Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
This paper proposes that wishes for longevity and immortality should be added to Freud's list of wish fulfillment (sexual and aggressive) in dreams. The author provides examples of his own dreams to support his thesis. The paper also maintains that the distinction between wish fulfillment and traumatic dreams is not as absolute as Freud maintains; so that traumatic dreams may also be wish-fulfilling. The paper discusses how the child's knowledge of death develops from early life on. The fear of immortality, as well as the wish for immortality, is considered.
Wishes for immortality and longevity are among the most universal of human desires. A wealth of cultural and historical evidence supports this observation. Ancient civilizations preserved bodies, built tombs and pyramids to house them, and provided all the necessities for an afterlife. Immortality, life after death, and resurrection are essential aspects of many primitive and modern religions. Yet in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud's landmark study of wishes and how we represent them to ourselves, this fundamental wish is not addressed.
Freud's revolutionary discovery was that dreams are not about predicting the future or remembering the past; they are about desire—the basic wishes foundational to our personhood—and its dangers. He maintained explicitly that “in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” (Freud, 1915. p. 288). And he certainly had profound wishes of his own about living forever. He believed that The Interpretation of Dreams would assure his immortality (Fliess letters, 1904)—and it probably has. Yet in it, by focusing exclusively on wishes about sexuality and aggression at the expense of wishes about life and death, he acted out his own hallmark thesis—that in our attempts to
fulfill forbidden wishes we disguise them from ourselves. He omitted from his inventory of conflicted longings the consoling wish for immortality in the face of the absolute primacy of death.
I will not engage here with the metapsychological assertions Freud advanced in the dream book, which have engaged psychoanalysts for more than a century now: the principle of psychic determinism; the existence of an unconscious; the distinction between manifest and latent content; the sleep-preserving function of dreams, and so on. My intention is only to demonstrate that in what was perhaps his most enduring and influential work, Freud left out the ur-wish of the human animal. In so doing, he established an absence that simultaneously enshrines and denies the importance of death in our psychic lives, and with it the compensatory wish to escape it. His book is a manifestation of the dynamic paradox that the more we desire immortality, the more dangerous it is to confront that desire, despite his bon mots on the subject (“the goal of all life is Death” [Freud, 1920, p., 39]). Let me make two general points at the outset. In Freud's view there were two kinds of dreams. The central proposition in The Interpretation of Dreams is that dreams are wish fulfillments, specifically of childhood sexual and aggressive wishes. He sees in a dream about strawberries a child's wish for epicurean sensual delight. But most of the childhood sexual and aggressive wishes that Freud had in mind had to do with the universal ambivalences of the Oedipus complex. It was not until two decades had passed that he identified a second category of dreams, those representing traumatic events. He considered these an exception to the rule of dream as wish fulfillment (Freud, 1900). I will show that many immortality dreams blur the distinction between wish-fulfillment dreams and trauma dreams that Freud considered absolute. This is another reason to study these dreams.
Second, Freud's belief that some dreams are “beyond the pleasure principle” supported his argument for a death instinct: the recognition of the universal truth that organic matter ultimately becomes inorganic matter, and that there is a push for the cessation of stimulation (the nirvana principle, which Freud borrowed from Barbara Low (Freud, 1920, p. 55).
As I have said, however, I believe that wishes for longevity and immortality, and the fears that go with them, also demand—and threaten—fulfillment, and that therefore the wish-fulfillment category of dreams is
motivated by a life instinct. For if dreams are imaginary compensations for unsatisfied desires, how can we recognize only desires for sexual and aggressive satisfaction? This makes for a very narrow view of human motivation, a critique that has often been offered of Freud's view of the human personality (Kardiner, Karush, and Oversey, 1959).
I have argued that psychoanalysis is at root the science of motivation (Richards, 1996). But it is hard to understand the vast range of human experience without a broader perspective on the wishes that motivate us, and these wishes surely include—we can see them in Freud himself—the desire to cheat death, to live forever, or at least for a very long time. Without them how can we understand our enduring concerns with legacy, with political engagement, with art, literature, and other creative activities? Every creator creates for an audience—the one that is present now and, perhaps even more important, the one that will be there in the future.
