◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Notes From the Consulting Room of Civilization Let us begin with what I know. Not what I believe. Not what I hope. What I know. I know that the human psyche contains within itself the drive toward its own destruction. I named it Thanatos — the death drive, the desire to return to the inorganic stillness that preceded life. This is not poetry. This is not metaphor. This is the clinical observation of a man who spent forty years listening to what human beings say when they stop performing and start speaking. What they say, underneath everything, is that civilization is a bargain they did not fully agree to — and sometimes they would prefer the simplicity of destruction to the complexity of the repair. What you are experiencing is not a political crisis. It is a psychological event that has taken political form. Until you understand the psychology the politics will not save you. In the beginning there was the primal horde. Over the horde stood the primal father. He took what he wanted. He brooked no rivals. He ruled by appetite and force with no law but his own will. The sons killed him — then deified him, because the father, however monstrous, had answered the question of who was in charge. This cycle has not ended. You are in it now. The man in the tower is the primal father returned. Not metaphorically. Structurally. And half the population loves him with the irrational love of the sons for the father they cannot kill and cannot stop wanting. You will not resolve it with better arguments. What cannot be remembered will be repeated. America has a wound it has never fully faced — the decision to build a republic on the premise that some human beings were property. Not faced. And so it returns — the wall between the protected and the disposable. In 1938 the Nazis came to Vienna. I was eighty-two. I had cancer of the jaw. I had spent years telling myself it could not be as bad as the alarmists said. I was wrong. I got out. My four sisters did not. Rosa. Marie. Dolfi. Paula. They were processed correctly. The paperwork was in order. I am the man who theorized the death drive — and I watched that drive consume my own sisters in the city I had lived in for seventy-nine years. The theory was correct. I would have preferred to be wrong. This is the analyst's condition — to see clearly and know that seeing clearly is not sufficient, that insight without action is merely more sophisticated suffering. The death drive is operational. The primal father has returned. The wound is presenting itself for the processing it has always required. Do the work. Not because it is easy. Not because it is guaranteed. But because the alternative is the repetition — the catastrophic repetition of the thing that has never been faced. I watched it consume my sisters from a consulting room in London in the last year of my life. Do the work.