Abraham Drassinower brings new life to an old discussion, the role of Eros and Thanatos (as Carl Jung called it) in Freud's work. Drawing on some of Freud's lesser-known works, and engaging in some aggressive but persuasive interpretation, Drassinower argues that the death drive is best seen under the horizon of the loss of those we love. It is this loss that brings death, including the possibility of our own death, into the psyche, where it naturally does not want to go. Freud said that the unconscious cannot conceive of our own death. Perhaps that remains true, but the loss of those we love brings death to consciousness, and into life.

Life, said Freud, is the struggle between Eros and death. There is a part of us that longs for death, a part that is only strengthened by the deaths of those we love, as though it would be easier for us to join them than to mourn them. The task of psychoanalysis is to teach us to mourn. In this task, psychoanalysis draws upon Eros, which is ultimately concerned not with pleasure and satisfaction but with giving up our childish attachments to those we have lost, and so entering into the world.

To see that the work of Eros is really the work of mourning is Freud's great contribution, and Drassinower does a fine job of reminding us of this. Of course, Freud was not the first to recognize that Eros is more about loss than fulfillment. Before Freud was Plato's Socrates, who defined Eros in terms of his parentage: His mother is poverty, and his father is contrivance. Bereft and destitute, Eros is always scheming to get what it wants (Plato, Symposium, 203b-e). Eros is not fulfillment and plenty; Eros is marked by lack of fulfillment, longing, and loss. Eros is the emblem of loss, and will only fulfill itself in and through mourning.

If we do not know this, if we do not wish to know this, which is tantamount to saying if we allow Eros to remain the great trickster, then the alternatives are few:

There is the denial and illusion that is religion, according to Freud. The cleric conducting the funeral service I recently attended who said “death is just a comma, not a period,” was practicing the religion of denial. Pace Freud, there are other ways to practice religion, perhaps any religion, which help us confront death.

There is the illusion of hypnosis, which Freud understands as the satisfaction of being taken care of by powerful parents, projected onto the charismatic leader.

There is war and killing, as though we could become the power of death itself: “Freud's observation is that we would rather go to war than talk of death. His profound concern is that our times might no longer wish to endure life” (p. 32).

If one wonders about the relevance of one more reworking of Freud's account of Eros and death, one need only think of the recent Iraq war. Was it not easier to attack Iraq than to mourn our losses? Not just those who died on that terrible morning in September, but the loss of innocence: that America is no longer protected or safe, that the death and suffering of the rest of the world is inside us, too. I am speculating, of course, but about such things what else is one to do? In any case, this is my speculation and should not be blamed on Drassinower, who is more circumspect.

More circumspect, Drassinower is also more optimistic that a cultural transformation is possible, one led by those who can remember their own pasts, their own dependence, longing, and need. Locating this cultural transformation “between Hobbes and Hegel” (the title of the second chapter), he argues that Freud grasped our antisocial propensities even more strongly than Hobbes, while sharing with Hegel the “labor of the negative,” which Drassinower reinterprets as the work of mourning (p. 55). Because he believed in the possibility of this labor, Freud is more optimistic than Hobbes.

The reader of this review will have to turn to Freud's Theory of Culture in order to decide if he or she finds such comparisons helpful. I thought it was not so much a stretch as irrelevant. Freud is not between Hobbes and Hegel; he represents another tradition. Freud is not rendered more “political” by comparing him with great political thinkers, but by the consequences of his thought.

No matter how subtly Drassinower interprets Freud's thoughts on loss and death, there is a tradition on this subject only begun by Freud that Drassinower ignores, a tradition that represents progress in thinking about this difficult topic. Consider just one example, that of Ernest Becker (1973), author of The Denial of Death, who writes that “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” (Becker, p. 99). Or so the fantasy goes.

Since Drassinower is not stingy with words and repeats his argument frequently, there was room to address Becker's revision of Freud by way of Otto Rank. (Drassinower includes Becker in the bibliography but does not discuss him.) Freud is, in other words, the first word on this topic, but not the last. In the end, important is not “what Freud said” but what use we can make of him. Figuring out how to use Freud requires that we learn how others have used him first. But perhaps that is a topic for another book. Certainly Drassinower gives us much to think about in this one.