AMONG FREUD’S ESSAYS FROM the war years, the most widely known may be a compact consideration of mood disorders. Mourning and Melancholia begins with the observation that in most regards depression resembles grief. In both conditions, Freud writes, the sufferer loses interest in the world. In particular, the capacity to love is absent.
The cause of mourning is obvious, the loss of a person or an abstraction, like liberty. Nor is the course of grief difficult to describe, in psychoanalytic terms. For a while, libido, the sexual energy that informs love, remains attached to the lost object. (Object can mean something like person, as in the object of one’s affection.) But the mourner is also in touch with the reality that the beloved is gone. Slowly, through “grief work,” the emotional investment is removed from memories and expectations of the deceased.
Because it resembles grief, melancholia, today’s major depression, would seem to arise from loss, too. Commonly a disappointment, like the end of a romance, is evident. But depression has two features, Freud observes, that are absent from normal grief. Depression does not end easily. And the depressed person suffers “an extraordinary diminution in self-regard.” In the grip of depression, people are beset by a conviction that they are morally worthless. They have come under the judgment of a “critical agency” in the mind.
Moreover, depression has a social function. It makes life hard for another person—a disappointing husband, say. Listening attentively, we will find that the self-accusations of the melancholic sound like indictments against the beloved. Freud writes slyly, “The woman who loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife as herself is really accusing her husband of being incapable, in whatever sense she may mean this.”
Freud explains the distinctive features of melancholia—chronicity, self-diminution, and hostility—by tracing the fate of the mind’s energy. It remains tied up, unavailable for reuse. The problem, Freud says, is that the depressive has made a narcissistic object choice, falling in love with someone who represents aspects of the self. This relationship is characterized by ambivalence, love mixed with contempt. In depression, energy does not move from the lost other to the outside world. Caught between love and hatred, the melancholic cannot let go. Instead, the disappointing other is brought within and the mixed energy of love and hate becomes attached to the self. Freud puts the fate of the beloved, the self, and the conscience in terms that are simultaneously technical and poetic: “Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object.”
Women and homosexuals, by Freud’s account, are especially likely to make a love choice based on narcissism. If they were more self-aware, they would suffer less. In general, Freud’s melancholics are narcissists who turn self-hatred into trouble for those around them. Freud explains mania on a similar basis. The melancholic is engaged in an inner struggle that ends when she finally devalues the other as bad and, releasing the ties all at once, revels in triumphant self-love.
Freud put forth his theory of mood disorders as tentative. Typically, this posture was rhetorical. Freud introduced ideas as speculations and then defended them as facts, which is how they passed into the analytic canon. In practice, Mourning and Melancholia became the most durable of Freud’s shorter works, influencing generations of therapists.
In recent years, depression has been studied extensively. What we know raises concerns about Freud’s account of the disease. Depression is varied. It can arise in response to small strokes in relevant parts of the brain. It occurs spontaneously, in people with strong genetic predispositions. And it is triggered by a range of stressors. The loss of jobs, money, status, or relationships can set off episodes. There is no evidence that these goods need to be regarded ambivalently. The end of a supportive partnership is a frequent cause of depression. All sorts of people suffer depression, the narcissistic and the selfless. And as depression recurs, it tends to appear “out of the blue,” so that fifth or sixth episodes are often “uncaused.” The pattern suggests that a physiological mechanism has taken over, and that psychological factors have become less relevant. If Freud saw narcissism and ambivalence in all his depressed patients, he was looking at an unusual series.
Freud’s observations hold some of the time. Depressives can have mixed feelings about their intimate relationships. But Freud may have mistaken the reason. The genetics of what researchers call “neuroticism,” a personality trait associated with self-doubt, anxiety, and other negative emotions, overlap with the genetics of depression. People who enter into relationships with trepidation happen also to be people who are prone to mood disorders, on the basis of heredity. This correlation is hardly surprising. Then, too, abused children often suffer depression in adulthood, when they are also at risk for pairing off with unsupportive partners. Bad relationships can end badly. The problem is not that the end of a certain sort of relationship (in which ambivalence prevails) causes depression. Rather, people in difficult relationships are also people liable to depression in the face of adversity.
