Free Manufacturing depression by Gary Greenberg Page B

along as if it never happened—raises a “crucial question” : Does “depression itself [lead] people to be realistic, or [are] realistic people more vulnerable to depression than other people?” They did not mention that Freud had already posed this question when he wondered why we have to get sick in order to have access to the truth. But then again, Freud wasn’t bringing up the question in order to answer it. He was making a point: that an excess of truth is bound to make a person suffer. Just ask Job.
    It would be tempting to see Freud’s increasing pessimism about the prospect for escaping ambivalence—or, to put it more directly, toachieve happiness—as his response to the excess of truth imposed by World War I, in whose shadow he wrote “Mourning and Melancholia.” That cataclysm, as he put it in “Transience,” an essay published in 1916, “ brought our instincts to the surface, unleashed within us the evil spirits that we thought had been tamed by centuries of education.” It was in the aftermath of the war that Freud developed the idea of the tripartite self, an ego stretched between id and superego, never quite up to the task of mediating between these protean forces. Eventually he would liken the ego to a garrison occupying a rebellious city, one whose walls would sooner or later be breached by the rest of the unruly psyche.
     
    But historian Eli Zaretsky reminds us that the war’s depredations showed up for Freud and other clinicians in a very specific way: the veterans on both sides of the conflict returned home plagued by nightmares and agitation and depression, by what the DSM now calls post-traumatic stress disorder, but which Freud knew as shell shock . Shell shock, Zaretsky argues, forced Freud to reconsider the significance of trauma in mental suffering. Although he once had seen external events—specifically, childhood sexual abuse—as the culprit in the hysterias he was treating, he had come to think of the memories of abuse as fantasies spun out by the psyche as it manufactured a Manichaean reality in an attempt to come to terms with its own divided nature. But the whole world had witnessed the horror that gave rise to shell shock; there was no use denying that the trauma was real.
    Still, it took an active mind to turn shells into shell shock—which it did, according to Freud, by what he came to call the “repetition compulsion.” The veterans’ psyches forced them to repeat their experience in flashbacks and dreams and in the unending anxiety—so much like their lives in the trenches—that plagued them. Freud had no question that this was an attempt to master the experience in fantasy if not reality, but he also saw something darker at work. It wasn’t only wars and sexual abuse and other overwhelming experiences that breached the garrison; it was a desire, built intoour animal nature, to return to our inorganic origins, to obliterate life—or, as Freud named it, Eros—before it obliterates us. “ What lives, wants to die again ,” wrote Freud’s earliest biographer by way of explaining this. “Originating in dust, it wants to be dust again.” A veteran relives the trenches for the same reason that another man recreates the trench warfare of his family—not only to revisit and “work out” that formative trauma, not only to have the opportunity to play out the drama with the odds evened up a bit, but also out of an inborn and perverse attraction to horror itself: the Todestrieb
(“death instinct”) , Freud called it.
    Even as he formed these dour theories, however, Freud retained some optimism that the war, and the truths about human nature that it seemed to reveal, would be the occasion for mourning more than for melancholia:
Once mourning is overcome it will be apparent that the high esteem in which we hold our cultural goods has not suffered from our experience of their fragility. We will once again build up everything that the war has destroyed, perhaps on