2. Death, Mothers,
and the Afterlife
At Home in the Uncanny
One of the sites at which the counterthesis emerges most clearly is the site of death, the site of the fears and fantasies surrounding mortality. Freud's interpretation of death is generally seen as supportive of the Oedipal master thesis which shaped so much of his work. Cultural theorist Peter Homans, for example, asserts, “In Freud's mature psychoanalytic theory, death was … a drive which polarized around the father” (1989: 98). Death wishes toward the father and fears of paternal retribution, Freud often argued, shape all human relationships with the authorities of culture, state, religion, and family: in psychoanalytic theory, parricide is both universal fantasy and primal deed. In both The Ego and the Id and “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud describes humankind's “realistic fear of death” as a fear of retribution and punishment by an Oedipal parent (SE 19: 58, 168). Destiny and fate are similarly understood within an Oedipal framework: “Even Fate,” Freud remarks, “is in the last resort, only a later projection of the father” (SE 21: 185).
A number of texts within the Freudian corpus, however, tell a very different story, a story in which death is associated with the usually “beloved,” idealized, and eroticized mother, a story in which immortality and the afterlife are associated with the maternal (SE 5: 583; SE 21:
Three kinds of images are associated with immortality and the afterlife in Freud's writings: images of dead mothers, images of mothers as instructors in death, and images of “uncanny” maternal bodies. As I noted earlier, my interest in pursuing this material is not motivated by a desire to dismiss Freud's work for its internal contradictions. This material constitutes elements of a counterthesis challenging the Oedipal theory and embodying a set of observations undeveloped but potentially significant for the psychoanalytic theory of religion. Nor is my interest in exposing this counterthesis motivated by a desire to attack Freud for what might be considered his veiled misogyny. We can benefit, as I suggested above, from close attention not only to the Oedipal interpretation of the construction of gender in patriarchal culture, but also to the linkages of maternity, mortality, and immortality in Freud's incompletely developed non-Oedipal counterthesis.
From the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, fantasies are “obscure revelations of … the truth of unconscious psychical activity … openings into a hidden world of ‘psychic reality.’” Freud's aim was to “excavate the inner history of psychosexual desire through an interpretation of the signs—images, gestures, words, symptomatic actions—through which this desire both revealed and hid itself ” (Toews 1991: 513). In Freud's texts, such “signs”—images of mothers, immortality, and the afterlife—and interpretations can be interrogated as openings into widespread, although seldom acknowledged “psychic realities” in which misogyny, matriphobia, and matricide lie in close proximity to fantasies of immortality and the afterlife.
THE BODY IN THE TEXT:
REVISITING THE DEAD MOTHER
The most visible trace of the counterthesis linking mortality, immortality, and the mother is the body in the text: bodies of dead mothers appear throughout Freud's writings. We saw in chapter 1 two sites of the maternal corpse in the Freudian corpus: Freud's short text “A Religious Experience” and a childhood dream of a dead mother. Here we pursue this trajectory further, examining a chapter from Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the provocative essay “Medusa's Head.” At these sites, as in “A Religious Experience” and the childhood dream, a dead or deadly mother is central; God, immortality, and the afterlife are prominent; and the presence of the dead mother once again is paradoxically denied.
In the famous story near the beginning of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the text that introduced the controversial notion of the “death drive,” Freud recounts in the text and footnotes a poignant story of a dead mother. The story involves a child's first game, the game of fort and da. A child one and one-half years of age, Freud recounts, repeatedly threw a toy across the room exclaiming “o-o-o,” which Freud interpreted as fort, the German word for “gone.” The child greeted the return of the toy with the exclamation “a-a-a,” or da (“there”). In Freud's analysis, this game of “disappearance and return” was a manifestation of the child's mastery of anxiety over maternal absence, an expression of the child's “great cultural achievement, the instinctual renunciation … in allowing his mother to go away without protesting” (SE 18: 15). The game, in other words, revealed the child's ability to tolerate the absence of the mother and the delay of gratification while awaiting the mother's return.
