potentially fatal encounter. The writer gives lip service to death but not to danger. The claim to immortality in the abstract type notes cannot be explained away only as a cultural belief or a psychological defense against the fear of annihilation. The claim is also a political communication signifying "object relations politics." On one hand, the claim to immortality is launched as a final attack on the enemy. Its aim is to prove the enemy's ultimate powerlessness in its attempt to destroy the ego. On the other hand, given the self's need to control the object, existence at a higher level furnishes a sacred source of sanction for enforcing compliance with one's wishes. The writer achieves a status of social, emotional, and metaphysical power. The objects of the internalized relationships are expected to take notice of the force behind the commands. Thus, the communication of belief in immortality is nothing but a disguised object relation fantasy. One's conception of life and death is always in relation to the self and object. Self-destructive behavior may be based on deeply ingrained religious or cultural beliefs about the nature of life and death. Yet, they represent nothing but a culturally sanctioned form of object relationship. They are forms of engagement with the world of objects rather than the strategies for the annihilation of the self. Suicide is an act with death as a consequence. The experience of the finality of the outcome is not part of the act. The act is a symbolic ritual that makes sense only within the individual's system of fantasies and beliefs. Although the person may embark on a dangerous act, he might not really want to die. Personal death or annihilation is beyond the human experience. Revival of some sort of relatedness is always behind the suicide fantasies. Pursuits of death and danger are clearly forms of engagement with the personal or impersonal worlds. They may even be regarded theoretically as fulfillment of certain object relation fantasies. However, the pursuit of death in search of nourishment and affirmation sounds paradoxical. Yet, Sandier and Sandier (1978) argue that even the most distressing and painful of relationships can be safety giving, reassur-

3


ing, and affirming, as is exemplified by sadomasochistic relationships. Freud (1924) points to similar dynamics in his analysis of moral masochism, where he argues that even self-destruction cannot occur without libidinal satisfaction. He also explains one case of attempted suicide as an instance of the enactment of a wish, an unconscious object relation fantasy (Freud, 1920). Constructive or destructive engagements with the world are symbolic expressions of inner struggles that seek resolution in relation to the internal objects. Self-destructive and dangerous acts may be initiated as a form of symbolic dialogue with a universe that has failed to validate the self (Taylor, 1978). Such acts may simultaneously serve as a symbolic ritual for disentanglement from a particular perceived entrapment in the world. In certain cases of suicide, the wish to destroy the fantasy objects is clearly the motivating force behind the act. Suicide becomes either the outcome of a struggle with bad objects or the point of interruption of a sadomasochistic course of action. To Winnicott (1950/1975), suicide represents the dramatization of ejection of badness. The aim is to destroy the inner world's bad elements, rather than the self. Although people can experience the death of others, they are incapable of experiencing their own deaths. As Freud (1915) observes, the defining feature of the fantasy of death or suicide is a self that is participating in the individual's own funeral and mourning. This is again an object relation fantasy involving gratification of some wish or resolution of some conflict. To Wilhelm Stekel (1910/1977), revenge is the motivating factor behind the suicide act. The destruction of the self is intended to inflict the greatest punishment on the instigator of the person's suffering. Stekel writes about the child's attempt to rob the parents—the real objects—of their most treasured possession, his or her own life. He could have easily argued for the person's attempt to inflict the greatest pain on his or her fantasy objects. Attachment to primitive love objects who are sadistic and idealize suffering has been suggested to contribute to the formation of social masochistic characters (Asch, 1976). We know that all cultures embody a variety of sadomasochistic symbols that can function as proxies for the primitive objects. Theodore Reik (1941) similarly discusses the revenge fantasies of the social masochist. According to him, the rehabilitation of an offended self-esteem and the gratification of an unsatisfied pride are the driving forces behind such fantasies and their enactments. Sadistic and revengeful fantasies soothe the pain of defeat and mute the bitterness of being maltreated or wronged. To Reik, "the daydreams of nations maltreated by brutal neighbors, of disdained religious or social mi-