As for self-accusations, they arise in depression and disappear as the disease lifts. Low self-worth is an integral part of the syndrome, occurring even when depression results from frank brain injury.
Freud had crafted a morality tale: Patients’ repressed sexual desires—their guilty love for a parent and their narcissism—lead to poor object choices, self-hatred, and finally a binding up of energy. This account moved psychiatry away from solid ground, the centuries-old understanding that depression arises from heredity, stress, and bodily illness, in nonspecific fashion. In practical terms, Mourning and Melancholia was an unfortunate narrative, inspiring psychotherapies in which depressives were catechized over their ambivalence or insecurity, when they were simply devastated.
But again, Freud was wise in his everyday observations. Often in romance, we choose someone whose strengths and weaknesses mirror our own. We then become paralyzed by our mixed feelings. We extricate ourselves only when we can hate the other and overestimate ourselves. This sequence is hardly a requirement for mood disorder, but Freud had identified a way that love goes wrong.
Mourning and Melancholia represents a step in Freud’s efforts to revise his account of how the mind operates, what he called his metapsychology. Freud’s early psychoanalytic papers approach the mind through two models: the topographic and the dynamic. Topography refers to the conscious and unconscious, the metaphorical up and down that inspired the term depth psychology. Dynamism refers to drives, largely sexual, and the distortions—symptoms, forgetting, and slips of the tongue—that result when drives encounter obstacles. Early on, Freud added a third model, the genetic, concerning the genesis or development of the self. Children pass sequentially through phases when sexual drives focus on different body parts, oral, anal, and phallic. Discussing depression, Freud adds a fourth model, the economic, and hints at a fifth, the structural.
Economy is a notion that Freud had used in his early theories about nerve cells. The nervous system, he believed, has a limited quantity of energy. What is tied up here cannot be used there. Freud had borrowed this principle, conservation of energy, from physics and considered it basic to any endeavor that hoped to claim scientific respectability. In psychoanalysis, the economic model is most evident in this account of depression. Because libido is attached to the self, the patient cannot pursue new interests. The economic model was never convincing, even to Freud’s followers. What seems characteristic of us, and of all animals, is that we draw on differing amounts of energy at different times.
But Mourning and Melancholia does not only look backward. It contains hints of new lines of thought, regarding mental structures. Describing depression, Freud wrote of the wholesale incorporation of the image of an object, the lost lover, into the self. And then there is that odd reference to the ego (in German, simply the ich or “I”) and to a mental agency that stands in judgment of the ego. Freud was beginning to fill in a map of the mind with shapes that cross the boundary between conscious and unconscious.
Freud found the later war years especially depleting. Life on the home front was hard, with shortages of food and fuel. For a newspaper article, Freud asked to be paid in potatoes. Freud spoke in public lectures of “the excess of brutality, cruelty, and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world.” Toward the end of the war, Martin was taken prisoner, and news of him ceased. Ultimately he was released. But then the Spanish influenza reached Vienna, killing fifteen thousand. Martha took ill and was sent to a sanatorium. Freud retreated to a spa with Minna. (This sort of behavior led to speculation that Freud and Minna had an affair. Jung once said that Minna told him as much, and Freud’s early correspondence shows him writing Martha that Minna shares his “wild, passionate nature.” But the bulk of the evidence suggests that Freud was a faithful husband. Altogether, he seems to have been inactive sexually, although charmed by provocative women.) Freud was bitter about what he saw as the cynicism of the Allies, civilized nations betraying their values through the Treaty of Versailles. In this atmosphere of disillusionment, Freud made an astounding change in his account of human motivation.
Because it overemphasized the infantile origins of disruptions to adult life, but also because Freud nurtured a romantic notion of military combat, psychoanalysis failed to anticipate the extent of mental illness that would arise in wartime. Shell shock, the First World War’s version of post-traumatic stress disorder, proved epidemic. Shell shock challenged Freud’s theories. Its prominent symptom was the nightmare, a return in dreams to a terrifying experience. It was hard to frame the reenactment of horror as a fulfilled wish. Nor did unconscious conflict and repressed sexual desire explain the disorder. Pretty clearly, shell shock arises directly from trauma, in a fashion that corresponds to old theories of mental illness—the vulnerable constitution and the overwhelming stress with resulting damage to the mind. A more general term for shell shock was traumatic neurosis.