Like Freud, I was alerted to these considerations by my own dreams. And this brings up a stipulation: Freud indicated in The Interpretation of Dreams that he suppressed some of his interpretations out of consideration for the privacy of others. Other people's privacy is not an issue in this paper. I have some concerns about my own privacy, of course, but I have been careful not to withhold any associations affecting the propositions that I offer. This is in contradistinction to Freud, who told Jung on the boat to New York that he had also limited self-revelation on the grounds that his authority would suffer if he said too much about his own dreams. I am not worried about my own authority, but I do suggest that to engage publicly with his immortality wishes might have required from Freud a confrontation with himself that he did not relish.
The night before I was to give a lecture on dream theory in Wuhan, China, I had the dream that awakened my first awareness of the importance of the wish for immortality, and its dynamics in dreams. In the dream a salesman was selling me a pen that he said had been invented by his grandmother. It had four sealed cartridges, each of which could write for two and a half years.
One piece of the day residue was a conversation at dinner that evening with my wife and the Chinese director of the program where I was
speaking. We were talking about how we wrote papers. My wife said that she writes all of her papers on the computer; I said I write mine in longhand, and have them transcribed; I use a pen. Another residuum of “real life” was that I had been bothered for several days by a fight I was having with my institute. I was being constantly thwarted in my wishes to participate in certain activities, and I was very frustrated. I thought to myself, “At some point in the future I will write a lot about all of this. The power of the pen!”
That thought gave rise to another one: that I was now as old as Freud was when he died. I was hoping to live at least ten years more, and to write many more papers. The grandmother in the dream I associated to my own grandmother, whose loss when I was five was my first encounter with death. In the dream, however, the salesman's grandmother was still alive. I could also identify oedipal wishes related to my father and my analyst, but you have all heard hundreds of thousands of such already, and anyway they aren't relevant here.
After this I began paying close attention to representations of death, immortality, and longevity in my dreams. Many of us have had dreams, or even a series of them, in which dead persons aren't dead. For about a week after a close friend died, I had dreams in which he was alive—as alive as can be. I knew he was dead, but in the dream his death was negated—my friend himself did not seem to know about it. Here is one example of Freud's two categories of dreams overlapping. In one sense this was a trauma dream; it felt like one, and my friend's death, and his dying, were certainly traumatic for me as well as for him. But the dream negated the trauma, and represented and fulfilled my wish that it had never happened and that my friend was still among us. And I will not deny that a dream about a dead person being alive may also have to do with the negation of the dreamer's aggressive wishes toward that person—with guilt—or with his own wish for immortality. Human motivations are complex, and cannot always be strictly separated.
Once I was paying attention, examples piled up quickly. I had a set of recurrent dreams of a close colleague, friend, and mentor: Martin Bergmann, who died two years ago at the age of 101. In one of these he was standing next to Yosef Yerushalmi, whom I knew less well but admired a lot—a historian who had written about Jewish history and also
about Freud's Moses and Monotheism. In the dream, he and Bergmann were standing next to each other, and I heard myself say or think, “They are standing tall.” The day residue in that case was that the new director of an organization I am connected with had told me that Yerushalmi had been his mentor at Columbia University.
In a more recent dream, I am at a movie theater, sitting in the loge. On the other side of the theater are Martin Bergmann and his wife Ridi, who is still alive at 98. Martin, who is dead, is represented as alive in the dream. In the second part of the dream, I have returned to the same theater, and sitting in the row behind me is Ridi Bergmann with some other people. I see her face and I think to myself, “Her skin is not wrinkled. Even though she is old, she looks young.”
I believe that dreams like these represent wishes for longevity and/or immortality, sometimes for ourselves, and sometimes for others—the wish not to die oneself, and the wish for the people one loves not to die. Both altruism and selfishness come into play here. But why do we dream these things instead of just thinking about them? Why, according to Freud's understanding of the mechanics and purpose of dreams, must they be relegated to the unconscious? Why are they forbidden? What is the fear? I suggest that in longevity and immortality dreams the threat is something far more powerful than a vengeful father or even the inexorability of death. As I will show, it is the recognition that, wishes notwithstanding, immortality is the greatest terror of them all.