Not only does the game of disappearance and return inspired by maternal absence thus emerge as a metaphor for the experience of loss and recovery and for the postponement of gratification, in addition, in
Concerned lest his colleagues conclude that Sophie's death was related to the notion of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle published in the same year, Freud took pains to point out that the text was “written in 1919 when my daughter was young and blooming” (Jones 1957: 43). I have no quarrel with Freud's insistence that his development of the idea of a death drive preceded Sophie's death. What interests me, however, is that he chose to introduce this particular text with an account of maternal absence and maternal mortality. Beyond the Pleasure Principle reframes the psychoanalytic masterplot by speculating that death is precisely not the “drive which polarized around the father” described by Homans (98). The death drive or death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is instead a physiological, biological, or cellular
This text initiated by a dead mother/daughter is not only a text about death. It is also about immortality and, at least rhetorically, about the afterlife. Some definitions might clarify the distinction between the two terms. The notion of immortality for Freud involves the escape from death by living forever: Freud's term is Unsterblichkeit, which might be literally translated “nondeath” or “undeath.” According to Freud, the belief in one's own immortality, Unsterblichkeit, is an unconscious constant: “It is true that the statement ‘all men are mortal’ is paraded in textbooks of logic as an example of a general proposition, but no human being ever really grasps it and our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality” (SE 17: 242). The notion of an afterlife, on the other hand, implies a heavenly existence following death. The term Freud most often uses, Jenseits, means “the other side,” the “hereafter,” the “beyond,” or the “other world.” It is, in Freud's view, a common fantasy, embellished by religions worldwide.
The issue of immortality has proven to be one of the most troublesome elements of Beyond the Pleasure Principle for its interpreters (Becker 1973, Boothby 1991, Brown 1959, Laplanche 1976). The text, in
The afterlife Wgures prominently here, as well, if only in linguistic play. The title of this text in German is Jenseits des Lustprinzips, literally The Hereafter of the Pleasure Principle. According to David Bakan and Ernest Jones, Freud often referred to this book in English as The Hereafter and in German as Jenseits (Bakan 1966: 178; Jones 1957: 43). A 1923 letter to his colleague and biographer Fritz Wittels brings together the entire set of ideas expressive of the counterthesis: the idea of the hereafter, the notion of immortality, and the question of the significance of Sophie's death in the development of the ideas in the book. Freud writes, “I certainly would have stressed the connection between the death of the daughter and the concepts of The Hereafter in any analytic study on someone else. Yet it is still wrong. The Hereafter was written in 1919 … it lacked … only the part on mortality or immortality of the protozoa” (Jones 1957: 43). A daughter (who is also a mother) is brought into the same metaphorical and rhetorical frame as death, immortality, and the afterlife in the context of a negation or denial.[2]
A text composed contemporaneously with Beyond the Pleasure Principle that we'll discuss below, “The Uncanny,” also exhibits this slippage from death to the afterlife and from mortality to immortality. There, Freud wrote:
Biology has not yet been able to deduce whether death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a regular but
As we shall see, Freud's analysis of the experience of the uncanny in the encounter with death is closely related to an experience of the uncanny evoked by the body of the mother.[3]
Both Beyond the Pleasure Principle and “The Uncanny” contain three theses regarding death, immortality, and the afterlife: there is an internal drive toward death; immortality may truly exist; and the hereafter (Jenseits) has at least a linguistic reality. This complex set of communications about death, immortality, and the afterlife is introduced by a mother whose absence taught her young son to play a game of presence and absence and whose death gives the narrative a chilling turn. Beyond the Pleasure Principle underscores the connections hinted at in chapter 1 in my discussion of “A Religious Experience” and the dream of the beaked birds: the dead body of the mother lies within the same plot as the fantasy of immortality and the afterlife. The plot of Beyond the Pleasure Principle differs substantially from the Oedipal masterplot within which the father is interred.
Another paradigmatic text exhibiting the theme of the dead/deadly mother is “Medusa's Head,” an essay Freud refused to publish during his lifetime. Written in 1922, it was published posthumously in 1940. A sketchy outline for an analysis, rather than a full interpretation, this text provides a concise example of the tension between masterplot and counterthesis.