Traumatic neurosis threw the “pleasure principle” into question. Freud’s psychology had been built around the sex drive, libido. We are constructed to seek pleasure, through release of sexual tension. Freud also recognized a role for self-preservation, which he called the “reality principle.” The reality principle takes into account barriers, such as social rules. These obstructions require detours, with resulting anxiety, or “unpleasure,” while sexual tension awaits release. Even so, the goal of the reality principle is pleasure.
But for traumatized soldiers, the route to anxiety was direct. They revisited painful memories, in defiance of the pleasure principle. What is worse, their repetition compulsion resembled the transference in psychoanalysis, when patients reenact painful experiences from childhood.
If repetition does not arise from repression of desire, but from trauma merely, then the method of analysis loses its justification. And once psychoanalysis moved away from hysteria, with its ever-changing symptoms, it confronted patients whose core problem was repetition, of self-injurious social behaviors and of painful affects. There were many points of resemblance between neurotic patients and the injured soldiers. If libido was not at work in the central phenomenon (painful repetition) of the predominant mental illness brought on by the war (traumatic neurosis), then psychoanalysis had serious limitations.
In his mediation on these subjects, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud considered an obvious explanation for repetition, that it represents a need to master the traumatic event. He did not reject this idea entirely, but it too closely resembled his rivals’ theories that favored adaptation and mastery, and not sex only, as basic human goals.
Freud preferred to move in a different direction. He had always favored a quaint biological theory, also modeled on physics, which held that organisms want to come to a state of rest—a diminution of excitation, of which sexual release is the prime example. Now he posited a yet more primitive instinct, to return to absolute stasis, that is, death. He was borrowing another principle of physics, entropy, in which complex systems fall apart. Again, Freud underscores the speculative nature of his new model, but he concludes: “[T]he aim of all life is death.”
The idea seems anti-Darwinian. How can a death drive, present from birth, aid an animal’s survival? Neither is it intuitive that a Todestrieb explains shell shock. If we are instinctively drawn to death, why is war traumatic? But the oddest feature of the unpleasure principle is its relationship to the rest of Freud’s carefully nurtured theory. If self-destructiveness is inborn, then we have no need for an Oedipus complex to explain neurosis and no need for ambivalence toward the beloved to explain depression.
To say that the death drive contradicts Darwin is also to say that is it profoundly antimedical. The most parsimonious explanation of shell shock is that it is an injury. Harmed, the brain and mind are stuck, in a futile loop. A phonograph record does not need a death instinct to repeat endlessly; it needs only a scratch. There is a sense in which Freud’s recourse to a death instinct reveals how his entire enterprise had, all along, stood in opposition to the simple notion of disease. In mental illness, as in illness of the heart or liver, symptoms may not symbolize. They may simply manifest disruption to normal functioning.
Freud denied that his decision to move death to the fore was grounded in his private experience. In 1920, his beloved daughter Sophie died in pregnancy, a late victim of the influenza pandemic. But Freud had been working on his essay before Sophie’s death. In support of Freud’s denial are his letters, which show how work buffered him from grief. After Sophie’s death, Freud wrote Ferenczi, “I am but for a bit more weariness, the same.” But from midlife, Freud had been obsessed with his own death, predicting it via calculations based on Fliess’s numerology. Perhaps it is mostly in this context that the change in emphasis is masked memoir. Always fascinated by death and now weary in his sixties, Freud felt drawn to it.
Psychoanalysts were—and have remained—uncomfortable with the death instinct, or Thanatos. If a patient engages in self-undermining behaviors, it goes against the thrust of analysis to say that such tendencies are simply natural, a result of what Freud now called “primary masochism.” Also, the death instinct makes the goal of analysis confusing. Sexual repression can be lifted, freeing the patient to enjoy genital fulfillment. But satisfying the death drive is incompatible with successful treatment. Freud never integrated the death instinct into clinical practice. Instead he moved quickly to equate Thanatos with aggression, calling it “an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms.”