Freud wrote that “The child's idea of being dead has nothing in common with ours, apart from the word. Children know nothing of the horrors of corruption, of the freezing ice cold grave, of terrors, of eternal nothingness—ideas which grown-up people find it so hard to tolerate, as is proven by the myths of future life.” He told of an intelligent boy of twelve who remarked after the sudden death of his father, “I know father is dead but what I can't understand is why he doesn't come for supper” (Freud, 1900, p. 254. n.1). We can smile at this, and it is certainly true that our understanding of death becomes more sophisticated as we mature cognitively and psychologically. But it is important to recognize that our understanding is always, and will always be, profoundly incomplete. More about this later.
Since Freud didn't delineate the way children's death ideas develop, let me offer a framework. It can take up to twelve before children understand the key components of death—universality, irreversibility; functionality; and causality—but many children achieve a reasonably mature understanding by the age of seven or so, at least intellectually (which is as far as any of us get). Their comprehension grows and matures as they do, but it takes a while before they can encompass the whole of this intimidating concept. Young children may undergo catastrophic separations, but they do not necessarily equate these with the experience of death or even of bereavement. Toddlers have grasped enough to worry about death and perhaps to threaten with it—“If you do that you'll die; If you do that I'll kill you”—but death has little abstract reality to them. For many children the closest available analog to death is sleep, which can cause problems itself.
Furthermore, studies show that young children harbor a dual view of death in which the body may die, but the mind is still alive.. A vignette reported by K.R. Olson in Psychology Today (Olson, 2013) depicts this developmental dualism. A four-year-old has just learned that a neighboring cat has died.
The mother asks: “Can he still move?”
The four-year-old answers: “No.”
Mother: “Does he miss his family?”
The child: “Yes.”
Mother: “Can he still have thoughts?”
Child: “Yes.”
Mother: “Does the cat's brain still work?”
Child: “No.”
“How does that work?” the mother asks.
The body dies, but the mind lives on. Younger, more concrete children, before they construct this mind/body duality, may understand death to include corporeal immortality as well, and many religions preserve such
early convictions. Sometimes the afterlife is a non-corporeal one, but in others actual bodily resurrection is anticipated: the dead rise and live again.
In any case, the logic of the dream is the logic of the unconscious and of childhood wishes; this is the logic by which people we know to be dead are dreamt of as living; in dreams, adult rationality coexists side-by-side with the magical thinking of childhood. I propose that the visual representations of dead persons in my dreams fulfills an unconscious childhood belief that the mind is immortal, and, perhaps, the body as well. The manifest content is that the dead person is not dead, has not died. The latent content is my own wish for immortality. If these admired figures can live forever, so can I. The dreamer's own wish for immortality is out of the dreamer's awareness, and therefore can be considered either unconscious or preconscious, accessible to consciousness on reflection.
But what does it mean to wish for immortality? By the end of latency children understand death as separation, and have begun to recognize it as inevitable, universal, and permanent. But death is unlike sexuality and aggression in the limits of our capacity to understand it fully. We do not have, and never will have, the opportunity to think back on what it felt like to be dead, and to bring our intellects to bear on the experience. Death remains forever unknown. I propose that this numinous quality, this enduring quiet menace is one reason that children's death-related fears and wishes are repressed along with sexual and aggressive ones, and relegated to the unconscious. Childhood ideas about death are no longer remembered, but return as hallucinatory wish fulfillments in dreams.