Freud begins “Medusa's Head” with an uncomplicated account of castration anxiety as the source of the myth of Medusa along the lines of the Oedipal masterplot, even using the mathematical symbol for equivalence in his sentence: “An interpretation suggests itself easily in the case of the horrifying decapitated head of Medusa. To decapitate = to castrate” (SE 18: 273). But this is not a simple castrative equation. The
Like the triple goddess in “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” whom we'll encounter in the next section of this chapter, this double goddess Medusa-Athene brings death. Paralysis, petrification, or rigor mortis are the punishments for looking at the Medusa face to face. But in the reversal that Freud so often enacts, the stiffening of death is transformed into a different stiffening, a stiffening signaling male sexual desire: the erection. Death is transmuted into sex: “The sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator stiffwith terror, turns him to stone … becoming stiffmeans an erection … he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact” (SE 18: 273). God the father is absent, replaced here by the presence of two unapproachable and deadly goddesses, a virgin and a mother, and in a comparative analysis on the following page, by “the Devil,” who “took to Xight” at the sight of a woman's vulva in Rabelais (274). The theme of homosexuality emerges here, as well, although quite briefly: “Since the Greeks were in the main strongly homosexual, it was inevitable that we should Wnd among them a representation of woman as a being who frightens and repels because she is castrated” (274).[4]
The dead mother whose corpse we have found haunting many of Freud's texts is, of course, the Medusa herself in this essay. Freud does not remind the reader of the myth in which the heroic Perseus Wnally succeeds in killing (decapitating) the Medusa by gazing not directly at
This text is exemplary of both masterplot and counterthesis. In the body of the text, Freud interpreted the “horrifying” associations of maternal genitals, female deities, and death (the counterthesis). Yet he concluded his argument with an insistent return to the safety of the “erect male organ” (the Oedipal masterplot). He broke offhis analysis as if he could not come “face to face,” like Perseus before the Medusa, with the implications of his interpretation, just as he turned away at the “navel of the dream” discussed in chapter 1. And his refusal to publish the text during his lifetime expresses yet again his resistance to the counterthesis.
In spite of his resistance to publishing his analysis of Medusa's head, Freud commented briefly on the same subject in a published essay, “Infantile Genital Organization,” written in 1923, shortly after he composed “Medusa.” There, in an analysis of the source of misogyny and homosexuality in castration anxiety (“We know, too, to what a degree depreciation of women, horror of women, and a disposition to homosexuality are derived from the Wnal conviction that women have no penis”), he credited his colleague Ferenczi with the initial insight that the myth of Medusa refers to the horror of the female genitals. “Ferenczi has recently, with complete justice, traced back the mythological symbol of horror—Medusa's head—to the impression of the female genitals devoid of a penis” (SE 19: 144). Freud added the insight
While these published remarks reiterate many of the same points as the essay that remained unpublished until after Freud's death, they are far briefer than even the brief text “Medusa's Head.” They lack the subtle references to death and deities present in the “Medusa,” they dissociate the original insight from Freud, crediting Ferenczi instead, and they bury the reference to the mother in a footnote. The published remarks focus almost entirely on sex: in a repetition of the gesture emblematic of his resistance to developing the counterthesis, Freud replaced death with sex. His publication of the mere skeleton of the argument in “Infantile Genital Organization,” by replacing death, deities, and immortality with a simple story of sex, highlights that resistance. His foray into the terrain of the counterthesis, evident in the posthumously published text, is clearly visible, but remains partial, hesitant, and deferred.
A PEDAGOGY OF MORTALITY
Maternity and mortality appear in another guise in Freud's texts: the mother, to use another of Peter Homans's terms, is the “instructress in mortality” (1989: 98), the master teacher in a pedagogy of death. We'll encounter this image twice, first in a dream of Freud's often called the “dream of the three Fates” (Anzieu 1986: 362; Erikson 1964: 178; Grinstein 1968: 161), and second in “The Theme of the Three Caskets.”
“Tired and hungry after a journey,” Freud recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams,
I went to bed. I dreamt as follows: I went into a kitchen in search of some pudding. Three women were standing in it; one of them was
Freud's association to this dream of three women centers upon the mythic Wgures of the three Fates: “In connection with the three women I thought of the three Fates who spin the destiny of man.” The third of the Fates, rubbing her palms together, evoked a memory from childhood in which Freud had learned of death literally at the hands of his mother.
When I was six years old and was given my first lessons by my mother, I was expected to believe that we were all made of earth and must therefore return to earth. This did not suit me and I expressed doubts of the doctrine. My mother thereupon rubbed the palms of her hands together—just as she did in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them—and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof that we were made of earth.
“So they really were Fates that I found in the kitchen when I went into it,” Freud reflected, “as I had so often done in my childhood when I was hungry, while my mother, standing by the fire, had admonished me that I must wait till dinner was ready” (205).
In the dream of the three Fates and the memory of the first lesson, awareness of death was thus associated “not only with a mother, but with a mother who was withholding food” (Homans 1989: 99). Insisting on a delay in oral gratification, she demanded that he wait. The dream of the three Fates casts the mother in the role of educator who teaches the son to defer his desires by insisting on a delay before he can appease his hunger. This maternal law is not the forbidding “nom (or non) dupère” described by Lacan (1977: xi). Rather than the paternal “No!” what the mother teaches is “Not yet!” Like the absent mother in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, she teaches children the “great
The imagery of epidermis and the dough as evidence of death reappears in another text. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes a “dead layer” or “crust … ‘baked through’ … a shield against stimuli” (SE 18: 26–27) which protects living inner layers of living cells from excessive stimulation: “By its death the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate” (SE 18: 27). Skin, crust, or dough thus serve as images of death, each associated with the handwork of women. The lessons at the hands of the mother involve waiting to eat and waiting to die.