For the prior quarter century, what had been captivating was Freud’s ability to explain mental illness and personality in terms of a single impulse, sex. In the Little Hans case, for example, Freud had argued against “the existence of a special aggressive instinct alongside of the familiar instinct of self-preservation and of sex, and on an equal footing with them.” Adopting aggression as a drive made for a less astonishing psychology. But then, Freud was moving—uneasily, with a degree of prickliness in the ser vice of his earlier theories—in the direction of conventionality. Soon Freud would ask, “Why have we ourselves needed such a long time before we decided to recognize an aggressive instinct?”
Like many of Freud’s innovations, the death drive was social commentary in the guise of individual psychology. Before World War I, Freud had been optimistic about the power of sublimation, as a source of art and science, and generally sanguine about the fate of nation-states. He had failed to predict the destructive role that would be played by what he would later consider malign forms of sublimation, ideology and nationalism. By recognizing aggressive drives, via the death instinct, Freud positioned himself to address what the war had made evident, that millennia of civilization had not mitigated the tendency of human beings, acting in groups, to engage in irrational destructive and self-destructive behaviors.
Well into the 1920s, Freud continued tinkering with his metapsychology, elaborating upon the hints, offered in Mourning and Melancholia, that the mind contains discrete structures. In dividing the mind simply into conscious and unconscious, Freud had created difficulties. It is clear that not everything that stands outside consciousness is repressed. Think of Breuer’s first example of unconscious thought, the anxiety experienced by a doctor who has not yet made rounds. The idea outside awareness, “I should care for my patient,” is both socially sanctioned and congruent with the doctor’s identity. If we think about the self—the “I” we mean when we think about “who I am”—we will discover that many of its aspects are like the doctorly anxiety. Through outside awareness, they are not products of forbidden impulses. This socially acceptable aspect of the mind is not the same sort of thing as “the unconscious,” when that term refers to dangerous drives that cause symptoms and character flaws. The unconscious is not a unified entity.
There is a yet worse problem. The self that participates in analytic treatment, the structure Freud will call the ego, soon throws up obstacles, called resistance, for reasons that the self cannot fathom. That is to say, part of the ego (as it interferes with treatment) is unknown to the ego (as it tries to cooperate). Equally, the part of the self that participates in making compromises, like symptoms or slips of the tongue—the part of the ego engaged in repression—seems to operate outside awareness.
Other everyday phenomena also seem to cross the divide between conscious and unconscious. We can be torn between desire and duty, when we are aware of both. Then, too, we can be plagued by a sense of obligation, in a way that goes beyond what we, by our own account, consider reasonable—as if an irrational judge were punishing the ego. This judge is conversant with the values of the culture and so is clearly not the primitive part of the brain that contains animal desire, the part Freud would call the it or id. Evidently, we store moral principles in a way that extends beyond the conscious mind. Freud’s awareness of this problem is apparent in that poetic sentence, in Mourning and Melancholia, in which he refers to a special agency that judges the self. The word Freud will coin for the special agency is over-I, or superego. Although Freud was inconsistent on this point, the superego, like the ego, must have conscious and unconscious aspects. In this new metapsychology, the important struggles in the mind are not so much on topographic lines, conscious versus unconscious, as among three structures: id, ego, and superego.
In discussing the superego, Freud begins with a mechanism he invoked in his discussion of depression: introjection. A representation of another person gets taken into the self and persists there. In the case of the structure that stands in judgment, what has been taken in is the father in both his admired and his feared aspects. Initially, Freud called this structure the ego ideal and ascribed to it “self-observation, the moral conscience, the censorship of dreams, and the chief influence of repression.” Later, “ego ideal” would refer to an image of perfection, a standard to which the superego refers when critiquing the self.