D E A T H , FANTASY, A N D THE P O L I T I C S OF S E L F - D E S T R U C T I O N

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norities living amongst an oppressing people, must be considered as mass-phantasies of the same kind" (p. 322). The social masochist is driven, according to him, by the anticipation of future power, by fantasies of conquering the oppressors and taking revenge on them. Clearly there is no limit to the kind of interpretations that one may advance. We have to be open to all views, particularly when the data do not warrant a strong inference. Yet some analysts tend to see the world in a much more systematic and ordered form than is presented here. They take an exclusionary theoretical position and claim a privileged status for their own interpretation. That approach is increasingly under attack today. Post-structuralists, similar to the sociologists of knowledge, contend that meaning is not an independent representation of the real world grasped by an independent psychoanalytic observer. It is rather a reflection of a meaning-making system that produces our theories, our world, and the possibility of a psychoanalysis. For instance, my own discourse in this paper is highly context specific. The object relations discourse includes constructs that may represent the cultural fantasy or ideological slant in the West. As an example, the distinction between self and object, the idea of self-object differentiation, the preoccupation with individuation, and the notion of symbiotic relationship with its pathological overtone may themselves reflect a Western individualistic Weltanschauung. Some writers (Chang, 1988) assert that in the West, our notions of self and other— with their corollaries of self and object representations—are grounded in the ideological dogma of methodological individualism. It is alleged that the Eastern self is of such a nature that it often eludes our grasp, particularly when we try to analyze it with our ideologically tortured spectacles. Self and object representations are cultural constructs with much cognitive and affective loading. In the East, the traditional mode of explanation of psychosocial phenomena is some form of system analysis. What Western journalists call the Easterner's "conspiracy theory" is primarily a tendency to avoid attribution of agency, responsibility, or blameworthiness to the individual. The enemy is some super structure, super organization, or super power (Movahedi, 1996). Perhaps the discovery of the enemy as a well-defined individual awaits the birth of the notion of the individual. That is, it may take an individualistic Weltanschauung for the enemy to become individualized. Thus one may even argue that the writers of the disengaged or abstract type notes represent not less differentiated and mature levels of object relation functioning in a Kleinian sense, but a more traditional form of self-object organization. Actually, there was some indication in the data that the notes clustered together in terms of their writer's social class or level of modernization. It has already been suggested

32


that traditional cultures are more anal, obsessed, paranoid, and likely to engage in action rituals to fight fear and anxiety (Becker, 1973). Whether these notes represent (a) different levels of object-relation functioning, (b) attempts to establish symbolic continuity with a sociohistorical order, (c) the unfolding of narcissism through heroic pursuits, (d) manifestations of social masochism, (e) different discourses of death, or (f) simply pseudorational justifications for the enactments of destructive impulses cannot be empirically settled. In all likelihood, they may represent the working of all these processes. The information contained in the notes does not allow for the choosing of one inference over the other. The typical data that come from the psychoanalytic process by themselves usually do not fare any better. The appreciation of the complexity of human behavior enhances our psychoanalytic understanding and helps us avoid fixation on any one specific interpretation. To refine our theories we should use various approaches to the data and be able to entertain a variety of plausible interpretations. As a postscript, I admit that bracketing a text from its socio-historical context, the subject of my analysis, is a problematic exercise, particularly, from a poststructuralist perspective. There is noting in a text that can be interpreted outside of its socio-cultural surround. To bracket a text means nothing but an exclusion of certain interpretive contexts in favor of some others. In one sense it does violence to the text by allowing the analyst's interpretive framework to structure—or to suffocate— the "voice" of the original writer, should we assume that there is such a voice. Any listening to a voice in a text or any close reading of a text is within interpretation and is by definition contextualized. This is particularly true if we jump from a phenomenological analysis of a text to a psychological analysis of its writer. Although analyses of object relations, i.e. power relations, are by themselves political, some are "intentionally" more confused than some others. An analysis in terms of a theory of the object—the conceptualized object outside of its historical context—the "terrorist bomber" as perverse or "sick"—is a confused, albeit a politically powerful conceptualized tool (Foucault, 1982). The analysis of any resistance against domination is itself subject to the vagaries of power in so far as all pursuits of knowledge are in the final analysis nothing but pursuit of power. Strategic power relations may be read not only in the texts of political technology of the body but also in the analyses of "experts'" claims of knowledge on matters of the perversity of individuals who have been subject to the violence of the oppressor. Bracketing the action—taking the action as a text—of a fighter on a suicidal mission against an invading, dominating or occupying force from the socio-political context of the domination, is itself a political move in the service of oppression. Much too