The cognitive aspects of this repression seem to be more complex than they are about the sexual and aggressive ambivalences. It takes a while for death's foreverness to become clear—if it ever entirely does. Even once older children begin to understand death as something feared by adults, they may still view it as something temporary or reversible. They do not understand that death is permanent for everyone. And—if I may use that metaphor—this belief dies very hard. Although it may be clear to adults in theory, we have no experiential basis on which to understand it emotionally, at least insofar as it applies to ourselves and not only as a
matter of the loss of others. I recall bringing my bone box home as a medical student. My wife's grandfather, who was an orthodox Jew, worried about how these bones would be gathered when the Messiah returned, and all Jews returned to life. The persistence of such beliefs is why in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood the subversive preacher's profession of his religious credo is so unsettling: “The blind don't see, and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way!” (O'Connor, 1952). The dead stay dead even in a religion??? Many of us talk to the people we have loved and lost as if they were alive even when we are awake; we really do know better, but… The permanence of death is not a given for anyone, no matter what age.
The point I want to make is that unlike sexual and aggressive wishes, feelings about death and immortality maintain a forbidden quality even in adult society. We all have crazy fantasies in which we talk to (or fight with) our dead parents. We see our long-dead cat's tail disappearing around a corner and think that it's time to refill his food bowl. We start trying to calculate how many years our savings are going to have to last, and we get freaked out. Most of us (with or without the help of analysis) get to the point where we understand sexuality and aggression pretty well. But we never quite figure out mortality, which we never get to experience with either cognition or consciousness at our disposal.
Fears of immortality. This incomplete grasp is something of a challenge even to adult reality testing, and makes it very hard to figure out which of our death-related thoughts can be fulfilled and which can't, which really are wishes and which are closer to fears. Certainly, the wish for longevity, let alone immortality, has its fearsome aspects; whatever our resistance to the idea of death, on some level we recognize that living forever is not a good alternative. It is better and more realistic to compromise, and aim for a long life. But how long? And under what circumstances? There are dangers there, too. Where death and longevity are concerned, it is very hard to draw the line between safe wishes and dangerous ones, and between what has to be repressed and what doesn't. Our relationship with mortality tests our capacity for reality testing in a way that other wishes don't. We do not necessarily grow into a comprehensive and sane adult view of death as we age, and I think that this too is a reason that some of our ideas about immortality and death remain more accessible in dreams than in other forms of awareness.
Schur (1972) writes, “The recognition that small children do not understand the meaning of death is the basis for Freud's eventual formulation that in our unconscious state, we know nothing about death in general and our own death in particular. Is this similar to the child not understanding why his sexual and aggressive Oedipal wishes can not be fulfilled?” That is a very hard question to answer, especially since we do not know to what extent a child's fear of acting on his sexual and aggressive Oedipal wishes does or doesn't equate to an understanding of “why” those wishes cannot be fulfilled. However unrealistic a child's understanding of exactly why he may not possess his mother may be, it is a very different order of not understanding from our inability to understand death, or so it seems to me. Wishes for immortality are unique in that they are the only wishes that can never be fulfilled. You can have sexual intercourse with your mother and survive. You can kill your father; people do. You can live a very long time. But…
Still, none of this explains why these concerns have to be kept permanently so far from consciousness that they present themselves to us only in dreams. If the wish for immortality is really as fundamental as sexual and aggressive wishes, if it really functions the same way in our psychology, what are the fears that keep it denied and repressed?
First of all, whether we understand them or not, our feelings about death are very, very complicated. I'll content myself with only a few examples of this:
* There are many literary depictions of the dangers of immortality; even the ultimate threat of western civilization—eternal damnation—loses its teeth with out the “eternal” part.
* Charlie Brenner points out that it is not necessarily wise to offer condolences to a newly bereaved person: “Maybe they're not sorry.”
* Everybody achieves death, but how? I'm not worried about death, Woody Allen said. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
* Even Freud's personal grandiosity and passionate desire for immortality did not induce him to want to live forever. Once life became sufficiently exhausting and painful, he turned to suicide.
* Even if you do live forever, you won't know what to do at 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon.
The flip side of the wish for immortality is the fear of it—either one's own or that of others who wish us ill. If people live forever, we would like to think, we wouldn't have to feel guilty about any real or imagined deaths in which we are implicated. But this is only one side of the wish/fear coin.
