The Death Instinct

by Jed Rubenfeld

  'He wasn't my fiancй,' said Colette.

  Freud raised both eyebrows: 'Younger killed the wrong men?'

  'No,' she answered. 'He killed the right men.'

  'I see,' said Freud again.

  'Dr Freud,' said Younger, 'I should warn you it may not be wise to let us in. I don't know how things are here, but in America it's a crime to take a murderer into your house.'

  'Did you commit murder?' asked Freud.

  'I may have,' said Younger. 'I believe I did.'

  'It wasn't murder,' Colette replied sharply. 'And if it was, I only wish you could have murdered him a thousand more times.'

  'Ah,' said Freud. 'Well, don't just stand there. Come in.'

  A fire crackled in an old-fashioned porcelain stove in the Freuds' sitting room. Younger and Freud were drinking brandy. Tea had been served to Colette, but she ended up taking brandy as well, out of Younger's snifter. They had told Freud the entire story, and silence had fallen.

  'What a lovely tablecloth,' said Colette.

  'Is it?' asked Freud.

  'The lace,' she answered. 'It's lovely.'

  'I'll tell Minna you said so; she sewed it,' replied Freud. 'Would you like a blanket, my dear?'

  Colette was holding herself as if outside on a chill night. 'Why didn't I kill him?' she asked with sudden animation. 'Why was I such a weakling?'

  'You don't know?' said Freud.

  'No.'

  Freud began trimming a cigar, watching Colette out of the corner of his eye. He offered one to Younger, who declined. 'The conventional answer,' said Freud, 'would be that your conscience rebelled at the last moment, convincing you that revenge is a sin.'

  'Revenge is a sin,' she said.

  'Everyone wants revenge,' answered Freud. 'The problem is that we usually seek it against the wrong person. At least you sought it against the right one. But your religious compunctions — they're not the reason you didn't kill him.'

  'I know,' she agreed. 'I believed it was the right thing to do — with all my heart. I still do. I shouldn't, but I do. But then why couldn't I pull the trigger?'

  'For the same reason, I suspect, your brother doesn't talk.'

  Colette looked at Freud, perplexed.

  'Do you have something else to tell us, my dear?' asked Freud.

  'What do you mean?'

  'Your brother has something to say,' said Freud. 'As a result of which he says nothing.'

  'I — you know what's wrong with my brother?' asked Colette.

  'I know exactly what's wrong with him,' said Freud, drawing on his cigar. 'But first things first. You have only two options, as I see it. Turn yourselves in or leave the country.'

  'We can't turn ourselves in,' said Younger. 'We'd be handed over to the police in Prague and jailed for who knows how long. Eventually they'll find Gruber's mother, so they'll learn we were looking for him. They'd ask us why. If we told them the truth, they'd conclude that Colette was bent on a revenge killing, which would be true — and which would be murder, even if we could prove what Gruber did in the war, which we can't. If we refused to tell them why we were looking for him, they'd know we were hiding something, and then they probably wouldn't believe anything else we said. Either way, we might end up convicted.'

  'Then you have to get out,' said Freud. At that moment, the lamps in the room flickered. 'Blast it — we're going to lose power again. It happens at least once a week.'

  Freud waited, cigar poised in the air. The flickering abated; the lights stayed on.

  'Perhaps we'll be all right,' he resumed.

  'Please, Dr Freud,' said Colette. 'Can you explain what's the matter with my brother?'

  'I'll tell you what I know, Fraulein, but the concepts will be new to you and strange. Brandy?' Taking his time, Freud refilled his own and Younger's glasses.

  'Well, where to begin?' said Freud. He was seated again, his legs crossed, in one hand a cigar, in the other his brandy. 'Twenty-five years ago, I discovered a path to unseen provinces of our mental life, which I may have been the first mortal ever to enter. There I found a hell of inexpressible fears and longings, for which men and women might have burned in earlier eras. A man cannot expect such insight more than once in a lifetime. But last year, I made a new discovery that, in my more vainglorious moments, I think might even surpass the first. No one will believe it, but that will be nothing new. It came to me from studying the war neuroses — indeed in part from studying your brother, Miss Rousseau. Not that your brother has a neurosis, strictly speaking, but his condition is similar. I want to be clear about one thing: he requires treatment. Wherever you go next, you should not simply leave him as he is. His case is straightforward enough. I could cure him myself, I expect, in — I don't know — eight weeks.'

