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As evidenced in his letters and in his analytic discourse, Freud suffered two heavy losses upon the war’s end. The more personal loss was the death of his beloved daughter Sophie who suddenly died of pneumonia in February 1920;1 the other, and more widely implicated socially-existentially, was the 1918 loss of the quite sheltering Empire,2 the symbolic (and reigning socio-political) structure in which Freud was born, raised, educated, lived, procreated, practiced his work, and developed his revolutionary thought. The relevance of Freud’s loss of his daughter for his writing of the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, particularly for its second chapter as the exemplification of his theory of the death drive that manifests itself in the compulsion to repeat, is extensively discussed by major 20^th-century theorists,3 while the relevance of the loss of the Empire for the same matter was widely ignored or marginalized. Beyond the Pleasure Principle discusses the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in two different spheres: first, the dreams in traumatic neurosis4 that Freud observed in the war survivors, and second, the waking life in a child’s game that Freud observed in Sophie’s son Ernest,5 three to four years before he wrote this essay.

However, informed by my own interpretative relation to transference, I have found the integral dimension of the second chapter as decisive for understanding Freud’s formulation of the death drive (Todestrieb) primarily as a rhetorical delivery of his witnessing function that Freud himself could not confess openly (or, he could not “bind ‘It’” by the secondary processes). That is, I read the missing link between these two losses that Freud experienced (yet not explicitly saying that connection) as placed in the relation between the two activities he studied: 1) the dreams of neurotics caused by an unexpected violence forcing them to wake up repetitively into a new fright and 2) the waking life of generating a play as instinctual renunciation through a cultural achievement.

Freud wrote the first draft of the essay from March to May 1919, while also working on the text The Uncanny,6 mentioning in both texts the “compulsion to repeat” but not the death instincts. He returned to the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle at the beginning of 1920, right after the death of his daughter, Sophie Freud-Halberstadt, and finished it between May and July of the same year, and only then formulated the death drive. However, in the text in which no personal names are given, besides his own name as the text’s signed author, Freud does not mention either Sophie’s death or his own fatherly loss. He describes that only in his letters to his colleagues in the days following Sophie’s death as “a serious narcissistic injury inflicted on him,” so that he is regaining his balance through writing, trying to overcome the painful experience through the continuity of his work: “I work as much as I can, and I am thankful for the diversing […] what is known as mourning will probably follow only later.”7

In the essay, the compulsion to repeat is seen as the universal attribute of instincts and perhaps all organic life – as the impulse for restoring the earlier state of things that was abandoned under the pressure of previous disturbing forces. The essay’s key second chapter consists of seven pages in the standard edition. On the first three pages, Freud speculates on the dark, desolate subject of the manifestations of fright8 in traumatic neuroses. He does not say that this tormenting psychic experience is anchored in and modulated by the hard turning-point of the emerging post-war existential and socio-political uncertainty, which all (of those surrounding him) – including Freud as a member of the Jewish minority in the post-Austro-Hungarian Empire Austrian (Germanic) national formation – inhabited, and certainly feared. Then, in just one sentence, Freud passes to the warmth and comfort of the family narrative, without saying that this is also triggered by the loss that he suffered himself, which certainly must have reminded him of his own mortality. Skillfully, he switches to the reassuring authority of his interpretation of his small grandson’s game (indeed, largely taken from Sophie’s own interpretation)9 that evolved in four different stages: 1) the boy throwing small objects away; 2) pulling back one as the game of disappearance and return to him of his mother as his primary object; 3) most important, the boy crouching down beneath the full-length mirror saying that himself he is “gone”, and 4) a year later, throwing his toys as sending his father “to the front” where his father really was.

In Freud’s own “masculine” and “senior” game of repetitions – where his daughter Sophie disappears repetitively as annulled by her father Freud in his own text – and with the aim to restore his ego, “regaining his balance through writing” (the balance that however is itself called into question by the topic of the death drive), Freud transfers to his grandson, as to the metonymical object, the burden of his own sudden fright caused by Sophie’s death. The link of grandfather-father/daughter-mother/son-grandson forms the chain of functions that can be directly related to consideration and confirmation of the factor of heredity in repetition, of which Freud writes in the same text. It is indicative to mention that Freud’s reaction to his father’s death (23.10.1896) was entirely different, described in his letters as the “heaviest loss in one’s life”, so that Freud “cannot write at all”, not even to thank colleagues for condolences.10

By the 1990s, a canon of the feminist interpretations of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle had already been established. Nevertheless, a comprehensive, literary ground-breaking reading of this text is offered by Elisabeth Bronfen in the chapter “The Lady Vanishes” of her 1992 book Over Her Dead Body.11 Bronfen describes the rhetorical strategy of Beyond the Pleasure Principle as such that it self-reflexively repeats its thematic concerns.