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often w h a t the sovereign fails to impose on the subject in h i s / h e r life, using Foucault's language, its experts try to do in h i s / h e r death by imposing a law of psychiatric truth on h i m / h e r which h e / s h e must recognize (the experts' wishful fantasy) and others have to recognize in h i m / h e r . In that sense, although this analysis m a y come across as an attempt to "un-situate" action, m y intention has not been to present a theory of the object— a psychology of the suicide bomber or "the theorist." Although psychoanalysis is itself a discourse of power, I believe it should be used to liberate the subject from the shackles, constraints and delusions of the symbolic order. It should not be used in the service of the subject's objectification and moral servitude. NOTES This article is an expansion of "The Utopian Pursuit of Death," which was previously published in American Imago 56 (1): 1-26,1999. 1. I have intentionally changed or omitted certain details to keep the confidentiality of the people involved. However, it should be emphasized that all these writers had participated in military combat missions, and none had engaged in a "terrorist" attack against a nonmilitary target. 2. By the term "object" here, I refer to a symbolic "other" that is in part a dimension of the "self" as a fantasy. 3. In the analysis of suicide notes, investigators often make references to process and content. For instance, while genuine notes tend to be content oriented, pseudo notes are highly process oriented. Process here refers to the dynamic state of change in a system. This also includes communication about an intended change, recurrent pattern, or function. Content, on the other hand, is a communication about the state of a system at a given time. As such, it is cross-sectional and static. The codependence of verb and noun bears on the distinction between process and content. A verb is part of the process language; it expresses function and change. A noun is a content term; it names the person, thing, or quality that acts or is subject to action (see, for example, Olinick, Poland, Grigg, & Granatir, 1973). 4. The overemphasis on the self, as is experienced by others, according to Shneidman and Farberow (1957a), is a characteristic feature of cultural or religious suicides. This observation supports Durkheim's (1897/1951) concept of altruistic suicide. 5. In connection with the working of persecutory objects, the operation of a punitive superego can also be detected. In "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud (1917) wrote that "the ego sees itself deserted by the superego and let itself die." Here, it seems that these writers felt they had to embrace death or they would be deserted by the superego. 6. There is certain direct and indirect information in the notes on the basis of which the extent to which the writer's decision was voluntary may be inferred. These include information on age, marital status, or some indirect reference in the letter, such as "the commander said he couldn't do anything

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about changing my assignment." Married men in their late thirties or forties were more likely to have been volunteers. Letters that signal some tension between the writer and the family over the writer's repeated acceptance of dangerous missions reveal a certain level of choice on the part of the writer. 7. According to Winnicott (1969), a transitional object may be employed only if the internal object is alive and "good enough," that is, not too persecutory. REFERENCES Aguinis, M. (1995). A masterpiece of illumination. In E. S. Person, P. Fonagy, & S. Figueira (Eds.), On Freud's "creative writers and day-dreaming." New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Aries, P. (1985). Images of man and death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Asch, S. (1976). Varieties of negative therapeutic reaction and problems of technique. Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association 24: 383-407. Bateson, G. (1968). Information and codification: A philosophical approach. In J. Ruesch & G. Bateson (Eds.), Communication: The social matrix of psychiatry. New York: Norton. Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: The Free Press. Brown, N. (1959). Life against death: The psychoanalytic meaning of history. New York: Viking. Brunner, J. (1992). The original story and the invited story. Invited symposium, American Psychological Association, Division of Psychoanalysis, Twelfth Annual Spring Meeting, Philadelphia. Campbell, D. (1995). The role of the father in a pre-suicide state. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76: 315-323. Chang, S. C. (1988). The nature of the self: A transcultural view. Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review 25:189-210. Darbonne, A. (1969). Study of psychological content in communications of suicidal individuals. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 33:590-596. Devereux, G. (1961). Mohave ethnopsychiatry and suicide: The psychiatric knowledge and psychiatric disturbances of an Indian tribe. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of Ethnology, Bulletin 175. Dreyfus, H., and Rabinow, P. (1982). Michael Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, E. (1897/1951). Suicide (J. A. Spaulding & G. Simpson, Trans.). Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Fenichel, O. (1945). The psychoanalytic theory of neurosis. New York: Norton. Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (1995). Understanding the violent patient: The use of the body and the role of the father. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76:487-505. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (eds.) Michael Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, S. (1915). Thoughts for the times on war and death. SE 14 (pp. 289-300). Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. SE 16 (pp. 239-258). Freud, S. (1920). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. SE 18 (pp. 145-172).

