…Anxiety in the face of death is anxiety ‘in the face of’ that Potentiality-for-Being which is one's ownmost, non-relational, and not to be outstripped. That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world itself…Anxiety in the face of death must not be confused with fear in the face of one's demise. This anxiety is not an accidental or random mood of ‘weakness’ in some individual; but, as a basic state-of-mind of Dasein, it amounts to the disclosedness of the fact that Dasein exists as thrown Being towards its end (Heidegger, 1967: 295).
This paper offers to revisit Heidegger's claim that anxiety is the only authentic way of being in the face of our ‘being-towards-death’ and ask what this means as regards the end of analysis and the possibility of an authentic psychoanalytic encounter.
I will start with a Hassidic story. Life for Hassidic Jews centres around one's chosen Rabbi. The Rabbi teaches the scriptures and acts as the ultimate interpreter, not only of the holy books but also of the hundreds of religious man-made rules that govern every detail of everyday life. It is the style and the nature of the interpretation which give each Rabbi his fame and the power to be the ultimate arbiter in disputes between his followers. It is believed that the more enlightened the Rabbi, the more the spirit of God is likely to communicate directly with him about the meaning of life and the secrets of the universe. A handful of most esteemed Hassidic Rabbis have been granted the title of Genius, always in reference not to the man's intellectual prowess but to the degree of intimacy he has allegedly achieved in his personal proximity to the Spirit of God.
And so as one of the many Hassidic stories goes, one cold winter's day, whilst crossing the great Russian countryside on a train, a group of Hassidic Jews chaperoning their very own renowned Genius discover that, on the same train and at the same time, the inner circle of another
outstanding Genius is making the same long trip. Both groups of followers have the idea that, if they can get the two great men to meet, they might witness a once in a lifetime encounter which would hopefully transform their lives. To their delight, both men agree to the meeting without reservation. The followers find an empty compartment which is exactly half way between the two Rabbis' allocated seats and where they escort both Geniuses, leaving the crowd of followers in the corridor, ears eagerly pressed against the flimsy curtained doors in excited anticipation of the pearls of wisdom soon to come out of this fortuitous encounter of great minds. After twenty minutes of complete silence from the compartment, anxiety mounts amongst the followers who urge one of them to peer through the curtained door. To his great amazement, he sees the two frail old men standing in the middle of the compartment, completely naked. Slowly they start to put on their clothes, nod to each other, shake hands and go back to their respective seats.
Of the many possible interpretations of the story, I favour the version in which the two men recognise that the only ‘knowledge’ worth sharing is that, however vast their expertise of this world and the next, regardless of all the interpretations and permutations of all the texts and of all their dealings with humanity, ultimately they are, like the rest of mankind, imprisoned in a body that acts as a daily reminder of its inevitable finitude. As Aristotle pointed out, as soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.
The questions of our living towards death, of our inevitable anxiety in the face of it and of how this may impact on the meaning of life, have been the subject of much direct deliberation by philosophers and theologians alike. In this paper I wish to explore the notion of the end of analysis and the possibility of the analyst's authentic being in the consulting room through Heidegger's concept of our ‘Being-towards-death’. I will claim that there has been a cultural tendency to conflate the concept of the analyst's authenticity with the notion of who we ‘really are’ leading, amongst other things, to the ethical issue of ‘self-exposure’. My suggestion is that we are often at risk of conflating the disclosure of personal details, of our feelings or innermost thoughts—albeit within the transference—with
the universal truth that, as humans, the secret we share is that we live towards our death and that Death is always with us.
Like Poe's story of The Purloined Letter, the secret is there for all to see, but our pathologies dance around it in a repetitive manner to avoid seeing it. I suggest that we can recognise this amongst our patients' groups with set reactions to this secret and that we can be seduced into false intimacies with patients in order to mask our own unresolved omnipotence in the face of Death, a sort of ‘cuddling up against the death drive’ as a Fairbairnian colleague once put it.