Repetition is doubly inscribed, for one by the death drive; directed toward reduction of tensions; toward an original of complete identity; toward an animate state anterior and posterior to which both precede and follow the life, and then it is inscribed by the pleasure principle, which is directed toward production of tensions through division of unity; separation leading through the detour of substitution to the production of new unities.12

Bronfen explains how, in this interstice, repetition serves to acknowledge the death drive beyond the pleasure principle in the sense that the mother/infant dyad must be renounced and translated into supplementation because the division death threatens is always inherent in this pleasurable unity.

In my reading of the wider context of the essay, the symbolic structure of the Empire worked out with similar materialist features for Freud, therefore and likewise it had also to be renounced by him while he was actively retaking the position of his rejection of it – after the Empire had been already “gone” – in the immensity of the death’s over-presence, leaving behind the crack and the interstice of much larger dimensions. The structure of the “departed” Empire in the prospect of the coming nationalism/Nazism as well as the rebelliousness of the forthcoming vast domain of socialist revolutions (analogous to that of the scientific launching of psychoanalysis by Freud)13 as aptly exemplified by Freud’s focus on his small grandson’s games – is yet another platform of the “maternal realm” that Freud uses for his theoretical articulation. According to this, Freud’s textual distribution of the observed child’s four performances only reinforces the importance of the missing link of this narration to the first part of the chapter that discusses traumatic neurosis as Freud’s difficulty to display the reference to his own social-existential reality of the violence-riven post-war condition.

The child’s two games of repetitively throwing away his toys, and the game of pulling one item back14 as an interpreted reference to the child’s mother Freud describes in the main text, adding his (and Sophie’s) arbitrary semantic coding of the sounds the child exclaimed ([o-o-o-o] fort-da, as denoting “gone-back”). However, the most important act of the boy crouching down beneath the full-length mirror saying that himself he is “gone” (“baby o-o-o-o-o!”) 15 is moved down to a footnote. It is widely claimed that Freud refused to acknowledge an interdependence between the theoretical formulation of the death drive and the experience of his daughter’s death, because an acceptance of the intersection between a real event of death and a theoretical speculation would counteract the solace this piece of writing was to afford to Freud. It is a common place in interpretations (by D. W. Winnicott, J. Lacan, J. Derrida, G. Deleuze, J. Kristeva, etc.) to read Freud’s description of these games as Freud’s self-representation of representation (of a departure) and the necessary return of and to the self, only more so because Freud persistently endeavored to separate the impartiality and authority of his theoretical insight from the open reference to his own trauma caused by Sophie’s death. Still, the question remains, why does Freud, who certainly has other possibilities for controlling his loss, react finally like the one and half year-old child when he, not mentioning his daughter’s death, sacrifices for the sake of the grapheme of his text, the dead Sophie for the second time in his text? Hence, we could also assume that as much as Freud’s concept of the death drive came out of his most intimate emotions, hints, resentment at the power of death, in the concrete case of his deceased daughter, it also came out of his own fright caused by his own facing compulsively the murky post-Empire developments. Or, also, his foreseeing the looming national-socialism, intuitively or theoretically, which would be in line with his psychoanalytic discipline.

Since Freud tried to deny any autobiographical connection, let us recall his own sentence from the same text, that in a person “only ego is resistant, but not the unconscious” (whose only endeavor is “to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action”).16 Accordingly, the intersection between the autobiographical and rhetorical strategy of self-reflexivity, the repetitive erasure of Sophie in the displacement from the daughter’s significant part to that of a grandson (as a blind spot) – can make for my claim that the common experience of fright as the turning point in the post-war reality is seen in the repetitive phenomenology of the mirror that takes hold of Freud’s narration. And that the whole authority of Freud in this text is moved to the footnote that describes the child’s fright from his encounter with his own reflection in the mirror (which is not his mother) and his hiding from himself. To hide from the mirror or to enter the mirror – that is how I would formulate the strategic ambiguity of the epistemological and ontological within the witnessing function.