In this maternal pedagogy of delay and death, ideas about immortality and the afterlife are ubiquitous, as are ideas about the presence and absence of God. Having been shown the “blackish scales of epidermis” between his mother's hands as proof of the inevitability of death, Freud recounts, he Wnally “acquiesced in the belief which [he] was later to hear expressed in the words: ‘Du bist der Natur einen Tod schuldig’ [Thou owest Nature a death]” (SE 4: 205). The quote within the quote is from Shakespeare, but significantly, it is a misquotation. Shakespeare's line is “Thou owest God a death” (SE 4: 205 n. 2). Freud thus substituted “Nature” for “God.” In Homans's reading, Freud's parapraxis regarding Shakespeare's line is an explicit reference to and negation of God: “To the linkage, mother/awareness of death, Freud was able to add the idea of God only by way of negation, for ‘God’ and ‘nature’ are, in the history of Western thought, negatives of each other” (99).[5]
Other interpreters of this dream and Freud's associations to it have drawn conclusions which parallel mine. Erik Erikson, for example, notes that Freud replaces God with women and with death: “The associating dreamer thus puts nature, that is, a maternal Wgure, in the place of God, implying that a pact with maternal women is a pact—with death” (182). And Ana Maria Rizzuto, noting that Freud “linked his mother to death” (1998: 238), states that Freud's misquotation “strongly suggests the unconscious representational admixing in his mind of mother, nature, and God” (238).[6]
Elsewhere, as well, Freud explicitly linked the experience of postponed gratification with belief in the afterlife:
A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its results, is given up, but only in order to gain along the new path an assured pleasure at a later time. But the endopsychic impression made by this substitution has been so powerful that it is reflected in a special religious myth. The doctrine of reward in the afterlife for the—voluntary or enforced—renunciation of earthly pleasures is nothing other than a mythical projection of this revolution in the mind. (SE 12: 223)
In this text, an ungendered postponement is the experience generating the notion of reward in the afterlife. In the dream of the three Fates and the memory of epidermis and dumplings, the renunciatory wait demanded by the reality principle is the particular message of maternal pedagogy, the mark of the mother.
While the mother is literally the instructress in mortality in the dream of the three Fates and in Freud's childhood memory, the short essay “The Theme of the Three Caskets” transforms the mother into death itself. Freud described the motif, widespread in folktale, literature, and myth, of a hero who, faced with a choice among three caskets, must select the correct casket in order to win a bride, knowing that the wrong choice will win him death. Tracing a double reversal of destiny, Freud shows that since death is our Wnal destiny, the myths give the hero a choice where no choice actually exists, transforming
The three women in these myths, Freud wrote, “are the three inevitable relations that a man has with a woman—the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate, and the woman who destroys him.” Freud described the three women as “the three forms taken by the Wgure of the mother in the course of a man's life—the mother herself, the beloved one who is chosen after her pattern, and lastly, the Mother Earth who receives him once more” (301). “The Theme of the Three Caskets” thus links mother and lover with the Goddess of Death and inverts the fear of death in male fantasies of selecting a bride and returning to the arms of the mother.[7] Death loses its terror through reversal in myths of sexual union and maternal embrace. But these reversals have a double edge: the maternal is also fearful and terrifying; maternal embrace and sexual union become dangerous embodiments of or disguises for death. Here the woman is not only a dead mother: “She may be something else as well. Namely, Death itself, the Goddess of Death” (SE 12: 296). Freud's Wnal words in this essay reiterate this entanglement of mothers and death: “It is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death will take him into her arms” (301). What seems to be a mother or a bride is really “the silent Goddess of Death.” Eros becomes Thanatos, presence becomes absence, and mothers become death. A mythic account of love and choice is
Kofman Wnds in this text a typical and troubling “double gesture,” a fragmented description of maternal omnipotence as Great Goddess which is quickly redefined and defanged, as it were, within a domesticated framework. “This double gesture on Freud's part,” she writes, “turns up everywhere: on the one hand, the acknowledgment of the (fantasmatic) maternal omnipotence transformed into a Fate or a great goddess; on the other hand, a dream of turning this power to the profit of man” (Kofman 1985: 80). I disagree with Kofman's interpretation. Freud is not simply a misogynist here: I Wnd in this “double gesture” an indication of masterplot and counterthesis in tension. A broader view incorporating the counterthesis enables us to perceive Freud's complex, although incomplete efforts at cultural analysis in this “double gesture.”
