Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Series Editor's Preface
- Author's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Memento Mori
- 2 The Death-Drive Does Not Think
- 3 A Subject Is Being Beaten
- 4 White Over Red
- 5 Literature – Repeat Nothing
- 6 A Harmless Suggestion
- 7 The Rest of Radioactive Light
- Postscript: Approaching Death
- Index
3 - A Subject Is Being Beaten
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Series Editor's Preface
- Author's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Memento Mori
- 2 The Death-Drive Does Not Think
- 3 A Subject Is Being Beaten
- 4 White Over Red
- 5 Literature – Repeat Nothing
- 6 A Harmless Suggestion
- 7 The Rest of Radioactive Light
- Postscript: Approaching Death
- Index
Summary
The half-hearted attempts at suicide that he kept making were not really serious; it was not so much a desire for death – death held for him neither peace nor hope – but rather the attempt, at moments of extreme terror or a vacant stillness close to un-being, to restore his equilibrium through physical pain.
(Georg Büchner, Lenz)If, according to Freud, the subject pursues its own death, or is steered towards it by a drive for inertia, why not say suicide and masochism lie at the heart of life? Is not suicide the ‘telos’ of being human, and why does Freud jib at the idea?
My title picks up on Freud's 1919 paper, ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’. Freud's title in turn quotes a phrase – one reiterated by several patients in relating their ‘beating-phantasies’. These phantasies typically progress through three phases, it being the second phase that counts:
This first phase of the beating-phantasy is … completely represented by the phrase: ‘My father is beating the child.’ I am betraying a great deal of what is to be brought forward later when instead of this I say: ‘My father is beating the child whom I hate.’ Moreover, one may hesitate to say whether the characteristics of a ‘phantasy’ can yet be ascribed to this first step towards the later beating-phantasy. It is perhaps rather a question of recollections of events which have been witnessed, or of desires which have arisen on various occasions. But these doubts are of no importance.
[…]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Death-DriveFreudian Hauntings in Literature and Art, pp. 67 - 81Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010