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Freud, S. (1924). The economic problem of masochism. SE19 (pp. 157-173). Fromm, E. (1947). Man for himself. New York: Henry Holt. Gottschalk, L., & Gleser, G. (1960). An analysis of the verbal content of suicide notes. British Journal of Medical Psychology 33:195-204. Henken, V. (1976). Banality reinvestigated: A computer-based content analysis of suicidal and forced death documents. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 6: 36-43. Hoffer, E. (1951). The true believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements. New York: HarperCollins. Hopper, E. (1991). Encapsulation as a defense against the fear of annihilation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 72: 607-624. Jacobs, J. (1971). Phenomenological study of suicide notes. In A. Giddens (Ed.), The sociology of suicide. London: Whitefriars Press. Joseph, B. (1982). Addiction to near-death. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 63: 449-456. Lacan, J. (1966/1977). Ecrits: A Selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). NY: Norton. Leenaars, A. (1988). Suicide notes. New York: Human Sciences Press. Lewin, B. (1946). Sleep, the mouth, and the dream screen. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15:419-434. Movahedi, S. (1976). Methodological schizophrenia: A problem in the sociology of science. International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 13 (January and April): 79-92. Movahedi, S. (1996). Metalinguistic analysis of therapeutic discourse. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 44 (3): 837-862. Olinick, S. L., Poland, W. S., Grigg, K. S., & Granatir, W. L. (1973). The psychoanalytic work ego: Process and interpretation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 54:143-151. Pollock, G. (1975). On mourning, immortality, and Utopia. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 23: 334-362. Pollock, G. (1976). Mourning, homicide, and suicide. Annual of Psychoanalysis 4: 225-249. Pulver, S. (1987). The manifest dream in psychoanalysis: A clarification. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 35: 99-117. Ragland, E. (1995). Essays on the Pleasures of Death. NY: Routledge. Reik, T. (1941). Masochism in modern man. New York: Grove Press. Ricoeur, P. (1993). Hermeneutics and the human sciences (J. B. Thompson, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Sandier, J., & Sandier, A. M. (1978). On the development of object relationships and affects. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 59: 285-296. Segal, R. (Ed.). (1990). In quest of the hero. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shneidman, E. (1973). Suicide notes reconsidered. Psychiatry 36: 379-394. Shneidman, E. (1993). Suicide as psychache. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Shneidman, E., & Farberow, N. (1957a). Some comparison between genuine and simulated suicide notes in terms of Mowrer's concepts of discomfort and relief. Journal of General Psychology 56: 251-256. Shneidman, E., & Farberow, N. (1957b). Clues to suicide. New York: McGraw-Hill. Steiner, J. (1981). Perverse relationships between parts of the self: A clinical illustration. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 62: 241-251.

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Stekel, W. (1910/1977). Symposium on suicide. In P. Friedman (Ed.), On suicide (pp. 33-141). New York: International Universities Press. Tabachnick, N. (1957). Observations on attempted suicide. In E. Shneidman & N. Farberow (Eds.), Clues to suicide (pp. 164-169). New York: McGrawHill. Taylor, S. (1978). The confrontation with death and the renewal of life. Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 8 (2): 89-98. Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: A study of the first not-me possession. In Collected papers: Through paediatrics to psychoanalysis (pp. 229-242). New York: Basic Books. Winnicott, D. W. (1967). The location of cultural experience. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 48: 368-372. Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50: 711-716. Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Fear of breakdown. International Review of Psychoanalysis 2:103-107. Winnicott, D. W. (1950/1975). Aggression in relation to emotional development. In Psycho-analysis (pp. 204-218). New York: Basis Books. Zilboorg, G. (1936). Suicide among civilized and primitive races. American Journal of Psychiatry 92:1347-1369. Zilboorg, G. (1937). Considerations on suicide, with particular reference to that of the young. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 7:15-31.

CHAPTER 2

Buddhism, Death, and the Feminine Jerry S. Piven

Life undergoes destruction night and day; Women are the stain of the holy life.. . —Samyutta Nikaya; Devaputtasamyutta (135: 76) I am repelled and humiliated By this foul, putrid body, Subject to break up, fragile: Fve uprooted sensual craving. —Samyutta Nikaya; Bhikkhunisamyutta (224: 530) This paper is an attempt to elucidate h o w certain developmental issues and conflicts are constellated in non-Western theologies. Despite a prevailing view of Buddhism as a philosophy of detachment that enlightens us about our illusions and the psychological causes of our suffering, n u m e r o u s Buddhist texts also evidence marked disgust for the body and physical decay, disparage the putrescing body as a real thing, and finally blame w o m e n for death and contamination. It is the task of clinicians to trace the origins of ideas, feelings, and pathological character structures in their patients. Psychohistorians and psychologists of religion, on the other hand, attempt to shed light on constellations of emotional arrest and injury, the determinants of motive, fantasy, and imagination in historical individuals, groups, and cultures. While this task may seem epistemically complicated, and indeed any psychological methodology may be justly susceptible to a

