Freud and the Ideal Self 241
For Freud it is not only self- love that can inspire what we com-
monly and (he believes) mistakenly call bravery. It can also be some-
thing much like the opposite. We are all subjects of and subject to
what Freud called the Death Drive. Every living creature wants to
end its own being: The aim of all life is death, Freud famously said.
Freud refuses to associate the Death Drive with the gathering
strength of the superego, as he perceives it in his later work. The
Over- I gathers force as civilization gathers force, and it oppresses
the individual more this year—or at least this decade— than it did
last. The Over- I can provoke despondency, depression, even sui-
cide. And Freud does once say that an enfl amed and punitive
Over- I can create a “pure culture of the death drive.” But by and
large the Death Drive is an in de pen dent force that has no real cul-
tural affi liation. The aim of all life is death, Freud says, but every
creature wants to die in its own way. The Death Drive, according
to Freud, manifested itself in trench warfare: the men who jumped
over their own wire and ran toward those guns were, in eff ect, being
directed by a force stronger than their own wills: the aims of their
lives became death.
But which is it? Does what is erroneously called courage come
from loving oneself (and accordingly one’s life) too much or from
detesting life at something like a cellular level and hungering to
die? Freud is pleased to off er both purportedly debunking specu-
lations. The fact that Freud is willing to call forward two opposed
explanations for the same be hav ior suggests a rather high level of
unease. Courage must be undermined, even at the cost of logic.
Anything that promises unity of being needs to be reinterpreted
in Freud’s transvaluation of heroic into bourgeois values. Where
Soul was, there Self must be.
But Freud is a thinker, a quester after Truth, is he not? In a
manner of speaking, yes, he is. Freud has something of genuine in-
terest to say on every consequential human subject. Freud is always