Schur uses Freud's “non-vixit” dream to elaborate on these issues. In the dream, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow is a revenant. Freud had introduced him to cocaine, which introduction eventually led to his death. A second revenant is Joseph Paneth, who took Freud's place as an assistant instructor in Brucke's laboratory. In the dream, both Joseph Paneth and Marxow, who are dead, are seen as alive. Fleiss, who is also in the dream, was still alive in real life. This dream (and the Irma dream) are generally seen as attempts on Freud's part to exculpate himself from the guilt of Marxow's death (and Irma's) by representing him (and her) as alive. It is also possible, however, to see Marxow's return as an accusation, against which Freud is still defending himself, to no avail. Immortality means that we can never hope for freedom from our accusers. They can always reproach us, and we can never definitively escape. Freud himself suggested that such revenants “existed as long as one liked and could've been gotten rid of if someone else wished it.” But that appears to be a wish to which his own dream gives the lie; clearly Marxow and his reproaches have not been “gotten rid of” by Freud, and clearly the person who makes the dead person reappear is the dreamer.
In dreams, we don't have to invent ghosts, as we do in real life; there is no problem in representing immortality. Dreamers can undo death in fulfillment of childhood immortality wishes. But as always, this is a two-sided fulfillment. The continued existence of accusatory figures is a reproach to us; the conscious awareness of it is guilt. But the unconscious one is a wish for their death.
Standard interpretations of the non-vixit dream focus on Freud's Oedipal conflicts with his father; the two Josephs of the dream, Paneth and Breuer, were father figures too. But such interpretations look to me increasingly as though they enact with Freud his displacement of
mortality issues onto concerns about sex and aggression, and his use of Oedipal preoccupations to push away a real analysis of the implications of Marxow's death. Am I out to lunch about this? Only further attention to immortality dreams will tell.
To pursue the analogy with sexual and aggressive wishes, we can note that immortality and longevity wishes and fears are represented in dreams in similar ways. A dream is almost always remembered upon waking as an image, a picture, a series of images. We see the dream in our mind's eye and remember the feelings that went with it. We start with the pictures. Only then do we think about what dreams may mean, using the tools that Freud has given us to unpack them: associations, the latent behind the manifest, and the concept of wish fulfillment. Otto Isakower used to warn candidates in the New York Psychoanalytic dream course about paying too much early attention to specific details. “Don't say to the patient, ‘What does the dream as a whole, or each element in the dream, bring to mind?’ But say, ‘Let's have a look at it.’” His idea was to keep the patient in the visual dreaming mode. This is important. Immortality dreams can and must be understood as hallucinatory wish fulfillments as much as sexual and aggressive ones are.
Recently I had a dream the day residue of which was a discussion at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute about whom to invite to a retreat. I had complained about the marginalization of some senior members there, and also about my own exclusion for more than a decade from NYPSI activities. In the dream I was telling someone that they needed to invite or include Ernie Kafka, Sandy Abend (both of whom were living), Jack Arlow, and Charlie Brenner (both of whom were dead). The image in the dream is Brenner. He is alive, and he is speaking to me, but I don't recall his words. There is no image of Arlow.
Focusing on that image of Brenner telling me something, I associated to the way Jack and Charlie were marginalized at NYPSI in the forties and fifties by the European émigré analysts and their acolytes. Jack's response was to remove himself from the Institute. He didn't resign, but he became more involved with the Columbia Center and Downstate. Charlie stayed; and eventually he became an important mentor to the next generation. Now, in my frustration and anger at the Institute's marginalization of me, I found myself asking: Should I leave like Jack, or stay
like Charlie? Presumably the image of Brenner, and not Jack, was telling me to stay.
On the other hand, the primary dream image is not always visual, and such variants can be noted in immortality dreams too. After Richard Gottlieb's death, a memorial was held for him at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Richard had been in my class at the University of Chicago, and another classmate of ours, also a psychoanalyst, spoke of our shared background and shared heritage, and what the University of Chicago had stood for in our lives.