An erasure of God lies within this double gesture as well. The paternal deity of the Western religious tradition has become a maternal deity, and his role as creator and protector of life is displaced by her role as Goddess of Death. Like the dead mother and the denial of the afterlife, which evoked an overwhelming feeling of the absence of God in the American doctor discussed in chapter 1, this Mother Goddess whose responsibility is death stands for the absence of the Father God in the text. While in the interpretations of his own dream of the dying mother and the American doctor's crisis of faith Freud had replaced anxiety over maternal death with incestuous sexual anxiety, this essay directly addresses the displacement of death by sex. Describing the displacement in myth and literature, Freud interprets it. In this text, Max Schur argues, “Freud met the theme of death head-on, perhaps for the first time” (1972: 274). In my view, Schur is too cautious. This was not only one of Freud's “first” direct textual engagements with death, it was one of his few direct textual encounters with death other than his writings on the death drive. Freud's open engagement with the imagery of death and the mother in this text stands as an anomaly in relation to his other writings, which typically allow these concepts to emerge only in fragments.
In his more typical Oedipal analyses, Freud maintained that every punishment in life, every mishap or disappointment, is experienced as an Oedipal castration. Every punishment “is ultimately castration, and as such, a fulfillment of the old passive attitude towards the father” (SE 21: 185). He reiterated this thought more than once: “It seems very hardto free oneself ” from a “parental view of fate” (SE 19: 168). Freud saw himself, however, as one who had succeeded in the dificult task of transcending this Oedipal relation to fate, one of the few who are capable of encountering fate or destiny without projecting unconscious familial patterns: “The last Wgure in the series that began with the parents is the dark power of Destiny which only the fewest of us are able to look upon as impersonal” (SE 19: 168). He argues that
there is little to be said against the Dutch writer Multatuli when he replaces the Moira (Destiny) of the Greeks by the divine pair Logos kai Ananke (Reason and Necessity); but all who transfer the guidance of the world to Providence, to God, or to God and Nature, arouse a suspicion that they still look upon these ultimate and remotest powers as a parental couple in a mythological sense and believe themselves linked to them by libidinal ties. (SE 19: 168)
Most of us, in other words, encounter the exigencies of destiny as punishments of an Oedipal, castrating father. Freud suggested that he and other superior thinkers escape the “passive attitude toward the father” where fate is a father projection (SE 21: 185). But Freud's counterthesis suggests that fate or destiny sometimes takes another, quite different parental form. In “The Theme of the Three Caskets” and the dream of the three Fates, where the counterthesis emerges with clarity, the third of the fates, both mother and death, will “take us into her arms.” These texts suggest that the mother is a Wgure whose embrace is simultaneously nurturant, erotic, and deadly. Freud comes close in these texts to an open acknowledgment of a longing for the mother which is intertwined with a misogynist fear of her, a desire for death which is intertwined with a fear of it, and an acknowledgment
This complex set of intertwined fears and fantasies is not uncommon in contemporary culture. I see it as a widespread, although virtually unacknowledged, “psychic reality,” which, precisely because it remains unacknowledged, continues to produce emotional, social, and cultural damage in the lives of men and women alike.
AN UNCANNY HOME AND A HOME
IN THE UNCANNY: THE MOTHER'S BODY
AND THE AFTERLIFE
Freud's texts “The Uncanny” and The Future of an Illusion contain further evidence of an attempt to analyze this set of intertwined fears and fantasies. These texts present a set of images linking the maternal body and the afterlife through a common association with the uncanny. They also move hesitantly toward an interpretation of these images and their interconnections.
The essay “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”), published shortly before Beyond the Pleasure Principle and “set against a background of war, death, the death instinct” (Kofman 1991: 123), illustrates with particular clarity Freud's two theses in tension: an Oedipal master plot persistently interrupted and undercut by a non-Oedipal counterthesis. Many theorists have pointed out contradictions in the structure and development of “The Uncanny.” Hélène Cixous, for example, describes the “text and its hesitating shadow,” noting that “what is brought together here is quickly undone, what asserts itself becomes suspect; each thread leads to its net or to some kind of disentanglement” (1976: 525).
In “The Uncanny,” Freud explored the realm of the experiences that arouse dread and horror. He offered a linguistic analysis of the term “uncanny,” an interpretation of a story, “The Sand-Man,” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, a “collection of examples” further illustrating the feeling of
This linguistic analysis establishes the foundation for Freud's interpretation of Hoffmann's “Sand-Man” and other sites of the uncanny. The linguistic ambivalence of the word, he argues, echoes a psychological ambivalence. Long-abandoned ideas which reemerge after having been repressed will generate a sense of the uncanny: “We can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche … into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (SE 17: 241). These long-abandoned ideas, however, are quite specific. The dominant thesis Freud develops and pursues is that the uncanny emerges from the return of repressed castration fears. Interrupting this thesis is a counterthesis in which the uncanny emerges from the return of repressed ideas associating death, the mother, and immortality.
Hoffmann's tale “The Sand-Man,” a central piece of Freud's analysis of the uncanny, is a complex story involving a young man's childhood memories and fears, his love for two young women, his conflicts with father Wgures, and his insanity and suicide. Three central moments of the story stand out in Freud's retelling and interpretation.
First, a set of childhood memories: as a child, the young Nathaniel
In the second major narrative moment, Nathaniel, now an older student, sees a double of Coppelius—“Coppola”—selling spyglasses or spectacles. He buys one, and while using it, sees through a window a beautiful, but silent woman, Olympia, with whom he falls violently and obsessively in love. Olympia, he later discovers, is an automaton created by her “father” and Coppola. A struggle ensues between Nathaniel and Olympia's creators, during which her eyes fall out. Coppola carries offthe eyeless, wooden doll. The “father” picks up Olympia's bleeding eyes from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel, saying that Coppola had stolen them from the student. Nathaniel “succumbs to a fresh attack of madness” (229). Crying out “spin about, ring of fire … wooden doll, spin about,” Nathaniel tries to strangle Olympia's “father.”
In the third central moment, having recovered from madness, Nathaniel is engaged to Clara, a clever and sensible young woman. They climb the high tower of the town hall. Looking through Coppola's spyglass, he falls into a new attack of madness. Crying out “Ring of fire, spin about!” he attempts to throw Clara from the tower. Rescued by her brother, Clara descends, while Nathaniel, having
Freud's interpretation emphasizes Oedipal and castrative themes. The “arbitrary and meaningless” elements in the story, he argues, “become intelligible as soon as we replace the Sand-Man by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is expected” (232). He emphasizes the castration anxiety underlying the fear of blindness, recalling Oedipus's self-punishment: “Anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The selfblinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis” (231). The Sand-Man, in Freud's view, generates a feeling of uncanniness because of the return of the repressed castration complex: “We shall venture therefore to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood” (233).
Alongside his castrative theory, Freud presents, but rejects, an alternative interpretation. He describes an analysis of the story and its uncanniness by a turn-of-the-century theorist, E. Jentsch, in which the uncanny is said to depend on the “intellectual uncertainty” over whether an object is alive or not, an uncertainty emerging “when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one” (233). Acknowledging that the ambiguous qualities of the doll/woman Olympia—alive and not alive, animate and inanimate—would seem to support Jentsch's view, he nevertheless argues that this ambiguity plays a negligible role in evoking the uncanny effect: “Jentsch's point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with the effect. Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which admittedly applied to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other more striking instance of uncanniness” (230).
Freud's rationale for dismissing the living/inanimate Olympia as the
Here, as in so many texts, Freud insists that castration anxiety is the foundational anxiety and that death anxiety is a secondary phenomenon, yet the priority of death over castration is irrepressibly expressed through textual interruptions and inconsistencies. “Everything takes place as if Freud could not bear the importance of his discovery concerning the death instincts and as if ‘The Uncanny’ with its successive invalidations, its tortuous procedure, is a last effort to conceal ‘the [real] return of the repressed [death]’” (Kofman 1991: 160).[10]
Freud's essay thus documents a hesitant exploration of—and resistance to—the themes of the counterthesis. His compulsive returns to Jentsch's thesis represent tentative forays into the terrain where mortality, immortality, and the mother are intertwined with the uncanny. The deadly mother, present in the other texts we have examined, is obscured in this text—yet her spectral presence has not been erased entirely. The Sand-Man has deadly maternal qualities: he tears out children's eyes as food for his own little children, a hint that the story itself can be read as a fantasy concealing the fear of death at the hands of a dangerous mother. This is a story in which the mother's presence is so frightening that she is negated. Hoffmann's tale contains two central accounts of motherless procreation. The events witnessed by Nathaniel as a child
In Freud's negation of the mother, in his giving the father the role of dead mother and presenting obliquely a “maternal” or nurturant Wgure associated with death through an image we encountered in the previous chapter, bird beaks, we encounter the foundational themes of the uncanny: death and the mother. “What seems to be unbearable and unheimlich is this identification with the mother and the death which she threatens; this internalization of the forbidden mother, who can be considered an analogon of the death instincts” (Kofman 1991: 162).