  'Cure him?' repeated Colette. 'Completely?'

  'I should think so.'

  Colette didn't know how to respond.

  'You sent us to Jauregg,' said Younger. 'Why?'

  'Many choose to treat their psychological disorders mechanistically. Miss Rousseau has to decide if she really wants her brother analyzed. I'm not sure she does. Twice now, she has brought her brother to Vienna but refused to commit herself to the time an analysis would require. And perhaps she's right: after all, it may not be pleasant for her.'

  'For me?' asked Colette. 'Why?'

  'I told you last year,' said Freud. 'The truths that psychoanalysis unearths are never irrelevant to other family members. Fraulein, you know what it is to yearn for revenge. Your brother is taking revenge too — by not speaking.'

  'On whom?' asked Colette.

  'Perhaps on you.'

  'Whatever for?'

  'You can't tell us?' asked Freud.

  'I can't imagine what you're talking about,' answered Colette.

  'It's just speculation, my dear. I don't know the answer.'

  'But you said you knew what was wrong with him,' said Colette.

  'I do. I understood it last summer, two months after you left. It was child's play, as a matter of fact. Younger, what is the boy's most revealing symptom?'

  'I have no idea,' said Younger.

  'Come — I just gave it away.'

  Younger chafed at Freud's habit of luring him with analytic conundrums, particularly under the present circumstances, but all the same, the lure took. Child's play? 'His game,' said Younger. 'Something to do with his fishing reel game.'

  'Exactly,' said Freud. 'Miss Rousseau told me that her grandmother played a German hide-and-seek game with her brother when he was little. He is saying fort and da when he unspools and rewinds his reel — gone and there. What does it mean?'

  Younger thought about it: 'When did he start?'

  'In 1914,' said Freud.

  'He's reliving the death of his parents,' said Younger.

  'Obviously. Over and over. But why?'

  'To undo the feeling of loss?'

  'No. He isn't undoing anything. He's making himself experience the single worst moment of his life again and again.'

  Cigar smoke had filled the candlelit room with its heavy, heady odor.

  'It's the key to the riddle,' said Freud. 'All the war neurotics repeat. They have a kind of compulsion — a repetition compulsion — a need to reenact or reexperience the trauma that has given rise to their condition. And they're all repeating the same thing: death, or the moment when they came closest to it. Normally, we have defenses — fortifications, physiological and psychological — that keep our mortality away from us, out of our consciousness. If these fortifications are breached, if in a moment of unexpected trauma, mortality punctures these defenses, its terror rushes in and starts a kind of mental conflagration — a fire very difficult to extinguish — but a fire to which a man wants to return again and again. The shell-shocked man will relive his trauma when asleep; or in broad daylight, he will conjure a bomb going off in the noise of a door slamming; he may even reenact the episode through bodily symptoms.'

  'Why?' asked Younger. 'To discharge the fear?'
r />   'For a long time I tried to understand it that way,' replied Freud. 'Discharging fear would be pleasurable. At least it would lessen displeasure. Every psychological phenomenon, I thought, was motivated at bottom by the drive to increase pleasure or lessen displeasure. But I was trying to fit facts to theory, when I should have been fitting theory to facts. I had just begun to understand it when you were last here. The war taught me something I should have seen ages ago: we have a drive beyond the pleasure principle. Another instinct, as fundamental as hunger, as irresistible as love.'

  'What instinct?' asked Colette.

  'A death instinct. More tea, Miss Rousseau?'

  'No, thank you.'

  'You mean a desire to kill?' asked Younger.

  'That's one side of it,' said Freud. 'But fundamentally it's a longing for death. For destruction. Not only someone else's; also our own.'

  'You think people want to die?' asked Colette.

  'I do,' said Freud. 'It's built into our cells, our very atoms. There are two elemental forces in the universe. One draws matter toward matter. That is how life comes into being and how it propagates. In physics, this force is called gravity; in psychology, love. The other force tears matter apart. It is the force of disunification, disintegration, destruction. If I'm correct, every planet, every star in the universe is not only drawn toward the others by gravity, but also pushed away from them by a force of repulsion we can't see. Within an organism, this force is what drives the animal to seek death, as moths seek a flame.'