Freud's idea that the death drive—the foundation and cornerstone of the drive-related sphere—presides over our aggressiveness, sadism and masochism and dwells beyond the pleasure principle, did not gain much popularity. His followers preferred to attribute those to more benign and presumably more amenable causes such as frustration. Freud's notion that mental health consists of a fusion between the death and life drives was also unpopular. I find Fairbairn's objection to Freud's death drive theory of particular interest because he claims that what Freud is describing is possibly a localised expression of aggression which was due to the infant's response to neglect and rejection by the primary carer.
In my opinion, this move by Fairbairn underlies what is seen by some as the revolution which planted the seed for the now fashionable Relational movement and by others as the ultimate betrayal of the Freudian project. Either way, it certainly contributed to certain confusion of tongues within the British Tradition. It was Klein who picked up Freud's concept of the life/death drives and elevated it as the cornerstone of her theory. She gave it a major role from the very early start of the infant's life, recognising it as a clinical phenomenon to be observed in the consulting room as well as in our intra-psychic life where it plays a most meaningful part.
Klein attributed the presence of the image of the threatening parents to a projection of a derivative of the death drive. If not balanced by sufficient ‘good experiences’, such experiences would lead to a failure to progress from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position, resulting in neurosis or even psychosis, depending on the innate
strength of the original life/death conflict, according to Klein.
In his paper ‘A Personal View of the Kleinian Contribution’ (: 171-178), Winnicott lists thirteen of what he considers to be Klein's most valuables contributions to psychoanalysis and recommends that all Freudians should adopt them on top of what they learned from Freud, including the concept of the depressive position, manic defences, Talion fears and the splitting of the object. He objects to some of the terminology used by Klein, preferring, for example, his formulation of ‘the development of the capacity for concern’ to the term ‘depressive position’ but he took no real issue with the concept itself. However, as far as concepts go, he did not accept Klein's use of the theory of the life and death drives as clinical phenomena and did not believe that, ultimately, the child's destructiveness could be explained by heredity and envy. Winnicott is also of particular interest in this context because of what he called the analyst's professional attitude in light of his attempts to introduce the highly problematic concept of the ‘real mother’ in the transference, an attempt that ultimately alienated him from the psychoanalytic community.
For Lacan, it is the fear of the subject's annihilation that faces us at one end whilst, at the other, we are threatened by language which, by setting limits, forces us to face death but, at the same time, gives us the means to think about it. How does authenticity come into it? Is it ever possible or are we all destined for alienation once we have clapped our eyes on our image in the mirror? How can one be authentic in the consulting room and what exactly does it mean? Authenticity is not something you teach or do; it is a question of being.
For the opening sentence of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger chose a quote from Plato: ‘For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed’ (1967: 1). Heidegger sets out to study the meaning of our being-in-the-world which he believes is disclosed to us in our human experience of time, space, mood and body. It is a being concerned with itself and its mortality, with our being-towards-death. It is this latter component and its relation to authenticity which I would like to limit myself to within the confines of
this paper.
Heidegger starts with the assertion that one's being can never be whole:
It is essential to the basic constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled. Such a lack of totality signifies that there is something still outstanding in one's Potentiality-for-Being…When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its ‘There’. By its transition to no- longer-Dasein, it gets lifted out of the possibility of experiencing this transition and of understanding it as something experienced (279 & 281).
It is only when we die that it can be said about us he/she was… We reach wholeness then but, until this point, we are constantly in the process of becoming. Once we die, we are at once no longer ‘there’ and unable to experience this wholeness nor are we there to experience our death. As humans, we have access to the death of others, but even this access, Heidegger claims, does not give us access to the experience of death. We can spend time with the dying and dead person, have memories of them, experience the loss but have no way to access their experience of loss of being or their suffering.
Heidegger recognises that which is at the heart of our work, namely that we can represent one another in a certain role, activity, fantasy but we are unable to represent one another in death. We can offer to die instead of someone, but we cannot experience another's death.
Heidegger's concept of Death is not something which comes at the end of life, life's end point, something total and complete like the completion of a task. ‘Death is not something not yet present-at-hand, nor is it that which […] has been reduced to a minimum. Death is something that stands before us, something impending’ (293–4). The being-towards-our-death discussed by Heidegger is not a historical event in the future; rather, it is the knowledge that, as Aristotle points out, we are delivered to our death as soon as we arrive in the world. We have no
conceptual knowledge of this fact which, according to Heidegger, reveals itself to us in a rather primordial fashion, in the shape of what he calls anxiety, the only possible authentic response to this universal and undisputed human condition.
