You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Freud was impressed by certain caesuras, but they are, in fact, multitudinous. Birth and death both seem to create a mental turbulence; it is possible that we ourselves notice the upheaval when we are born and change from a watery fluid to a gaseous fluid, from the amniotic fluid to air. But it is the birth of someone else which creates the disturbance in the already existing people – usually the mother and father. Death also creates a disturbance in the survivors. But that doesn't mean that birth or death are of any importance as far as the individual is concerned. We can easily imagine that if we fail to be born adequately that would create a disturbance; similarly if we fail to be adequately killed, or fail to die.
When I was studying medicine I became familiar with the saying, “Do not strive officiously to keep alive”, meaning “Don't go out of your way to keep somebody alive, officiously”. Thanks to the scientists it is now possible to keep certain bodily functions operating – for whose benefit I don't know. Recently there was a notorious case in which the parents were extremely anxious that all this apparatus should be allowed to cease functioning so that the patient, their daughter, could die. Their wish was disregarded. The antivivisectionists used to object to animal nerve-muscle preparations which were used in the teaching of students in physiology. The case to which I refer was one in which the human being was used like a nerve-muscle preparation. Cui bono? To whose benefit is it?
To get back to these periods which seem to create a powerful impression on living people: babies are born, and people die. Once we are alive, we can die at any time. So how many funerals are we going to celebrate? How many deaths are we going to exalt into ritualistic upheavals? Each one of us who exists at the beginning of a meeting,
like this, has ceased to exist almost every second of time that passes from then onwards; we have all changed into different people. What we were