  'But you can cure it — this death instinct?' asked Colette.

  'One cannot cure an instinct, Miss Rousseau,' said Freud. 'One cannot eliminate it. One can, however, make it more conscious and in this way relieve its pathological effects. When an instinct creates in us an impulse that we don't act on, the impulse does not go away. It may subsist unaffected. It may intensify. It may be turned to other objects, for better or worse. Or it may produce pathological symptoms. Such symptoms can be cured.'

  'I wouldn't have thought,' said Younger, 'that Luc's muteness aimed at death.'

  'No, his muteness has another function. That would be the point of analyzing him — to uncover that function. It's undoubtedly connected to his parents' death, but there's something more too. Possibly their death reminded him of a scene he had witnessed even earlier. Did your father mistreat you, Miss Rousseau?'

  'Mistreat me? In what way?'

  'In any way.'

  'Not at all,' said Colette.

  'No? Did he favor you?'

  'Luc was his favorite,' said Colette. 'I was a girl.'

  Freud nodded. 'Well, it's a pity you can't remain in Vienna, but I don't see how it's possible. Vienna is a much smaller city than New York. You'll be noticed here. The police will have everyone watching; someone will report you.'

  'May I ask you a question, Dr Freud?' asked Colette.

  'Of course.'

  'These two forces you describe,' she said. 'They're good and evil, aren't they? The instinct for love is good, and the instinct for death is evil.'

  Freud smiled: 'In science, my dear, there is no such thing as good or evil. The death instinct is part of our biology. You're familiar with chromatolysis — the natural process by which cells die? Every one of our cells brings about its own destruction at its allotted time. That's the death instinct in operation. Now if a cell fails to die, what happens? It keeps dividing, reproducing, endlessly, unnaturally. It becomes a cancer. That's what cancer is, after all — cells afflicted with the loss of their will to die. The death instinct is not evil, Miss Rousseau. In its proper place it's every bit as essential to our well-being as its opposite.'

  That night, after Freud had retired and Colette and Luc were installed in one of the children's old bedrooms and the apartment fell silent, Younger smoked a cigarette on the veranda. He had felt claustrophobic inside; on the little balcony overlooking the courtyard, he felt claustrophobic outside as well. A door opened within; Younger imagined it might be Colette, coming to join him.

  'No — it's only me,' said Freud's voice behind him. The older man stepped out onto the veranda. 'So what do you think of my death instinct?'

  'I'm for it,' said Younger.

  Freud smiled. 'You're still at war, my boy. You never demobilized. Ten years ago, I wouldn't have foreseen you as the instinctual kind. You were more — repressed.'

  'I read somewhere that repression is unhealthy. A world-famous psychologist has proven it.'

  'Whose ideas you don't accept.'

  'Ten years ago,' said Younger, reflecting, 'I saw your ideas as moral anarchy. Exploding all propriety. But you were right. I guess I don't believe in morality anymore.'

  'Ah yes, that's what my critics say: Freud the libertine, Freud the amoral.' He inhaled the night air — a deep breath of age and judgment. 'It's true, I'm no believer in Sunday school morality. Love thy neighbor as thyself is an absurd principle: quite impossible, unless one has a very unusual neighbor. But when it comes to a sense of justice, I believe I can measure myself with the best men I've known. All my life I've tried to be honorable — not to harm, not to take advantage — even though I know perfectly well that by doing so I've made myself an anvil for others' brutality, their disloyalty, their ambition.'

  'Why then?' asked Younger. 'Why do you do it?'

  'I could give you a plausible psychological explanation,' said Freud. 'But the truth is I have no idea. Why I — and for that matter my children — have to be thoroughly decent human beings is beyond my comprehension. It is merely a fact. An anchor.'

  There was a slight pause before Younger said: 'You think I need an anchor?'

  'No. You have one already.'

  'You mean a sense of justice?'

  'I meant love,' said Freud. 'Which is why this bombing of yours worries me.'

  'The Wall Street bombing?'