I suggested earlier that we might be able to identify different pathological structures by observing how patients take up a place in the world in the face of our being towards death.
“One of these days one will die too, in the end: but right now it has nothing to do with us…” This evasive concealment in the face of death dominates everydayness so stubbornly that in Being with one another, the ‘neighbours’ often keep talking the ‘dying person’ into the belief that he will escape death and soon return to the tranquillized everydayness of the world of his concern (297).
A female patient of mine once told me that, on looking in the mirror that morning, she had noticed changes to a mole on her face and wondered if it might be a malignant melanoma. She thought she ought to go and see the GP and have it checked out but decided to wait for a couple of weeks. I quote: ‘I have only just been to see him about something else and I don't want him to think I am being hysterical’.
This is one of many examples of the way in which the hysteric deals with the appearance of death, this time represented by the suspected melanoma. It is quickly replaced by concerns of appearances, of what the other might think of her, and what her possible illness and/or death might mean to the significant others in her life. The new eroticised project gains a romantic crescendo when she almost ventures to plan what she might wear in her coffin. Having adopted an inauthentic stance in the face of her being-towards-death, always – melanoma or no melanoma – she reverts to what Heidegger calls ‘falling’ into ‘the they’. She tells herself that we all have to die one day, not now, and shifts gear to the actualities of one's death, the ‘fugitive’ way. Yes, death is something that will reach
out from somewhere one day and get us. The ‘One’ in ‘One dies’ is in fact ‘Nobody’ so it can't possibly be me – not yet, not now.
‘Dying’ is levelled off to an occurrence which reaches Dasein, to be sure, but belongs to nobody in particular. If idle talk is always ambiguous, so is this manner of talking about death. Dying, which is essentially mine in such a way that no one can be my representative, is perverted into an event of public occurrence which the ‘they’ encounters…. Death gets passed off as always something ‘actual’; its character as a possibility gets concealed…The ‘they’ gives its approval, and aggravates the temptation to cover up from oneself one's own ownmost Being-towards-death (297; emphasis mine).
Obsessionals might be the most painfully difficult group of patients in one sense and yet the most fascinating one in terms of the sheer tenacity of the unchanging narrative, coupled with the severity of the symptoms and the aesthetics of the structure. After all, it was the repetition compulsion which led Freud to ‘discover’ the death drive. In complete contrast to the hysteric, the average obsessional patient could be said to be looking death in the face all the time and in a somewhat transfixed manner, whilst at the same time refusing to accept the basic principle of the human condition. In other words, how could it be possibly true that we live towards our death always and right now? If this was the case, surely, everyone would be tearing their hair out in a panic, but they are not doing so which means that there must be a way to get around this and some people have found it. What I must do, therefore, is put my life on hold until such a time that I can find it myself. And whilst my life is on hold, Death cannot reach me because I am not really alive and, in as much as I must do something to literally stay alive on the level of sheer existence, I must design a form of existence which is minimalist. I must keep all my options open, never make a choice no matter how big or trivial the issue
is, because not only does a potential die with each choice I make but, because I am yet to work out what it is that triggers death, every switch, however innocuous, might be the one, so I am not touching any.
Life will start one day, in the future and, in the meantime, time is not ticking for me and the Angel of death cannot find me as I am yet to appear on any life register. Obsessionals come to analysis because, unlike the rest of us who have comforted ourselves with the ‘we all die one day but not now’, they suffer from the pressures of the world which treats them as if they were alive and are constantly disturbed by their denied time-clock ticking in their ear.
The best way I can describe being with my most severely obsessional patients in relation to this is that I am acutely aware of the fact that, just like with any other patient, I will be fifty minutes older at the end of the session, it is fifty minutes of my life which like all other fifty minutes are unique and will never ever be relived, but the patient does not age with me. His fifty minutes do not count, they were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing; his card has not been punched in the great factory of lived experience.
