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.
Let us return to Freud's (1920) postulation of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Critical reactions to the postulated death drive often serve to distinguish French from American analysts. Freud's text is problematic in more ways than has been recognized. For me, it is essential to understand that Freud composed Beyond the Pleasure Principle within the very period that he analyzed his daughter Anna (Mahony, 1992a). That first analysis lasted from 1918 to 1922. We readily realize that the analysis was an oedipal acting out at both ends of the couch, but we must realize more than that. If Anna was an oedipal object, she also signified death, and it was Death that Freud took into treatment.
Quite a bit earlier than the familial analysis, Freud had begun to link his daughter with Death. For example, in a letter to Ferenczi in 1913, Freud (1961, p. 307) wrote that his intimate relationship with Anna constituted “the subjective condition” behind his authorship of “The Theme of the Three Caskets.” A pertinent and revelatory passage in that essay reads as follows:
Lear carries Cordelia's dead body on to the stage. Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess who, like the Valkyrie in German mythology, carries away the dead hero from the battlefield. Eternal wisdom, clothed in the primeval myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying. (Freud, 1913, p. 301)
Documentary evidence has now surfaced that shows how Freud became painfully aware of the dilemmas that he and Death, his daughter analysand, were caught in. On the couch she was talking about her murderous fantasies, meanwhile Freud was privately