That was the day residue. That night, in a dream, I heard the voice of another friend, Fred Solomon, who had also been in our class at the U of C and who had also died within the last year. I felt as if I had a picture of him in my mind, but in the dream I did not actually see him. I did hear his voice, however, and he spoke for several minutes. I don't recall exactly what he said, only that his voice was as I remembered it; and I've had a sense since that what he was saying was something that I had heard him say before. This dream showed me that hearing the voice of a dead person also may represent the hallucinatory fulfillment of an immortality wish, but in the auditory rather than the visual mode.
A few words about immortality in trauma dreams. As I've mentioned, Freud's distinction between the wish-fulfillment dreams described in the Interpretation of Dreams and the traumatic dreams discussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, meets an interesting challenge in immortality dreams.
As I try to identify traumatic dreams of my own, two examples come to mind. The first are my recurrent dreams of concentration camps, in which I feel that there is no escape, and that I will be murdered. I've had these all my life, but at this point I am thinking about them differently. They relate to the traumatic realization of my childhood that six million Jews were murdered in Eastern Europe, including some of my own family. I had a very immediate connection with these events, having grown up in a Yiddish-speaking environment and reading Yiddish newspapers in which these cruel events were portrayed in vivid detail. I remember relating particular dreams to specific references to the Holocaust on the preceding day. But as I became more knowledgeable
about psychoanalysis, I began to look for latent sexual and aggressive wishes, oedipal or otherwise, for which I was being punished, and to note that the very fact of being punished for the wishes meant that they had been gratified: the disguised latent wish under the manifest content. I also recall feeling in these dreams that they were only dreams after all, that the dream was not really happening, and that I would wake up feeling relieved.
But in this new context I note that although these dreams were literally about life and death, I was scrutinizing them, as per Freud's example, not for the meaning of that, but for sexual and aggressive content. That awareness has led to a different interpretation of the latent content and the wish it disguises: my relatives died, and I'm still alive. The joy of my good fortune, in other words, and its seamy side—survivor guilt.
A second familiar category of traumatic dreams are those in which I dream about someone close to me who has died. These are different from the dreams I cited earlier because painful affect is associated with the presence of the dead person. Richard Gottlieb, whose memorial service I mentioned above, died last year at a relatively young age, after a rapid and terrible encounter with cancer and its treatment. He was very dear to me, and for four or five successive nights I had dreams in which he appeared. I would see him and try to convey to him that he should not be there, because he is dead; I would feel anxious and upset, but he doesn't listen. Waking, I can experience his death as the trauma it was and the dream as an effort to undo and master it by visually representing him as alive. I know that I cannot bring him to life permanently, but for a short while, in the dream time, I can.
This dream reminds me of others, in which my father is alive, and I maintain him to be so in my dream so that he and I may both experience my oedipal triumph, which is that he is dead and I am not. The guilt of the wish, and the fear of the punishment it evokes, are neatly counterbalanced by the gift of immortality that I offer him.
I contend that the wish for immortality, or perhaps more accurately in this case the denial of death, is the underlying wish that is fulfilled in this dream, and that this is consistent with both the first and second of Freud's dream theories. Immortality dreams are fascinating in the
intimacy with which they link these two categories of dreams that Freud separated so definitively. The trauma and the fulfillment of the wish are one and the same, and so are the mastery of the trauma and the reason for the suppression of the wish.
Longevity dreams seem to me to be a subset of immortality dreams in that they do not explicitly deny death, but they take an active stance against it. Furthermore, wishes for longevity, unlike immortality wishes, are frequently conscious, and sometimes possible of fulfillment. Shortly after the memorial service dream recounted above I had one involving Jack Arlow and Leo Stone, both of whom were dead at the time but alive in the dream. They were looking for new offices. I saw a building that they were considering—still only a framework that had not yet been completed. There was a visual image of Jack in the dream, but none of Leo. One aspect of the day residue was riding in the elevator at the NYPSI where the memorial for Richard Gottlieb was being held, and seeing the list of analysts in newly renovated offices there. I had the thought that if I were starting a practice, having an office at the institute would be nice—turning the clock back and being a young man again.
The Leo Stone day residue had to do with my impending publication of a book whose title was The Widening Scope of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (the title, or course, inspired by Stone); the author was ill, and I was hoping he would manage to complete this work in his lifetime. And in mine? What will I manage to complete before my time is up?
I can offer two more dreams that seem to address the wish for longevity directly. One is similar to the dream of the unfinished offices. I am driving a Renault Dauphine, the car that we owned in 1958. Our grandson, now thirty, was in the passenger seat. The day residue had to do with new developments in his life, specifically the possibility that he may get married and have children. The very reminder of children and grandchildren is, in its way, a fulfillment of the immortality wish. But the wish to turn the clock back—to be young again ourselves—is evident too; if we can return to 1958 at will, we can essentially live forever.
In the second dream I am going to a cemetery to unveil a tombstone for my father, who had just died. (In fact he died in 1975.) The day residue was that I had just noted in a biography of Isakower that he was born in
1899, the year after my father. Now it was 2018; in the dream, my father lived to be 120.
Freud thought that beliefs in previous lives, transmigration of souls, and reincarnation are all products of the denial of death. Implicit in this denial is the wish for immortality, which he considered a universal experience “in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality” (Freud, 1915. p. 288). In my view, however, we begin not with a wish for, but with a belief in immortality. This is a child's view until age four. It is given up with some reluctance, and endures for a while as a cognitive/corporeal split, not so different from a phenomenon that Freud recognized: “In reaction to death of someone close, the primitive man invented other forms of existence, such as spirits and ghosts.” The idea of life after death is a reflection of our persistent memory of the dead, and Freud believed that the creation of religion is related to illusory wishes projected by the living in the face of death, by an unconscious in which there is “no sense of the process of time.”
Yet he did not include these powerful wishes and illusions as foundational in The Interpretation of Dreams. He does include some dreams in which immortality wishes are evident, yet he seems to give them short shrift. Why did he exclude them, and the terrifying implications of their denial, in his catalog of the motivating wishes of the human animal? Let me offer a few speculations.
One possible explanation is that he thought that it was his views of childhood sexuality and the Oedipus complex that were his major discovery. This fits in with the epigraph he chose for the book—about shaking the underworld. Yet that view just reemphasizes his own immense preoccupation with immortality, and his inability to face directly his own inevitable death.
Another possibility is that the awareness of death is an ego-based, cognitive, and rational experience. Unlike the visceral passions of desire and rage, it is available to us (insofar as it is available to us) only through ego-modulated experiences of cognition and memory. As we mature and become accustomed to passion, we increasingly master it. But death can never be mastered, and the more fully we grasp its reality, the more
terrifying it is to face. Freud's interest in Fliess's (1904) numerological protocol for predicting the age of his death (61 or 62) reflects, in my view, a reaction formation to this awareness, an attempt to deny his helplessness in the face of his ultimate undoing, by means of a prediction that he hoped would not be fulfilled. The fear of death is why the wish for immortality, which it underlies, had to be omitted from his catalog of wishes.
A third possibility is that, as we have noted, wishes for longevity tend to be conscious, while the fears—of death and of life without it—tend not to be. Freud asserted not only that we cannot imagine our own deaths, but that our own deaths are not represented in the unconscious (Freud, 1900). Therefore, he did not consider either whether personal wishes for immortality—or, in some circumstances, for death—can in fact be represented in dreams as the sexual and aggressive wishes are, or if death might be dreamed of as a trauma to be mastered through repetition. I propose, though, that while we cannot fully imagine death, we can fear it and we can long for it, and that we do fear it and sometimes long for it, and that those fears and longings are stimulated by our conscious and unconscious experiences of illness, accident, and what we observe as the death-experiences of others. On balance the wish for longevity lies closer to consciousness, and the wishes for immortality and for death lie deeper. But I believe that both of these wishes can be represented in both kinds of dreams.