The sequence and development of Freud's subsequent argument in “The Uncanny,” after his discussion of “The Sand-Man,” repeats his earlier pattern of presenting, recursively, an interpretation of death and immortality, followed by a castrative text, followed, in turn, by another discussion of death and immortality. Freud describes another story by Hoffmann, “The Devil's Elixir,” focusing here upon his use of the theme of the double. His argument moves from the denial of death, to the double as a portrayal of the immortality of the soul, to the double as a defense against castration, to ancient Egyptian practices of creating doubles to promote immortality, and Wnally to the double as herald of death.
The double “was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’ … and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body” (17: 235). Eventually, he states, “from having been an assurance of immortality, [the double]
Three vivid images conclude the “collection of examples” in “The Uncanny”: a castration image, an image of being buried alive, and an image of the mother's genitals. The dramatic castration image illustrates the master thesis Freud propounds in this text: “Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut offat the wrist … feet which dance by themselves … all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them.” This kind of uncanniness, he argues, “springs from its proximity to the castration complex” (SE 17: 244). Freud's penultimate example, fear of living burial, is tentatively offered and subsequently retracted in a move which itself seems to compulsively repeat a pattern we have previously observed. Freud stated, “to many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all but was Wlled with a certain lustful pleasure—the phantasy, I mean, of intrauterine existence (Leben im Mutterlieb).” (CP 4: 397).[12] The terror of death through premature burial is thus diminished or transformed into pleasure by locating its source in the fantasy of returning to the womb. What seems uncanny is actually canny, comforting, pleasant, or cozy (SE 17: 222 n. 2). Freud's proffered and retracted image simultaneously illustrates and enacts the repetition compulsion. As in “A Religious Experience,” “The Theme of
This leads Freud directly to his Wnal example of the uncanny. Introducing this image as “a beautiful confirmation of our theory of the uncanny” (by “our theory” he means here the theory of the source of the uncanny in the return of the repressed), he notes that, the previous example notwithstanding, male patients frequently report that “they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs.” He explains: “This unheimlich place however is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning … we may interpret the place as being mother's genitals or her body. In this case too the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, homelike, familiar, the prefix ‘un’ (un) is the token of repression” (SE 17: 245, parentheses in original).
These images inscribe a powerful circularity: Freud links the uncanny with both birth and death. Human beginnings are linked with endings. Freud's own later autobiographical remark recapitulates this cycle: “The triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path” (SE 20: 253). Like the Wgure of the mother who gives birth and enfolds in death in “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” these images return us to our place of origin, but leave us with an uncanny sense of alienation. The terror of premature burial is exposed as a pleasurable fantasy of returning to the mother's genitals, but the mother's genitals are in turn exposed as terrifying and uncanny. The Wnal set of images—castration, premature burial, and maternal genitals—recapitulates the tension in the overall movement of the essay: an Oedipal/castrative master thesis is interrupted by a counterthesis suggesting that death and the mother are the primary factors invoking the uncanny.[13]
Freud linked the uncanny to religion very directly in the linguistic portion of his essay, quoting several biblical passages and theological texts. He cites Psalms 27: “In the secret of his tabernacle he shall hide me heimlich” (SE 17: 225), and he quotes Schelling, “To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain Unheimlichkeit” (SE 17: 224). While hiding in the house of God and veiling the divine are certainly (un)heimlich, it is the idea of the afterlife which is most closely related to our theme. The unheimlich Heim, the uncanny home, appears in another text of Freud's, a text which brings us directly into contact with the theme of religion and the afterlife: The Future of an Illusion.
In this famous book, Freud criticizes three central doctrines of Western religious thought: the idea of God, the idea of a moral universe, and the idea of a blissful afterlife. He argues that these “doctrines” are illusions or wishes: “It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe, and an afterlife, but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be” (SE 21: 33). Such beliefs are direct and transparent expressions of humandesires, “fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” (30).
