The Psychologists' Assertion

 In an essay on Emily Dickinson, collected in his Required Writing, Philip Larkin refers in passing to "the psychologists' assertion that an obsession with death conceals a fear of sex." 

Larkin—whose poems evoke more than enough dread of both—may have known whereof he spoke. 

But what more rational fear could any human brain have than of its own eventual annihilation? All life seeks to perpetuate itself. We have evolved to want to protect the continuity of our organism. 

Why, then, would an "obsession with" or fear of death require any special psychoanalytic explanation? What could be more natural and least in need of Freudian insight than that a conscious being should dread its own destruction? 

Larkin understands this as well. In an interview with the Observer, collected in the same volume, he says—of mortality—"if you ask why does it bother me, I can only say I dread endless extinction." 

His implied point being: and why shouldn't he? Who wouldn't? 

Is this not the ur-fear, from which all of our lesser fears derive? 

Better to say, then, that the "psychologists" have it backward. An obsession with sex conceals a fear of death—rather than the other way around. 

The early Freud would differ, though. He would say—at the level of the Unconscious, no one truly fears death. Because no one can actually imagine their own annihilation. 

At the most fundamental, narcissistic level—he writes in "Reflections on War and Death" (1915)—every ego believes itself to be immortal. 

And indeed, non-existence is unthinkable from within the categories of existence. This accounts for a certain "Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," to borrow the title of a Damien Hirst piece. 

Whatever is outside of existence belongs, then, purely to the realm of the mystical, in Wittgenstein's sense. It is beyond one's field of thought or mental vision. 

So why fear it—if we cannot even think it? How can we fear that which we cannot even conceive? 

But this is the sort of argument Larkin himself adequately demolishes in a famous poem: 

He refers to that "specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel,"—then adds:

"That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, [...]

The anaesthetic from which none come round."

In other words—is the brain really incapable of fearing a state just because it cannot imagine it? Or does the unimaginableness of non-existence not make it even more fearsome? 

And indeed, the later Freud suggests that the Unconscious is not so unacquainted with or incapable of grappling with the possibility of death as he had at first believed. 

In his subsequent writings, he mined another, quite different attitude to death from the submerged layers of the Unconscious. 

Alongside the ego's assumption of personal immortality, he wrote—there is also the longing for death. The drive toward extinction. The nostalgia for the inanimate state, which he describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

I was reading Don DeLillo's short novel Point Omega, about a postmodern intellectual hired by the defense department to write cooky exercises in "theory," in order to throw critics of the Iraq War and extraordinary rendition off the scent. 

This "scholar" at the center of the book turns out to be motivated to support the war effort—the torture program—CIA black sites—all the rest of it—not only by a distinctly American drive for post-9/11 revenge—but also the more universal Freudian thanatic urge. 

"Isn't this the burden of consciousness?" he asks. "Matter wants to lose its self-consciousness. We're the mind and heart that matter has become. Time to close it all down. This is what drives us now. [...] We want to be the dead matter we used to be." 

Echoes here of Freud: "The attributes of life were at some time evolved in inanimate matter [...] The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way, the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state." (Strachey trans.)

And indeed, one of the available human attitudes toward death has always been not only fear—but fear mixed with desire. Longing. An almost sensual attitude that perhaps accounts for the proximity of death and sex in the unconscious that Larkin's "psychologists" were spotting. 

In moments of greatest stress and despair, we long for the peace of the inanimate state from which we all began—the mere "matter" out of which the first life arose—producing endless complications ever since. 

In such times, we long to know "what made fatuous sunbeams toil / To break Earth's sleep at all"—as Wilfred Owen put it. 

We take comfort in the thought of our eventual extinction. We long for that "absolute, utter forgetting" of which D.H. Lawrence wrote. 

We think—with Swinburne—well, at least "dead men rise up never," and "even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea." 

As a character says in Thomas Lovell Beddoes's The Bride's Tragedy:

Come so to me, sweet death, and I will wreath thee 

An amorous chaplet for thy paly brows; 

And, on an odoured bank of wan white buds. 

In thy fair arms I'll lie, and taste thy cool delicious breath, 

And sleep, and sleep, and sleep. 

Philippe Ariès would call this the "gentle death." 

(Note again the quasi-sexual element in this attitude to death. One finds it too with a more homosexual and sadistic valence in Owen's "Greater Love.")

In an essay about attitudes to death, Walter Kaufmann once quoted a series of German poets—Heine, Benn, and others—to suggest that this tolerant attitude to death is a distinctly Germanic one. 

But I could cite you as many or more English, Scottish, and American bards who could rival "Der Tod und das Mädchen" for treating death as the ultimate comforter and friend. 

In addition to the ones already cited, there is Burns's apostrophizing to Death as "the poor man's dearest friend, / The kindest and the best!"

Paul Laurence Dunbar writes of "the grave" as giving "true release" and "the clasp of peace."

And Beddoes again. In Death's Jest-Book, a character cries: 

O Death! I am thy friend, 

I struggle not with thee, I love thy state: 

Thou canst be sweet and gentle, be so now;

And let me pass away into thee[.]

Here's another, from Beddoes: Methinks it is not so unlovely, 

This calm unconscious state, this breathless peace, 

Which all, but troublesome and riotous man,

Assume without resistance. 

(Still another character declares: "Death and Hymen both are here"—so maybe we will need to dust off those psychoanalytic theories after all, with which we began.)

Beddoes even reveals that our religious longing for immortality is as much a fantasy of eternal death as it is of eternal life. Indeed, the two may in the end be interchangeable. 

When Death (in the figure of the deceased Wolfram) first enters on the stage, in Beddoes's Jest-Book, he announces himself as the servant of "Comfort"—"a name," he says, "by which the master, whose I am, / Is named by many wise and many wretched." 

Is he talking about Jesus? No, he's talking about Death. But perhaps they are one. 

He goes on: "Will ye with me to the place where sighs are not; / A shore of blessing"?

Is he talking about Heaven? No—again—he means death. But maybe, again, the two are one and the same. 

When the mystics and theologians have been asked to describe the heavenly state of the saved and blessed, they have described it as a perfect and changeless state. 

But what is changeless that is living? Is not the most perfect and immutable thing a stone? 

So what is this longing for heaven if not a disguised form of Freud's death drive—the nostalgia for the inanimate state? 

This is the "omega point" that DeLillo's Teilhard de Chardin–inspired character longs for. The "dead matter" to which he suspects we all secretly long to return. "We pass completely out of being. Stones," he says. 

In the closet drama Axël, by Auguste Villers de l'Isle-Adam, the protagonist is gradually inducted at one point into the mysteries of esoteric knowledge. He slowly realizes that this promised salvation through spiritual perfection resembles nothing at last so much as non-existence. 

Spiritual discipline is "too high a price for nothingness:" he cries; "I do not wish to become a stone statue." (Guicharnaud trans.)

But Freud—and DeLillo's "scholar" character would say—yes you do. Deep down. That's exactly what you want to become. 

"Back now to inorganic matter," the scholar says in DeLillo's book. "This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field." 

That's what religion is all about. The longing for the pre-animate state. 

In this cosmic view, the distinction between mortality and immortality collapses. Heaven and annihilation become one. 

And so we may indeed "thank whatever gods may be" that "even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea."