Daniel S. Benveniste, PhD, is a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Sammamish, Washington and is a Visiting Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Wuhan Mental Health Center, in the People’s Republic of China. He is the author of Libido, Culture, and Consciousness: Revisiting Freud’s Totem and Taboo (2022), and The Interwoven Lives of Sigmund, Anna, and W. Ernest Freud: Three Generations of Psychoanalysis (2015) Originally from California, he did his undergraduate and graduate studies in the San Francisco Bay Area. From 1999 to 2010, he lived and worked in Caracas, Venezuela. In 2010 he relocated to the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Adriana Prengler. In 2016 he was named Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
What can you tell me about the importance of Freud’s theories?
One of Freud’s more important ideas is that our psychology has evolved along with our body and because of this our psychological problems are embedded in our bodily experience and animal instincts. The two major instincts that motivate behavior are said to be the life and death instincts. Freud saw aggression as derived from the death instinct, which opposes the life instinct, the libido. The life, or sexual, instinct moves toward life and the death instinct moves toward death – toward the inorganic.
Many psychoanalysts equate the death instinct with aggression. They overlook the fact that the death instinct is about entropy – the winding down of life toward the inorganic and it is present from the very beginning of life. The death instinct moves us toward death and toward the dissolution of the psyche, as well. The psyche responds aggressively toward this dissolution. Entropy is easily recognized in the dynamic loss of control and breaking down of the body, even in the young. But it is most obvious in the way people get older. Their bodies break down and they react to it with a fear of death – a fear of ego dissolution. And what does consciousness do under the threat of dissolution? It fights back. Aggression comes out of the fear of death. One fights against it, and either fights the world or succumbs to it in one way or another. Becker quoted Otto Rank who said, “the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed” (Rank, 1945, p. 130, quoted in Becker, 1973, p. 99).
How does the death instinct relate to making meaning in life?
The dissolution of consciousness evokes questions of God. This is where we get our theories of death, rebirth, the afterlife, heaven and hell, and all the religions. Freud didn’t write much about “the meaning of life,” he dealt more with the meaning of dreams and symptoms, etc. But C.G. Jung, Otto Rank, Rollo May, and Ernest Becker took on “the meaning of life” more directly. Becker writes eloquently about “heroic systems” – the way people seek to make themselves immortal in a religion, or in some other heroic system such as science, art, politics, war, etc.
How have Freud’s ideas evolved over time?
The post-Freudians built on Freud’s ideas, but they often did so by first rejecting or minimizing Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality. I’ve always found this strange, because basically what the theory of infantile sexuality says is that the infant gets to know the world through its body, through its senses, and its developing erogenous zones. The highly enervated erogenous zones of the mouth, anus, and genitals are zones of excitation through which the child gets to know the world, and which are subject to intense socialization. The child gets to know the world through its body and its senses. We organize the world around the experience of our body: around suckling, toilet training, and socialization in relation to our sexual organs. It was a brilliant insight, but I really wish Freud had emphasized metaphor, especially in some of his theories like castration anxiety, penis envy, and the Oedipus complex. These ideas look strange to most people that are not familiar with them. If you take them literally, they continue to look strange, but if you think of them metaphorically, the whole thing opens to a world of meaning.
Does your book, Libido, Culture, and Consciousness (2022) draw on Becker’s ideas?
Absolutely. I have many citations to Becker’s work in my book. This book is about the relationship between the stages of psychosexual development and the stages of prehistoric cultural evolution. In one part of it, I note that six million years ago, our ancestors looked like chimpanzees, and the ancestors of chimpanzees also looked like chimpanzees. The chimpanzees are a slowly evolving species. We are a fast-evolving species. So, at one point, I became very interested in chimpanzee behavior, especially their genetically determined social instincts, many of which we share in common. Now chimpanzees have different ways of greeting depending upon their familial relation, their hierarchy within the chimpanzee troop, their alliances, and so on. After reading about greeting ceremonies in several books, I noticed something that wasn’t there! There was never a mention about signaling “good-bye.” Their greeting ceremonies are elaborate, they are excited to see each other after a long absence, and they grieve the deaths of loved ones who do not return their greetings, but they don’t signal good-bye! So, I wrote to some primatologists and asked if chimpanzees signal goodbye. And they said, “No, they don’t.” Now, I thought this was particularly interesting, because, you see, the very first archeological sign of a spiritual impulse in the human species is a 100,000-year-old intentional human burial. We had enough of a symbolic function by that time to project a soul into another person and relate to them as such. Chimpanzees also relate to each other as having personalities (souls), but when their loved ones die, they grieve the loss and leave the loved one there on the ground. They don’t bury their loved one in a fetal position with amulets, food, and tools. Only people do that. People “say goodbye” to the soul of the absent other. So, you see, the very foundation of the human spiritual impulse is in relation to death. The funerary ritual is a cultural defensive strategy to deal with death. So, you can see that from the very beginning, we, as a species, have been struggling to come to terms with death.
This brings me to something else that I addressed in my book. In the Paleolithic period our ancestors, with their extraordinary symbolic function, began facing death and confronting non-being. And while facing the awful terror of death and non-being, they were also facing the awe of being. At some level, I assert, they were confronting their very existence and trying to come to terms with it in the face of death. I think Becker does a very nice job of explaining that when we abandon the societal defensive strategies of religion, theism, and concepts of an afterlife, we are challenged to face our existence and become creative in the construction of our own heroic system.
From my point of view, the psyche of every person begins by organizing itself around a trauma. It may be a disastrous trauma of horrible abuse or simply a developmental crisis like separating from mother or dealing with the birth of a sibling, for example. The trauma gives rise to a conflict. The conflict leads to a repetition compulsion in which the person routinely finds themselves dealing with recurring problems in relationships, recurring problems with authority figures, etc. The problem, whether it is choosing the wrong people for intimate relationships, recurring scenarios of abandonment or betrayal, conflicts with authority figures or what have you, is what we call “the symptom.” If the unconscious roots of the trauma, conflict, and symptom can be made conscious, however, they can be transformed into a sublimated prosocial activity that we will recognize as part of a “meaningful life.” An abused child can, in adulthood, find themselves the victim of repeated experiences of abuse or can turn the tables and become an abuser. But it is striking to see how some people will avoid being victims, refuse to victimize others, and instead find a life-calling in protecting others. Some lose a parent to illness and instead of becoming hypochondriacal and fearing death or engaging in high-risk behavior in a defiance of death, they enter the field of medicine with passion. Becker says, “When you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own” (The Denial of Death, p. 171) He did not speak in terms of the sublimation of the repletion compulsion, as I have, but I believe he was getting at the same thing when addressing the creative person’s solution to the problem of existence in the face of death.