Let us attend carefully to the words Freud uses to describe the psychological effect of religious notions of the presence of God and the reality of the afterlife. He describes “the painful riddle of death” and the uncertainties of life. One might suppose, he notes, that this “condition of things would result in a permanent state of anxious expectation.” However, religion assuages these anxieties, offering promises of safety, predictability, and familiarity: “If death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil will, if everywhere in nature there are beings around us of a kind that we know in our society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny [fühlt sich heimisch im Unheimlichen], and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety” (SE 21: 16–17; GS 11: 424). By negating death and afirming God, religion allows us to feel “at home in the uncanny.” The words are not far
In The Future of an Illusion, religious beliefs offer a home in the uncanny, a Heim in the unheimlich, a sense of familiarity in the unfamiliar. In “The Uncanny,” the mother's body or the female genitals offer an image of an uncanny home, a sense of discomfort in the familiar. The unheimlich, uncanny, unfamiliar, maternal body is what was once heimisch or heimlich, familiar or “homey,” while the heimlich (familiar) religious universe assuages the unheimlich disorientation of existential anxiety. Heaven and the mother's genitals are uncannily linked. The first makes us feel at home in the Unheimlichkeit; the latter makes us feel unheimlich at home. Religion offers at-homeness in the uncanny; the female genitals offer uncanniness at home. Pivotal in the unheimlich Heimlichkeit of each is “the riddle of death”: religion's reconstruction of death into an illusion of a desirable afterlife is what makes it so heimlich, while the proximity of the maternal body to the symbolism of death is what makes it so unheimlich. Freud's texts delineate religion's reconstruction of the unheimlich facticity of life and death into the heimlich familiarity of God's universe. Freud's terminology exposes the presence of the maternal body in ideas about death and the afterlife.[14]
THE RENUNCIATION OF GOD
AND THE AFTERLIFE
Freud's texts on religion explicitly urge a renunciation of the belief in God the father. In his Oedipal paradigm, the atheist position on the question of God enacts a heroic, post-Oedipal stance whereby one overcomes the regressive tendency toward Wlial submission motivated by castration anxiety. Atheism thus constitutes a kind of courageous act of parricide. As Freud suggested in “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” the slaying of the divine father through the abandonment of the belief in God
Within the context of the counterthesis, however, God's absence or God's negation appears closely linked to maternity, mortality, and immortality: the absence of God emerges as a central element within the non-Oedipal counterthesis. We noted earlier, for example, that Freud's parapraxes regarding God, nature, and the afterlife raised the possibility that the contemporary critique of God may be heavily overdetermined and overlaid with maternal connections. An exclusively Oedipal hermeneutic fails to inquire into the maternal pedagogies that may underlie atheism and disbelief. Similarly, the attachment to or abandonment of the belief in immortality and the afterlife involves non-Oedipal dynamics.[15]
Freud strongly urged the renunciation of the idea of the afterlife. Not only does the belief in the afterlife too readily fulfill our wishes, he argued, it also has harmful social effects. By promising a blissful future life for individuals, it prevents us from striving for universal justice in this life. In the utopian pages at the end of The Future of an Illusion, he sketches a glorious future for those who abandon the mythology of a heavenly afterlife: “By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret, ‘we leave heaven to the angels and the sparrows’” (SE 21: 50).
If our interpretation of Freud's incompletely developed counterthesis is correct, however, the abandonment of the belief in the afterlife is not as simple as it sounds, primarily because it is so intricately intertwined, to use Freud's terminology, “at the deeper layers” with notions of maternity and mortality (Jones 1957: 162). Freud saw his humanist and secularist negation of religion as an Oedipal or post-Oedipal challenge, but the counterthesis within his own work shows that his critique
The Future of an Illusion, the text that most clearly negates God and the religious belief in the afterlife, suggests through its language that the “home in the uncanny” represented by religious ideas about a heavenly afterlife is a kind of mirrored reversal of the “uncanny home” represented by the mother's genitals. Freud's explicit recommendation is a renunciation of that desire for a heavenly home in the uncanny. His counterthesis, however, hints at the more complex entanglement of the notion of the afterlife with the fantasy of the uncanny home “where each one of us lived … in the beginning” (SE 17: 245).
These themes of immortality and the afterlife continue to be problematic today in the West, even as the discourse of immortality and the afterlife disappears from liberal religious rhetoric (Walter 1996) and reemerges in the literalized heavens of fundamentalist Protestant discourse, the angelology of popular culture, and the New Age discourses of reincarnation and past lives. Because the symbolic structures of earlier eras associated the body of the mother with death and the afterlife and supported these ideas upon a foundation of deep misogyny, contemporary variations of belief in immortality are likely to continue to serve as carriers for such fears and fantasies.
If Freud initiates but resists an inquiry into the interrelatedness of mortality, immortality, and maternity, he is not alone. Although the contemporary movement that focuses on the problems of death and dying seems to expose an eagerness for discussions of death (Bregman 1999), we more commonly evade talk about death—particularly when death is associated in any way with the mother. These are the topics of the unspeakable. Cultural and religious discourse idealizes motherhood and avoids open acknowledgment of matriphobic or matricidal fantasies. Similarly, contemporary secular discourse, uncomfortable with the traditional religious imagery of heaven, hell, and eternal life—and even with ideas about God—tends to evade serious consideration of