Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures.
Freud’s main debut for the theory was presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923, both in Freud, 1984). In the latter text he says (pp. 380 – 381):
I have lately developed a view of the instincts … according to (which) we have to distinguish two classes of instincts, one of which, the sexual instincts or Eros, is by far the more conspicuous and accessible to study…. The second class of instincts was not so easy to point to; in the end we came to recognize sadism as its representative. On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put forward the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state; on the other hand, we supposed that Eros … aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, at preserving it. Acting in this way, both the instincts … would be endeavouring to re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life. The emergence of life would thus be the cause of the continuance of life and also at the same time of the striving towards death; and life itself would be a conflict and compromise between these two trends.
Echoing the French notion of orgasm as “la petite morte” (the little death), Freud adds (p. 388):
The ejection of the sexual substances in the sexual act corresponds in a sense to the separation of soma and germ-plasm. This accounts for the likeness of the condition that follows complete sexual satisfaction to dying, and for the fact that death coincides with the act of copulation in some of the lower animals. These creatures die in the act of reproduction because, after Eros has been eliminated through the process of satisfaction, the death instinct has a free hand for accomplishing its purposes.
In 1996 a senior industry executive who had created some of the advertisements under discussion here told me that, partly because of reflection on these arguments as presented in a 1994 draft of this paper, he had resigned his highly paid position. He said, I ve stopped being a peddler of death.
Thanatos in Politics
Freud’s pointing the link between sexual satisfaction and dying opens an important area of understanding pertaining to sadomasochism and politics. The accidental death by probable masturbatory self-strangulation of Stephen Milligan MP in February 1994 brought the existence of activities such as autoerotic asphyxiation into the public limelight in a way which shocked many people. Yet in Scotland at least, much of the press coverage was sympathetic but penetrating in its critique of the way power is gained and exercised in British society.
Columnist Sue Innes echoed two other writers in Scotland on Sunday, 13 February 1994. Permit me to diverge into this: our discussion of Thanatos in cigarette advertising brings such psychodynamic principles into a sharpness of relief that might otherwise have been relegated to the obscure corners of forensic medicine. Innes raises disturbing questions around the image of major political decisions being made in smoke-filled rooms by men and women from an establishment subculture to which stiff up lip pathology, and much more that goes with it, is perhaps so epidemic as to be considered normal.
Insofar as it is at all, sado-masochism is discussed in terms of civil liberties but rarely in terms of sexual politics or in terms of the bleak insight it gives into an aspect of (mainly) male sexuality. But because of that this latest scandal is more than a personal tragedy. It is a political issue because the association of sexual practices involving humiliation and submission with men who in the public world have a great deal of power is not coincidental but related to the retarded emotional development and imbalances inherent in what you have to do and be to achieve power. Add to that the way that the deprivation of the traditional upper and upper middle-class boys’ education feeds into emotional repression and sexual problems. Add the lying and hypocrisy over matters sexual, marital and financial which we have seen in the past few weeks – are we ruled by emotional and moral inadequates, and can we pretend it doesn’t matter?
Andrew Samuels, one of the very few Jungians in a senior British academic post, recognises that for many reasons it does matter (The Political Psyche, 1993). He now advises the Labour Party on political psychology. And of course, it is the Saatchi brothers who have often been credited with advertising Mrs Thatcher into power. Through M & C Saatchi they still hold the Conservative Party account and most recently have been responsible for producing the controversial demonic Tony Blair eyes campaign. This ranks as an example of thanatonic imagery in political advertising, something for which the most obvious precedent is anti-Semitic advertising in Germany earlier this century (Thomson 1977).
One of the most openly amoral ministers in recent government is Alan Clark, who championed arms sales and ceased being Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence when the Arms for Iraq scandal got too hot. An anonymously written Portrait of him in The Scotsman sheds psychological light that would be consistent with many high achievers in his sort of position in British power politics (Long in the Truth, 10-2-96, p. 13):
His mother was a sharply intelligent woman who was ill for much of her son s life and who supposedly never quite forgave Alan for causing her such pain in childbirth…. Lord Clark (his father) retained a keenly Calvinistic mistrust of pleasure and a patrician intellectual discipline … He was better at conveying things without expressing them than anyone I ve ever met. He made me feel inadequate intellectually … Eton was an early introduction to human cruelty, treachery, and extreme physical hardship … the equivalent of three years in jail.
Thanatos in Popular Culture
If sado-masochism and its expression through authoritarian personalities is one fruitful area to explore in understanding the social outworkings of Eros and Thanatos, a second is discourse analysis of the lyrics in popular music.