A chronic schizophrenic patient once asked me: ‘They say that Princess Diana is dead, did you see her dead?’ Unable to use the storage of repressed fantasies to embroider a veil over the gap which death represents, having no body and no subjectivity, the schizophrenic is caught between the constant preoccupation with the concreteness of death where suicide in its most extreme forms and homicide masquerade as one another, and the simple inability to ‘believe in’ death as the supposedly dead appear all around them. One could say that for psychotic subjects, death is both concrete and meaningless and that they make up in the imaginary what they cannot symbolise. In Heideggerian terms, they appear unable to engage in the ‘everybody dies one day’ as their everybody is completely full and yet empty at the same time, in the same way that the transferential field they are in is both full and empty and whilst it may change shape, it
is never ever dissolved.
For Heidegger an authentic being-towards-death primarily involves revealing to ourselves that we got lost in the inauthentic ‘they–self’. ‘This will bring us face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the illusion of the “they”, and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious’ (311). In this sense, anxiety is perceived as the only authentic way to be in the face of our being-towards-death. This takes us back to the question of the possibility and meaning of the analyst's authenticity in the consulting room, a question linked to why the analyst is there and to what he/she thinks they are meant to be doing.
The end of analysis is associated with the dissolution of the transference. From the patient's side of the bargain, there is what Winnicott imagined would be the ‘uncovering [of] the patient's true self’ and, in return, the patient would be able to see us as we ‘really are’. But what is it that we really are that is relevant to the being of the analyst and the doing of the analysis? What of our authentic being is revealed in a possible authentic psychoanalytic encounter? Are we the sum total of our personal qualities as individual characters? Is it our ability or otherwise to make up for the failure in maternal provision in real infancy in the here-and-now of the transference ? Are we the representatives of the internalised object of desire of our patient's infantile fantasies? Are they ready to leave us when we have given them sufficient good feeds to dispel the derivatives of the death drive? And if we believe that we are truly such wonderful creatures, why would they ever want to leave us, which also raises the ethical issue of why we would ever want to let them go.
Can they ever see us as the real people we take ourselves to be once we have brought about the dissolution of the transference or are we stepping into the fantasy image projected upon us and join forces to dance together around the secret in the middle of the room? Is it our job to reassure our patients that, although we live towards our death, life is worth living and we are all in it together buttressed by the certainty that love can conquer all?
The question of the analyst's being and her active participation in the analytic process is as old as analysis itself. Ferenczi advocated this kind of feeling sharing and active analysis as early as 1909. It was only his lamentable failure at controlling his sexual appetite towards his patients (in his case, a mother and her daughter) that made the further exploration of his ideas rather delicate.
For Heidegger the only authentic state is anxiety, not the pathological anxiety of the hysteric who does not want to know, of the obsessional who plays an interminable game of chess with the angel of death or of the psychotic who defies death and will shock us with the most dramatic actualisations of it. Like the Rabbi, we have the power to interpret but can never mediate between a man and his personal, non relational living-towards-death here, now and until the end and we know that one would be mad not to be anxious in the face of it. Perhaps all we are called upon to do is to refuse to join the dance of the defences and have the courage of our own authenticity, giving up our omnipotence so that we may truly meet our patients in the nakedness of our healthy anxiety; not in the sentimental need to confide in them or to tell them how we too are only human but by side-stepping our own narcissism and accepting that, at the end of the day, we only allowed our Being to be used in order to represent something which is nothing. Like the Rabbis in the Hassidic story, the only truth which counts is that we came from nowhere and will return to nowhere, without ever knowing why. It is this nothing, if we can allow it to be, which might enable our patients to discover their own anxiety, the one which will get them out of bed in the morning and make them put one foot in front of the other, not because they are afraid of standing still but because it is against the background of our living towards death that life reverberates in a million colours.
Many years ago, I bumped into an ex-patient of mine in the dressing room of a ladies' sauna. We were both naked. We said hello and got on with the things one does whilst getting ready to leave. At the end, now
fully dressed, the ex-patient came over to me and told me a story. When she worked as a nurse, she once looked after an older Jungian analyst. On the back of his wardrobe door, he had a cartoon pinned up which depicted a patient on a couch and an analyst who was saying to the patient: ‘Right, you are cured now. Whatever inhibitions you have got left, hang on to them as you will need them to get on with your life.’