The Utopian Pursuit of Death

Sometime ago, I came across a collection of notes that a Middle Eastern freelance writer had been compiling to edit as an anthology of the human experience of war. These notes were all final letters or wills and testaments of some militant men who had volunteered for dangerous or suicidal missions. These missions involved various regional conflicts in the Middle East between 1980 and 1990. The letters were either sent by the volunteers to their families right before a dangerous mission that took their life or were found in their possession when they later discovered their bodies.

The war anthology never took form. A severe depression of the writer hampered the completion of the work. He later committed suicide. Within limits set by confidentiality, I was permitted to study the letters.1

I thought I might have stumbled over some symbolically significant psychoanalytic texts. A communication that a person makes while he or she is anticipating an impending death is an overloaded message. It may be comparable to the first or the last dream in psychoanalysis. It may provide important clues not only to the person's immediate psychic experience—needs, feelings, or images—but also to one's characteristic mode of encounter with the object world.

Although one cannot speak of a writer separate from his or her linguistic and cultural forms of self expression, differences in the pattern of such expressions should reveal something about the writer's own psychic voice. For this analysis, I tried to bracket off the notes from external data as much as possible to see whether I could detect any pattern that I could attribute to the individual's characteristic state of mind. This was not to underestimate the importance of the sociocultural context for the intelligibility of human action. Rather, I wished to focus primarily on a written piece of work to see how much we could legitimately trace to the writer's psychic dispositions.