38

T H E PSYCHOLOGY OF D E A T H I N FANTASY AND HISTORY

variety of criticisms, the discoveries of psychoanalysis may be invoked to identify certain specific patterns of behavior and fantasy which might not be discerned as clearly without a psychological lens. When one examines the fecal obsessions of Martin Luther, for example, his furious scatological declarations, and his defeat of Satan in the Wittenberg Castle lavatory with "a mighty anal blast," one is hard pressed without a psychoanalytic framework to make any sense of such bizarre history.1 An obsession with anality usually derives from specific experiences of developmental conflict, the struggles with parents and caregivers over toilet training and bodily cleanliness which induce rage, guilt, disgust, the fear of punishment, and loss of love. Excrement can become a symbol of defiance, self-loathing, as well as besmirching revenge. Anality and excremental imagery can pervade the imagination and vocabulary of the person whose world view is despoiled with such ineradicable conflicts and obsessions. Martin Luther's biography further accords with the psychoanalytic paradigm. Luther was obsessed with the contaminating and uncleansible ubiquity of feces, proclaiming for example, "scatet totus orbis," the whole world shits, and "the world is a gaping anus and I am a rife shard."2 This is but one instance to highlight the complexities that may be brought into focus through a psychological exploration—not as a means of reducing phenomena to categories or diagnoses, not applying labels or inherently pathologizing the thing investigated, but sounding something against psychological researches, exploring the resonances between psychology and thing observed, and being aware of a deeper spectrum of psychological complexities; thinking psychologically. Thus this paper uses psychoanalysis to sound and understand the psychodynamics of certain Buddhist texts and practices from India, China, and Japan. Though one may be able to distill certain central tenets of Buddhism, one cannot assume a priori very much about how any particular Buddhism is actually conceived or practiced. As Faure (1996) writes, "In theory, Buddhism recognizes only two levels: the absolute, characterized by the absence of individual nature, and the relative, the world of egocentric illusion" (p. 156). Nevertheless, the attachment to lineage, funerary ideology, sacred and magical relics, and a host of idolatrous literalisms abound in Buddhism, in Zen monks as well as peasants. Keizan not only deposited the sacred bones of his master Dogen in a funerary mound behind Yokoji, but counted himself as one of the "Five Elders" and "preposthumously" declared his own bones to be relics venerated in "all the monasteries" (p. 158). Reverence for regalia like the "Dharma robe" (kasaya), teeth and hair clippings of the Buddha, his "heavenly" tooth or finger, reflected the widespread belief in the magical powers of relics to protect the country, ensure rich harvests, and even modify karma, assure one of Bud-