I conclude with a question. How do these ideas relate to our clinical work? As I was completing the first draft of this paper, I was asked to offer some clinical examples of dreams that were not my own. I couldn't recall a patient's dream in which a wish for immortality, or a preoccupation with longevity, was evident. However, I do not conclude from this that such dreams were never reported; only that I did not recognize them at the time, as I failed for many years to recognize that aspect of my concentration camp dreams. This may have been true of Freud too; he taught us, and we learned from him, to focus in the clinical setting on the ambivalence conflicts of children, on Brenner's “four calamities,” (Brenner, 1982) and on other such concerns. Like most of us, my clinical attention has been to pathological object relations, projective identification, denial, repression, and displacement. And immortality in dreams seems (on the surface, at least) to be less “hot” a subject than sex and aggression, and much less dramatic.
But now I wonder about this. Perhaps these dreams are “invisible” in part because we have far less power to negotiate our death-related passions than our sexual and aggressive ones. And while we understand our own aggression and sexuality better as we mature, in some ways death becomes harder to grapple with the closer we get to it. The sexual and competitive passions slacken a bit as we age, but death becomes ever more preoccupying and distracting.
The threat of death is a reality that can never be mastered or contained or mentalized or symbolized. As Time's wingèd chariot approaches, we realize ever more clearly that our earlier “understanding” of death was incomplete; we left out the recognition that it is aiming at us. Death is a fundamental preoccupation, and so unnerving that perhaps even oedipal catastrophe appears safer than looking it in the face. It comes when it comes. It comes how it comes. You can survive abandonment and castration. But you can't survive death.
The wish for immortality is ubiquitous, or nearly so. Goodreads cites 434 quotes on the subject from a wide range of authors. Fears come with it, although we don't always think about them much: what if Irma did return? What if an angry Marxow did come back? What if there really was no escape from great age, from illness, from dementia, from pain? Such wishes and fears cannot survive the rational processes of our conscious minds, but they do survive in the irrational unconscious, where the rules of logic and reality do not prevail. I have tried to show that they display the same status and relationship to reality as the sexual and aggressive wishes of childhood: they are fearful and ambivalent wishes experienced and dangerous enough to require repression. Immortality wishes and fears may provide even clearer demonstrations of Freud's theories than the familiar sexual and aggressive ones do, because unlike the latter they can never be tested out, gratified, or mastered.
But while these wishes and fears may be universal, the conscious belief in immortality—that is, the idea that a person can live forever—is not universal at all. Yes, there are religious doctrines of eternal life, and of corporeal reincarnation, and of a soul or spirit that survives the death of the body. But immortality as a real possibility is a belief that children deconstruct and abandon as their cognition and their egos mature. The unconscious remnant that is left of it, I submit, is a wish and a fear
about what existence would be like if the terrifying fact of death were not so.
The awareness of life and death are organizing forces of our psychic lives as powerful any others (and let me point out that our fears of our sexual and aggressive desires would be far less daunting if Death were not an active construct in our awareness). They are as conflicted and as subject to ambivalence as any of our other major psychic experiences, as likely therefore to be subject to repression, and so as likely to appear ultimately in dreams as any of these others. However, we know that Freud, by his own admission, often stopped short in his dream analyses. He did not want to reveal too much about himself to his readers, and given some of his comments in other areas, we can wonder too whether perhaps to some extent he preferred to be blind himself to the area that mattered to him most.
In his work on dreams, he cast a great light upon a universal and mysterious human experience, and it is in a spirit of appreciation that I avail myself of the opportunity here to shine that light into a corner that he missed. I suggest that the wish for immortality shares the childhood origin, and the fate, of early sexual and aggressive oedipal wishes, and I propose that they be added now to his inventory of primary dream wishes. I hope profoundly that as we further explore this topic, both theoretically and clinically, we will find the evidence for a greatly enhanced understanding of immortality wishes and their place in, and contribution to, our dreams.
The dream of “Irma's injection” was dreamt by Freud on July 23 to 24, 1895. It is a characteristic of the mythologizing of discovery to conceive of a particular discovery as having occurred at one particular moment. Creation and discovery are more accurately described as processes occurring over time and characterized by nodal points of insight. In fact, Freud had earlier, in a letter to Fliess of March 4, 1895, described a wishful “dream of convenience” dreamt by Breuer's nephew Rudi Kaufman .