'But you said you knew what was wrong with him,' said Colette.
'I do. I understood it last summer, two months after you left. It was child's play, as a matter of fact. Younger, what is the boy's most revealing symptom?'
'I have no idea,' said Younger.
'Come — I just gave it away.'
Younger chafed at Freud's habit of luring him with analytic conundrums, particularly under the present circumstances, but all the same, the lure took. Child's play? 'His game,' said Younger. 'Something to do with his fishing reel game.'
'Exactly,' said Freud. 'Miss Rousseau told me that her grandmother played a German hide-and-seek game with her brother when he was little. He is saying fort and da when he unspools and rewinds his reel — gone and there. What does it mean?'
Younger thought about it: 'When did he start?'
'In 1914,' said Freud.
'He's reliving the death of his parents,' said Younger.
'Obviously. Over and over. But why?'
'To undo the feeling of loss?'
'No. He isn't undoing anything. He's making himself experience the single worst moment of his life again and again.'
Cigar smoke had filled the candlelit room with its heavy, heady odor.
'It's the key to the riddle,' said Freud. 'All the war neurotics repeat. They have a kind of compulsion — a repetition compulsion — a need to reenact or reexperience the trauma that has given rise to their condition. And they're all repeating the same thing: death, or the moment when they came closest to it. Normally, we have defenses — fortifications, physiological and psychological — that keep our mortality away from us, out of our consciousness. If these fortifications are breached, if in a moment of unexpected trauma, mortality punctures these defenses, its terror rushes in and starts a kind of mental conflagration — a fire very difficult to extinguish — but a fire to which a man wants to return again and again. The shell-shocked man will relive his trauma when asleep; or in broad daylight, he will conjure a bomb going off in the noise of a door slamming; he may even reenact the episode through bodily symptoms.'
'Why?' asked Younger. 'To discharge the fear?'
'For a long time I tried to understand it that way,' replied Freud. 'Discharging fear would be pleasurable. At least it would lessen displeasure. Every psychological phenomenon, I thought, was motivated at bottom by the drive to increase pleasure or lessen displeasure. But I was trying to fit facts to theory, when I should have been fitting theory to facts. I had just begun to understand it when you were last here. The war taught me something I should have seen ages ago: we have a drive beyond the pleasure principle. Another instinct, as fundamental as hunger, as irresistible as love.'
'What instinct?' asked Colette.
'A death instinct. More tea, Miss Rousseau?'
'No, thank you.'
'You mean a desire to kill?' asked Younger.
'That's one side of it,' said Freud. 'But fundamentally it's a longing for death. For destruction. Not only someone else's; also our own.'
'You think people want to die?' asked Colette.
'I do,' said Freud. 'It's built into our cells, our very atoms. There are two elemental forces in the universe. One draws matter toward matter. That is how life comes into being and how it propagates. In physics, this force is called gravity; in psychology, love. The other force tears matter apart. It is the force of disunification, disintegration, destruction. If I'm correct, every planet, every star in the universe is not only drawn toward the others by gravity, but also pushed away from them by a force of repulsion we can't see. Within an organism, this force is what drives the animal to seek death, as moths seek a flame.'
'But you can cure it — this death instinct?' asked Colette.
'One cannot cure an instinct, Miss Rousseau,' said Freud. 'One cannot eliminate it. One can, however, make it more conscious and in this way relieve its pathological effects. When an instinct creates in us an impulse that we don't act on, the impulse does not go away. It may subsist unaffected. It may intensify. It may be turned to other objects, for better or worse. Or it may produce pathological symptoms. Such symptoms can be cured.'
'I wouldn't have thought,' said Younger, 'that Luc's muteness aimed at death.'
'No, his muteness has another function. That would be the point of analyzing him — to uncover that function. It's undoubtedly connected to his parents' death, but there's something more too. Possibly their death reminded him of a scene he had witnessed even earlier. Did your father mistreat you, Miss Rousseau?'
'Mistreat me? In what way?'
'In any way.'
'Not at all,' said Colette.
'No? Did he favor you?'
'Luc was his favorite,' said Colette. 'I was a girl.'
Freud nodded. 'Well, it's a pity you can't remain in Vienna, but I don't see how it's possible. Vienna is a much smaller city than New York. You'll be noticed here. The police will have everyone watching; someone will report you.'
'May I ask you a question, Dr Freud?' asked Colette.
'Of course.'
'These two forces you describe,' she said. 'They're good and evil, aren't they? The instinct for love is good, and the instinct for death is evil.'
Freud smiled: 'In science, my dear, there is no such thing as good or evil. The death instinct is part of our biology. You're familiar with chromatolysis — the natural process by which cells die? Every one of our cells brings about its own destruction at its allotted time. That's the death instinct in operation. Now if a cell fails to die, what happens? It keeps dividing, reproducing, endlessly, unnaturally. It becomes a cancer. That's what cancer is, after all — cells afflicted with the loss of their will to die. The death instinct is not evil, Miss Rousseau. In its proper place it's every bit as essential to our well-being as its opposite.'
That night, after Freud had retired and Colette and Luc were installed in one of the children's old bedrooms and the apartment fell silent, Younger smoked a cigarette on the veranda. He had felt claustrophobic inside; on the little balcony overlooking the courtyard, he felt claustrophobic outside as well. A door opened within; Younger imagined it might be Colette, coming to join him.
'No — it's only me,' said Freud's voice behind him. The older man stepped out onto the veranda. 'So what do you think of my death instinct?'
'I'm for it,' said Younger.
Freud smiled. 'You're still at war, my boy. You never demobilized. Ten years ago, I wouldn't have foreseen you as the instinctual kind. You were more — repressed.'
'I read somewhere that repression is unhealthy. A world-famous psychologist has proven it.'
'Whose ideas you don't accept.'
'Ten years ago,' said Younger, reflecting, 'I saw your ideas as moral anarchy. Exploding all propriety. But you were right. I guess I don't believe in morality anymore.'
'Ah yes, that's what my critics say: Freud the libertine, Freud the amoral.' He inhaled the night air — a deep breath of age and judgment. 'It's true, I'm no believer in Sunday school morality. Love thy neighbor as thyself is an absurd principle: quite impossible, unless one has a very unusual neighbor. But when it comes to a sense of justice, I believe I can measure myself with the best men I've known. All my life I've tried to be honorable — not to harm, not to take advantage — even though I know perfectly well that by doing so I've made myself an anvil for others' brutality, their disloyalty, their ambition.'
'Why then?' asked Younger. 'Why do you do it?'
'I could give you a plausible psychological explanation,' said Freud. 'But the truth is I have no idea. Why I — and for that matter my children — have to be thoroughly decent human beings is beyond my comprehension. It is merely a fact. An anchor.'
There was a slight pause before Younger said: 'You think I need an anchor?'