  'Yes. It may be a harbinger of something new. Not its violence — that's to be expected. I was reading the other day a description of one of those happy quarters of the earth where primitive societies flourish in peace and contentment, knowing no aggression. I didn't believe a word of it. Where there are men, there will be violence. Fortunately, the death instinct almost never operates alone. Our two instincts are nearly always obliged to work together — which gives sexuality its violent character, but also tempers the death drive. That's what makes your bombing so troubling.'

  'Because it was unalloyed?'

  'Exactly,' said Freud. 'The death instinct unbound. Freed from the life instincts, freed from the ideals by which the ego assesses its actions — conscience. Perhaps the war has unleashed it, or perhaps an ideology. Men have always worshipped death. There are death gods in every ancient religion. Goddesses as well, some of them quite beautiful, like Atropos with her shears, cutting life's threads — which is further evidence, by the way, of man's attraction to death. They haven't caught the perpetrators, have they?'

  'Of the bombing?' asked Younger. 'Not yet.'

  'Perhaps because they're dead.'

  It took Younger a moment before he understood: 'You think they killed themselves in the blast — deliberately.'

  'Maybe they did, maybe they didn't,' said Freud. 'Maybe they'll give others the idea. But yes, that's what worries me.'

  Early the next morning, while Freud was out for his daily constitutional, Oktavian Kinsky called. 'I've come to offer you my services, Mademoiselle,' he said to Colette in the Freuds' sitting room. 'I heard what happened outside the Hotel Bristol last night. I thought I might find you here, and I also thought you might want discreet transportation to the railway station.'

  'You're very kind, Count Oktavian,' said Colette. 'I don't know how to thank you.'

  'Not at all, Mademoiselle,' he replied. 'A nobleman's first duty is not to the police, but to the beautiful woman the police are pursuing.'

  'Especially the nobleman who reported the woman to the police in the first place,' said Younger.

  'Stratham,' Colette rebuked Younger. 'Why would you say
that?'

  Oktavian was abashed. 'I'm afraid he's right.'

  'They found your business cards,' said Younger.

  'That's just it,' replied Oktavian abjectly. 'Several of my cards were discovered near the scene of your — your misadventure. The Czech authorities wired the Vienna police, who put me in a cell as if I'd committed a crime. They said a man named Hans Gruber had been killed in Prague. They asked me if I knew him. What was I to do? Naturally I explained that you, Miss Rousseau, had journeyed to Braunau in romantic pursuit of Herr Gruber, and that Dr Younger had driven to Braunau in romantic pursuit of you, together with your brother, in a motorcycle I'd rented for him. I'm sure the police have everything wrong, as they always do. I told them that neither of you could possibly have been involved in a killing. I'm so sorry; it's all my fault.'

  'No,' said Colette, 'it's our fault the police came for you.'

  'Did you tell them,' asked Younger, 'that we were acquainted with the Freuds?'

  'Certainly not,' said Oktavian. 'One doesn't reveal confidences to the police. By the way, where is my motorcycle, if you don't mind? I understand you arrived at the hotel last night by taxi. Did you leave the motorcycle at the station?'

  'The police didn't tell you?' asked Younger.

  'Tell me what?'

  Younger beckoned to Luc. 'Count Kinsky wants to know where his motorcycle is,' Younger said to the boy.

  Luc pulled from a pocket a small round mirror with a piece of snapped metal at one end. Oktavian took the offering with blinking eyes. From his other pocket, Luc produced a bent wheel spoke.

  'Oh, dear,' said Oktavian.

  'Enjoyed it immensely,' said Younger. 'Agile little vehicle.'

  'Oh, dear,' Oktavian repeated, swallowing drily. 'Well, they say debtor's prison is not nearly so unpleasant as it used to be.'

  'Wait — there's one more item,' said Younger, withdrawing from his jacket a bank draft, which he made out to Oktavian Kinsky.

  Oktavian stared at the draft. 'This isn't enough for a motorcycle, Doctor,' he said. 'It's enough for a motorcycle and three new automobiles.'

  'I know,' said Younger. 'And still not enough to repay you.'

  There was nothing to pack. Their belongings were all at the hotel and therefore irretrievable. In the courtyard, they were saying goodbye to Minna when Freud returned from his morning walk, accompanied by his wife, Martha.