Psychic Deadness: Freud

THE SENSE OF BEING DEAD has become a popular clinical theme. More people than in the past seek help for feeling dead. Although feeling dead is a central complaint of many individuals, it is not clear where this deadness comes from, or what can be done about it.

There are many variations of psychic deadness. For some people, deadness does not consume much psychic space. It is a circumscribed counterpole or subtheme in a fuller, richer existence. It comes and goes or nags in the background. At times it becomes prepossessing, and one wonders (with a chill) what one would do if it swallowed existence, if it became all there was. One waits for it to fade and usually it does. It moves along with a variety of moods and states of being.

Some people have pockets of deadness that are relatively constant. They get used to living with areas of deadness. They wish they were more alive, that life offered more, but they make do with their portion. If life is decent enough, a bit of deadness is not too much to pay for satisfactions. One adapts to being less than one might be, to feeling less than one might feel. One talks oneself into imagining one is about as happy as one can be, as happy as one is going to be. One more or less succeeds in believing oneself, since one fears (rightly) that things could be worse.

For some people, the sense of deadness is pervasive. They describe themselves as zombies, the walking dead, empty and unable to feel. An extreme example of massive deadness was an anorexic-bulimic woman, Deborah, who passed through my office several years ago. She weighed under eighty pounds and looked like a corpse. Her bones were like piercing icicles that stung and ripped me apart.

I wept upon hearing her story, a familiar story, yet shocking in its outcome. Deborah's parents were successful professionals. There was a history of neglect, a mixture of over- and understimulation, the usual story of emotional poverty in a luxurious setting. Overeating-vomit