Book Review: Making Death Thinkable

Suicide, as one manifestation of Freud's death instinct, is never far from the psychoanalytic mind. Franco De Masi's Making Death Thinkable is less personal in tone but wider in scope than Aho's, bringing in not only the impulse towards self-annihilation but topics such as midlife crisis, mourning, psychoanalysis in old age and the psychotic's awareness of death, as well as briefly touching on some existentialist ideas.

De Masi sets out to explore psychoanalytic theory on death, especially in the unconscious, and the inner resources we might use to think about it and face it. He also brings in the way it "pervades our relationships, all of which are marked by separation and mourning" (p21). As with Aho's search for 'releasement', De Masi's desire for "a way to free ourselves partially from the mystery and pain of solitude vis-à-vis death" (p26) may itself reflect our human inability to face death square on, rather than looking just a little bit to the side of it.

De Masi's book is less of a flowing river and more a series of small ponds; he takes a quick dip in many waters. In one he is considering our tendency to ignore or deny our own death; in the next he is distinguishing dread and panic as forms of death anxiety; and in the next he discusses Freud's and Klein's views on the death instinct, and more recent views on self-annihilation as a response to trauma or defence against depressive pain. For the existentialist reader, De Masi professes an affinity for Heidegger's understanding of death as the closest possibility to living and death anxiety as an emotion that accompanies our authenticity. Jaspers gets a mention in the context of our thirst for eternity as a form of hope or inspiration, and Merleau-Ponty is quoted briefly without comment: "Neither my birth nor my death can feel as my own experiences" (p119). He also refers to Nietzsche's vision of humans as chained to their past in a way that other animals are not. Otherwise, the book is mainly concerned with the work of Freud, Klein, Winnicott and their more recent successors. Like Aho, De Masi makes use of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych in a chapter that is only a summary of the story, with a brief suggestion at the end that the novel is a metaphor for the anxiety of the mid-life crisis.

De Masi concludes that psychoanalysis may help us confront our finitude by finding meaning, reappraising and integrating our past, mourning, tolerating our aloneness, accepting life's mystery and finiteness, and projecting our individual potential into hope for the collective potential of the people, institutions and values close to us that will live beyond our death. While I experienced the analytic theorising as arcane and unfounded, and the structure of the book as disjointed and lacking in a cumulative impact, De Masi does bring together a wide range of psychoanalytic thought to bear on the many ways in which death will make an appearance in therapy, which may be helpful for those who practice in that way.

As I have suggested at the start, these two books certainly won't be the last words on death – we need at least another few thousand years for that – but they do offer some ideas, stories and provocations to help and distract us on our own way towards that silent, invisible and faceless end.

Andrew Miller

Dialogues on the Renaissance of Daseinsanalysis: What does 'existential' really mean?

Prof. Miles Groth & Prof. Tamás Fazekas. Kyle Glover (ed). 2021. London: SEA.

In 1921, Martin Heidegger wrote a letter to the philosopher, and his former student, Karl Löwith, saying that his philosophical way of working came out of the "lived experience" that is accessible to him, as he put it, and that it came "from out of my 'I am'". I mention this because it raises one of a number of issues. A central one is the question of how to approach the reading of letters, correspondences and conversations, whether personal and private, or public and open, and how to place them. For one thing, Heidegger's language in 1921 was different to that of the language with which we are familiar in his 1927 publication of Being and Time. That is to say, the above quotes sound very Cartesian and incongruent when compared with his subsequent writings in that same decade. Nevertheless, it still strikes me as important to note that Heidegger expressed himself differently in his letters than he did in more formal philosophical texts and lectures. Perhaps this is no great surprise. But we also take into account that his correspondent, in this case, Löwith, was a relevant factor in what (and how) Heidegger wrote in his letters to him. I had these thoughts in mind as I read Miles Groth and Tamás Fazekas' correspondence over twenty-five email dialogues.

As a more recent addition to the several dialogues that have already been published by the SEA, here we follow two prominent Daseinsanalysts pondering the questions and challenges that Daseinsanalysis now faces in our time. This is perhaps a reflection of the fact that every psychotherapy is historical, rather than being a set of eternal, timeless facts and truths, and that it too needs to, amongst other things, absorb and reflect on the enormous changes and upheavals that mould, shape and reconfigure tactical life as it is lived. As our current epoch's technological understanding of being progressively erodes, or corrodes, Earth in its necessary strife with world, the crucial and central question of what it 'means' to be our kind of being is urgently pressing upon us. This, in case we have forgotten, and, furthermore, have forgotten that we have forgotten, is the very question that re-turns us again to the beginning of Being and Time.

In their reflections, Groth and Fazekas cover a vast range of ideas and concerns that preoccupy them, entering into both agreement and respectful disagreement throughout the exchanges that complete this short publication. They each venture, much like Hölderlin did in his journey to 'far-off lands', in offering their own interpretations on topics that relate to Daseinsanalysis, and then waiting in anticipation for the other's response. They agree that Daseinsanalysis needs to undergo its own renaissance, and here they try to put this to work through their own shared attempts to think aloud, and to see where this might take them. As a reader, I found myself moving between a reading of these dialogues as introductory summaries of Heidegger's thinking, mainly from the 1927 text but also from the Zollikon Seminars, and at other times reminding myself that these are letters, dialogues and that I should be more relaxed in my overall approach. For example, Fazekas uses the term 'authenticity' a number of times in his offerings, which made me wonder whether to hold him to task for his seeming use of it in a more everyday sense (as honest, principled, sincere, consistent, for example), than Heidegger's Eigentlichkeit (1962 [1927]: 370). But this is an example of the very challenges that we all face if we claim ourselves to be drawing on Heidegger's ideas and language as therapists or Daseinsanalysts.

My own numerous pencil markings in the margins throughout this text include the difficulty of holding in view the ontological-existential and ontic-existentiell, and not confusing the two, nor – and here is the real difficulty – overlooking the fact that they are inseparable. But overall, I am grateful to both authors that they ventured into something that feels timely and also precarious.

Mo Mandic

References

Heidegger, M. (1962 [1927]). Being and Time. Trans. Macquarrie, J. & Robinson, E. Oxford: Blackwell.