B U D D H I S M , D E A T H , A N D THE F E M I N I N E

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dhahood, and enable one to enter the Pure Land or Tusita heaven. As Faure writes, "The cult of relics is one of the basic components of Buddhism, in India as in the rest of Buddhist Asia. A priori, we should not expect to find it in as theoretically 'iconoclastic' a school as Zen. But practice often tends to belie theory, and all the Chan or Zen masters seemed to have attached a certain importance to the fate of their remains" (p. 160). Despite the image of Buddhism as a meditation on detachment, of sagacious monks at one with the universe, and despite explicit messages on the illusory and impermanent nature of appearances, Buddhism could be utterly literalistic, fanatical, even violent. The Tendai monks of Mount Hiei are notorious for descending suddenly and ripping their enemies to shreds. On three occasions they assaulted Nishihonganji (whether because Jodoshinshu was somehow heretical to them or because its increasing popularity threatened Hiei's political influence is difficult to say). In the Japanese medieval epic The Tale of the Heike, suffering victims of war implore Amida to save them. They simultaneously lament that the world is illusory, ephemeral, and tormenting, and fight wars and commit suicide as though it were real. And they pray that Amida bring them to paradise while expressing the saddest and most pathetic attachments to the decimated world they love. People pray to Buddha as though he were a deity. Sutras are recited that Buddha heal the sick, grant them both worldly amelioration of pain so that they may live happily, and salvation in the afterlife. Sages such as Kuya (903-972) promulgated the view that "he never fails to reach the Lotus Land of Bliss who calls, if only once, the name of Amida," and Honen (11331212) insisted that the mere invocation of the Nembutsu would bring salvation (Eliade, 1967, pp. 503-505; cf. also Faure, 2003; Kitagawa, 1987). When the Tendai priest Shinsei died in 1495, "several nuns tried to drown themselves, apparently in the hope of following him to the Pure Land" (Faure, 2003, p. 47). Whatever the "authentic" message, people took these ideas very literally. If Buddhism seems to teach that all is illusion, there are nevertheless schools of Buddhism that believe still today in a literal paradise which adherents may enter if they chant the name Amida with enough devotion. In Kyoto one may visit the Zen temple Ryoanji, where the goal is inwardness, detachment, and recognition of perception as a projective process. One seeks self-understanding, or in a more Buddhistic language, how "self" is an illusory construct that must be understood in order to detach from destructiveness and pain. Buddhist scholar Nobuo Haneda compares Amida to Hamlet or Faust, saying that one derives wisdom from Amida as a fictional character and would never worship him as a god.3 Nevertheless, elsewhere in Kyoto, in such temples as Chioin, Sanjusangendo, or Nishihonganji, devotees

40


believe in distinct divine entities, an afterlife, salvation, or reincarnation. These may all be called Buddhisms but they are diametrically opposed; the Zen approach being (ostensibly) nontheological, and the others mentioned being distinctly literalistic and theological. A practitioner of Zen from Ryoanji might well see the theology of Chioin as distinctly opposite Buddhist truths, believing in the idol, worshipping rather than recognizing belief and supplication as the very illusions and attachments from which one must free oneself. Thus one may have trouble essentializing Buddhism, and the purpose of this paper is to trace certain fantasies that pervade the Buddhist corpus despite the possibility that such fantasies may not be considered "authentic" Buddhism to scholars or practitioners. While there are numerous forms of Buddhism, a close reading of many Buddhist texts reveals fantasies and emotional dispositions which either contradict the stated philosophy (and conventional interpretations) or remain trenchant themes in the text regardless of whether the authors are aware of these motives. How a Buddhist (or any person) might define his or her conscious feelings and ideas is no indication of what may be going on unconsciously. Stating that Buddhism is itself aimed at discovering the nature of one's attachments and deceptions is not proof that one has actually achieved this goal. Indeed, a central tenet of psychoanalysis is that the psyche deceives the conscious self about its true motives. Certain forms of Buddhism have been well aware of this thousands of years before psychoanalysis: "Trying to know ourselves is like trying to glimpse a shadow in a hall of mirrors" (Leifer, 1997, p. 106).4 In the Buddhist view, the basic cause of suffering is ignorance, avidya, literally, "the failure to see." The ego is the locus of our ignorance. We think of the ego as the locus of our knowledge, and indeed it is regarded as the locus of our logical faculties, but the ego itself is formed out of ignorance, in the sense that it is built u p o n a view of itself and the world which denies, represses, or distorts the facts of existence, especially the facts of suffering and d e a t h . . . . The mechanisms of defense are all falsifications of reality. They are lies w e tell ourselves, (p. 78)

The task is therefore not to claim that a culture or theology knows its true motives and fantasies, but to read the unstated, the repressed, the displaced, and the symbolic, that which is being said despite the conscious desires of the subject. BUDDHISM, DEATH, AND DISGUST The argument of this paper is that many Buddhist texts reveal an immense disgust for life itself, for the body, and for death. Further,