A mild example is The Beatles (1974, p. 161). They make specific reference to the “discoverer” of tobacco in their song, “I’m so tired.” This portrays both alcohol and tobacco as a means of suppressing the psychological pain of heartbreak.
I’m so tired, I haven’t slept a wink,
I’m so tired, my mind is on the blink.
I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink.
No, no, no.
I’m so tired I don’t know what to do.
I’m so tired my mind is set on you.
I wonder should I call you but I know what you’d do.
You’d say I’m putting you on.
But it’s no joke, it’s doing me harm.
You know I can’t sleep, I can’t stop my brain
You know it’s three weeks, I’m going insane.
You know I’d give you everything I’ve got
for a little peace of mind.
I’m so tired, I’m feeling so upset
Although I’m so tired I’ll have another cigarette
And curse Sir Walter Raleigh.
He was such a stupid git.
But many love songs played on stations like BBC Radio 1 go deeper than this. They associate erotic love and death. During the Gulf War some of these were taken off the air by the BBC. At the time I was co-editing, under the auspices of Scottish Churches Action for World Development, a daily anti-war news service for Scottish church leaders and peace activists worldwide. GulfWatch used the Internet to frustrate the government s stated intention to require media consultation in reporting on peace movement activities and certain other information of ethical concern. In response to my inquiry, a BBC spokesperson told me that the banned list of 67 songs were not just peace songs, but ones which might be insensitive to families of dead soldiers (Hulbert & McIntosh, 1991). These had titles like, “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight,” “Armed and Extremely Dangerous,” and Roberta Flack’s “Killing me Softly with your Love:” that is to say, they were songs which mingled violence or death with love.
A good example of such lyrics come from Cross of Changes, a best-selling 1994 album by the German group, Enigma II.
I see love, I can see passion
I feel danger, I feel obsession
Don t play games with the ones who love you
cos I hear a voice who says
I love you … I ll kill you …
Loneliness, I feel loneliness in my room
Look into the mirror of your soul
Love and hate are one in all
Sacrifice turns to revenge and believe me
you ll see the face who ll say
I love you … I ll kill you …
but I ll love you for ever
The music is trippy, oceanic, cosmic, evoking imagery of the orgasmic cries of the Goddess. Many of the lyric themes are eco-spiritual: Remember the shaman when he used to say: Man is the dream of the dolphin .
Thanatos in Spiritual Emergence
To Freud, such expression would have been seen as perfect articulation of his Nirvana principle, alluded to in the above quote as that blissful, oceanic, womb-like state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life (at birth).
He acknowledges (op. cit. p. 381) that his Thanatos hypothesis “throws no light whatever upon the manner in which the two classes of instincts are fused, blended, and alloyed with each other; but that this takes place regularly and very extensively is an assumption indispensable to our conception.”
But here he reaches impasse. He could go no further. I think this is because he saw himself as a reductionist biologist not open to spiritual insight. This precluded a deeper ontological teleology – speculation on what the ultimate purpose of life is about. He could only look back in life, back to the womb, and not into the here and now possibility of eternal life (cf. Luke 17:21). If it is the case that spiritual reality is actually the nature of deep reality as certain empirical evidence would suggest (cf. McIntosh 1979 a & b), this constitutes a major failing in Freud s outlook.
Jung of course overcame this obstacle, and psychotherapists working within what is broadly known as the human potential movement have taken Jung s work on in ways that give fresh insight to the point at which Freud reached impasse. Probably the most important contemporary heirs to all this is Stan Grof, whose early research into LSD induced non-ordinary states of consciousness lead into the development of holotropic breathwork based on shamanic and yogi techniques. With thousands of workshop participants Grof has found thanatonic states to be a common experience (the Grof work to Britain is by the Irish Transpersonal Psychotherapy Group, 00 353 1 668 5282 fax: 496 0389, considered to be one of the best in the world). Both the induction of these experiences through modest hyperventilation, and their association with suffocation, is interesting vis-a-vis the association between tobacco and inhalation (1993, p. 60):
Sigmund Freud once shocked the world when he announced his discovery that sexuality does not begin in puberty but in early infancy. Here we are asked to stretch our imaginations even further and accept that we have sexual feelings even before we are born…. The evidence suggests that the human body harbors a mechanism that translates extreme suffering, particularly if it is associated with suffocation, into a form of excitement that resembles sexual arousal. This mechanism has been reported by patients in sadomasochistic relationships, by prisoners of war tortured by the enemy, and by people who make unsuccessful attempts to hang themselves and live to tell the story. In all these situations, agony can be intimately associated with ecstasy, even leading to an experience of transcendence, as is the case with flagellants and religious martyrs.