From the moment it was proposed, the superego was a contentious concept. Critics wondered why only the father, and not the mother, is absorbed into a special self-evaluating structure. Freud had stressed that an admiring mother confers on her young son a positive self-regard that will last into adulthood. That attitude might well be held in the superego. Thinking more broadly, why is introjection vital—the wholesale incorporation of a judgmental father? Why not say that we begin with certain temperamental leanings, toward anxiety and guilt, say, and then learn values in all sorts of ways, so that we construct a conscience based on the teachings of father and mother, friends and mentors, and the society at large? Surely the harsh superego is a contingent structure, present only in people subjected to a certain sort of parenting or endowed with a certain predisposition. Once again, it might seem that Freud had only generalized from a troubling part of his own constitution—making obsessional traits, such as self-doubt, into universals.
But Freud understood the demeaning superego as a fixed element of the human mind. Here is one place where Freud’s romance with Lamarckian evolutionary theory came into play. In The Ego and the Id, Freud traces the superego to totemism and the troop’s guilty patricide—a historical event that is repeated and finally inherited, as an aspect of mind. Guilt over father-murder, Freud writes, distorts the ego to the point that permanent marks are made on the id. “Thus in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms its super-ego out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them to resurrection.” Not only the child’s father but also the brutal fathers of primitive man sit active within the part of mind that passes judgment on the self.
Id, superego, and ego have passed into common English usage. The id expresses basic drives; the superego enforces the culture’s values; and the ego faces the demands of external reality and mediates between id and superego. As Jonathan Lear has pointed out, these concepts correspond to the aspects of the psyche recognized by Socrates: appetite, or desire for pleasure; spirit, or desire for honor; and reason, or desire for truth. Similar models of motivation recur across the centuries in religious and philosophical accounts of human nature. Freud would say as much in presenting his scheme in detail, in 1923: “All this falls into line with popular distinctions with which we are all familiar.”
On its face, Freud’s adopting a structural model is a concession of defeat. He could no longer explain human behavior by relying exclusively on infantile sexuality and the unconscious. Early Freudian therapy was magical. Seriously ill patients would recover once they had confronted repressed thoughts and desires. Later Freudian therapy is more diffuse and more pedestrian. It embraces not only unconscious sexual impulses, but also (through attention to the genetic model) developmental history, (through economics) attachments in adult life, and (through structure) conflicts between values. Repeated self-undermining behavior has its own explanation, through the death drive. Freud works to explain how these perspectives interconnect. But in practice, if a patient complains of a symptom, the analyst can address it through any of a half-dozen approaches, covering most of what we are likely to imagine might inform a person’s makeup, from inborn tendencies to early family life, adult relationships, and ideals.
The three-part model of mind is especially mundane. It allows for attention to the ego, an entity that is something like the self. The ego begins in the body, so that good health is an “ego strength,” as are vision and hearing. With some mediation by the id, the ego goes on to include most of the elements of temperament known to psychology for the whole of Western history. Emotional leanings and cognitive style are ego traits. Attention to the ego represents an enormous back door through which almost any therapeutic technique imaginable can enter psychoanalysis, on the grounds that we need to strengthen the self against the overactive instincts and punitive conscience.
In time, much of psychoanalysis would come to focus on one set of functions of the ego, the defenses. The defenses are mechanisms of repression, ways of ignoring dangerous wishes or forming compromises between the demands of mental structures. Sublimation and projection, which we have already met, are defenses. These concepts, along with others explored in the 1930s by Freud’s youngest daughter, Anna (they include rationalization, regression, intellectualization, and denial), have moved into everyday speech, largely because the defenses are also ways of facing challenges. One person tends, when threatened, to intellectualize; another, to project. When we say that someone is “defensive,” we do not mean that he cannot acknowledge his sexual drives. We mean that he wards off our criticisms without giving them due consideration. With the delineation of the ego, psychoanalysis began to move from attention to repressed material toward attention to characteristic ways of facing the world.
The Great War was a turning point. It led Freud to abandon a range of optimistic views, about insight for the individual and sublimation for the species. After the war, Freud folded his idiosyncratic ideas into a workable everyday psychology that was, however, considerably less distinctive than any of the bold theories that had made his name.