4i

this fear and hatred of death engenders a tangible disgust and moral derogation of the feminine as the source of life and physical decay. One can only ask the reader to approach this strange perspective with an open mind, and to notice when one finds an idea stressful, that perhaps such anxiety may reflect a threat to our own wishes, attachments, and fantasies. The story of Buddha is a simple one: Prince Gautama lives secluded within the walls of his opulent castle. When he ventures out one day he encounters aging, sickness, and death. He thus ventures to the Bodhi Tree to find enlightenment of the meaning of existence and determines that the suffering which is life can be escaped by extinguishing desire. The fundamental asseveration of Buddhism is that life is a painful illusion caused by emotional attachment. Enlightenment consists of the attainment of this understanding, and enlightenment of the Buddha realm is also achieved by eradicating desire. Buddhism is therefore operating under a paradox: If the suffering of life is an illusion that can be overcome by detachment, then it is the emotions which are here criticized. But in the ubiquitous condemnation of birth, death, human decay, disease, and mortality, Buddhism is attributing evil to the physical world. Consider Gautama's thoughts after encountering the sufferings outside his castle, as written in the Digha Nikaya, xiv [Mahapadana suttanta]: Shame then verily be upon this thing called birth, since to one born old age shows itself like that! Shame then verily be upon this thing called birth, since to one born decay shows itself like that, disease shows itself like that. Shame verily be upon this thing called birth, since to one born the decay of life, since disease, since death shows itself like that! Verily, this world has fallen upon trouble—one is born, and grows old, and dies, and falls from one state, and springs up in another. And from the suffering, moreover, no one knows of any way of escape, even from decay and death. O, when shall a way of escape from this suffering be made known—from decay and from death? (Brewster, 1926, pp. 15-19) Shame and disgust are hardly detachment, and they rather motivate disparagement, which is actually an emotional attachment. What is at issue is the problem of mortality, and this is the unacceptable, ineluctable fact which motivates the defense dynamism of denial and the moral categorization of life itself. Consider these aphorisms from the Dhammapada: 47. He who is busy culling pleasure, as one plucks flowers, Death seizes and hurries off, as a great flood bears away a sleeping village.

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48. The Destroyer treads him underfoot as he is culling his worldly pleasures, still unsated with lusts of flesh. 147. Look at this painted image, wounded and swollen, sickly and full of lust, in which there is no permanence; [sic] 148. This wasted form is a nest of disease and very frail: it is full of putrid matter and perishes. Death is the end of life. 149. What delight is there for him who sees these grey bones scattered like gourds in autumn? 150. Here is a citadel of bones plastered with flesh and blood, and manned by old age and death, self-will and enmity. 151. Even as the king's bright chariot grows old, so the body of man also comes to old age. But the law of the holy never ages. . . . 170. The King of Death sees not him who regards the world as a bubble, a mirage. . . . 202. There is no sorrow like existence: no bliss greater than Nirvana [rest]. 238. Make for thyself a refuge; come, strive and play the sage! Burn off thy taints, and thou shalt know birth and old age no more. 289. Knowing this clearly, the wise and the righteous man straightaway clears the road that leads to Nirvana. (Eliade, 1967, pp. 581-583) Death itself is the evil, which must be evaded by extinguishing the self. The dread of life's irrevocable conclusion and cessation is the motivating factor, and thus the defense mechanism of denial sets in. The horror of decay and mortality engenders a way to escape and subsequently insinuates a causal factor between the morally objectionable and corrupt fact of existence and the attachment to life which despairs of death. In other words, despair motivates denial, while it also condemns that which cannot fulfill wishes for security and permanence, that is, life itself. Without such wishes (needs), there would be no denial, no condemnation, no need to escape. Great disappointment engenders resentment, moral approbation, and the drive to transcendence, not objectivity or compassion. Hence the desire for life is blamed for the cause of life itself, since one is rejecting that which one cannot have. And one subsequently deceives oneself into believing that if one abandons such futile desires, that one will therefore escape the pernicious phenomenon causing such disappointment. Hence life, not merely desire, is condemned, while actually being considered the progeny of desire. It is attachment that is most often emphasized in describing or discussing Buddhist ideas, but this is only an evasion of what the true source of misery is. The source of misery is life and death itself, and


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desire must be extinguished as the solution. Once we focus on death as the essential problem, and attachment as only a deceptively misemphasized causal factor, then we realize the significance of moral condemnation of life and death, and the defensive, wishful quality of the metaphysical drive for transcendence. Consider the words of the Shikshasamuccaya [Vajradhvaha-sutta] 280-282: The whole world of living beings I must rescue, from the terrors of birth, of old age, of sickness, of death and rebirth, of all kinds of moral offence, of all states of woe, of the whole cycle of birth-and-death.... I must give myself away as a pawn through which the whole world is redeemed from the terrors of the hells, of animal birth, of the world of Yama. . . . (Conze et al, 1954, pp. 131-132) One contemporary Japanese Pure Land Buddhist text cites the eternal truth of the Pali Anguttarra Nikayas Samana-sutta that "all living things are born from i g n o r a n c e " — " t ^ T t ^ t. l/£(;t

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