Grof goes on to point out that (p. 61 & 218):
During the passage through the birth canal, the child is in contact with various biological products, including mucus, blood, and possibly even urine and feces. This connection, combined with other events, forms a natural basis for the development of a variety of sexual disorders and deviations later in life… One of the most astonishing aspects of the concentration camp practices was … the indulgence in scatology … in sharp contrast with the meticulous German sense of cleanliness…. Suffocation in gas chambers and the fires in the ovens of the crematoria were additional elements in the hellish, nightmare environment of the camps. All these are themes that people in non-ordinary states of consciousness often encounter in their inner experiences.
Grof s approach to psychotherapy is concerned with the bodily and psychic cathartic release of such emotions. This usually involves passing through a death and rebirth experience. It is the very antithesis of suppressing the emotions with a thin veneer of anaesthetic pleasure such as nicotine, alcohol or other narcotics provide. The death part of the process partly entails a dying to ingrained primal patterns of dysfunction based on unresolved trauma from perinatal and early childhood experience. The rebirth is spiritual growth, the process of finding new and unimagined resources of Life within and perhaps from beyond one s self.
I share the view that it is only with a spiritual paradigm that sense can be made of the human fascination with death. This can be processed not though repression, but by being embraced and lifted up to make us into something more: to make us into people who both live life, and live life abundantly (cf. John 10:10). In this way as one internationally respected Church of Scotland minister once put it to me, Heaven is the fulfilment of the erotic (cf. Song of Songs/Solomon).
Consider again the popular songs on the radio. But instead of listening to them only as girl loves boy themes, see how well the words often fit if thought of as the love relationship between the soul and the divine. The urge to die into one another s love is, I believe, a shaft of insight, albeit often temporary, into the mystical dying into eternal life. The love feels like it will last forever and a day because, when people really love, the god within (cf. John 10:34) the one touches that in the other. The point of spiritual development is to develop this wonderful capacity, deepening and widening it into what was traditionally called the communion of the saints: free love in the sense of loving freely. Such capacity corresponds to that part of the psyche that is outside of time, in the pleroma, eternity. Thus there is a sense in which what we have being broadcast over the supposedly secular radio can be listened to as Sufi hymns; as mystical song.
I live, but not within myself,
In hope I now begin to die
Because I know I will not die. …
For how can I this life sustain
If I must live away from you?
A life? It is a death in pain,
Endurance greater than I knew,
And losing all would be my gain.
My destiny I seek, for I
Am dying, so as not to die.
A Radio One Gulf War banned song? No. The 16th century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross (tr. Jones, 1993). But it could have been another track from a group like Enigma II. Or:
- I lift a stone; it is the meaning of life I clasp
Which is death, for that is the meaning of death;…
- Though slow as the stones the powers develop
To rise from the grave – to get a life worth having;
And in death – unlike life – we lose nothing
that is truly ours.
No official mystic this time, but the supposedly atheistic Scots poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, revealing a significance of Thanatos deeper than Gallaher-style morbidity (from “On a Raised Beach” in Bruce ed., 1991, p. 14).
To conclude then, I argue that Eros and Thanatos are powerfully linked not so much because they are opposite instincts as Freud suggested, but because life and death are intimately intertwined at a mystical level. In eternal life, death is but a trick with mirrors. It is actually part of the amazing dance of love if understood as the mystic understands it. But when understood and exploited otherwise, it can become something very terrible.
Thanatonic Advertising as Spiritual Exploitation
So what is the mechanism by which nicotine hooks into misery?
In 1994 I brought the warrior chief of the Mi Kmaq First Nation peoples in Nova Scotia over to Scotland to help fight a proposed superquarry near my home in the Scottish Hebrides (McIntosh 1995). Sulian Stone Eagle Herney was made responsible by his people for stopping a similar proposed superquarry at Kluscap Mountain on Cape Breton Island. As well as being a warrior chief who had seen active combat in the Oka crisis, he was also, by paradox that his elders told him he had to work out, now a sacred peace pipe carrier. The pipe had to be treated as one would treat one s grandfather. And grandfather was teetotal. He could not be left alone for long; could not be taken anywhere with alcohol present. This presented certain difficulties as we toured the Highlands and Islands of Scotland on the land reform trail.