ABSTRACT
In their different ways, a series of Gerrnanie artists and thinkers-the poet Novalis, the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and, most powerfully, composer Richard Wagnerall espoused at one point in their lives the view that death should not only be welcomed but ardently desired, even sought after as the final rest after a Iife of s triving and suffering.1 Wagner wrote - with a characteristic lack of modes ty-to Liszt in 1854 about his appreciation of Schopenhauer's particular position on mortality:
Soon after this, Wagner began writing and composing Tristan und Isolde.3 He had interrupted his work on Der Ring des Nibe/ungen in the last act of Siegfried, apparently 1 This chapter was written in collaboration with 'Team Tristan'- four very talented graduate
Wagner has often been seen as anticipating Freud in his psychological insights into both the unconscious and the non-rational in human behaviour, and not a few critics have been tempted to interpret his works in general Freudian terms.6 Some of these have risked reducing Wagner to a neurotic or his lovers to patients on the psychiatrist's couch, diagnosed as 'two wounded narcissistic people' experiencing the 'oceanic feeling' oflosing ego boundaries in relation to their mothers.7 But this is definitely not the direction we would like to explore; instead, it is specifically in relation to the theme of death and the notions of a death drive and the compulsion to repeatthat the Wagnerian connectionsto both Schopenhauer and Freud are most evident - and, we belicve, mutually illwninating. In the years immediately following
World War I, infiuenced by the psychological trauma he had been witnessing and its clinical signs he could not explain, Freud tried for the first time to integrate the experience of death into his theory of psychic drives. Taking two concepts that were insepara bl e in earlier Greek thought - Eros (life/love) and Thanatos (death) - Freud posited a primary drive in the human psyche that he called the 'death
instinct'. While this was conceived as being in opposition to a 'life instinct' which had direct links to sexuality, it was the death drive that Freud came to consicler the more primitive and basic. The postulation that 'the aim of alllife is death' was based on Freud' s belief-in his terminology-that all life strove toward a reduction of tension to an inorganic zero point. In other words, he felt that the animate sought to revert to the inanimate.8 But this drive was countered by the energy of sexuality. Freud then rather ingenuously noted: 'We have unwittingly steered our course into the harbour of Schopenhauer' s philosophy. For him death is the "true result and to that extent the purpose of life", while the sexual instinct is the embodiment of the will to live.'9 While subsequent psychoanalytic theory has certainly contested the validity of Freud's theories of Eros and Thanatos,10 the relevance of these dual drives to a reading of death in Wagner's work comes in their status as an im portant-if late-contribution to the German Romantic obsession with sexuality and death, or to what in later cultural shorthand terms came to be called the 'Liebestod'. 11
A significant part of this contribution lay in Freud' s insight into the structure and possible meaning of repetitive behaviour. One of the clinical findings that led Freud to conceive of a death instinct in the first place was the curious tendency he noted on the part of those suffering from severe trauma to relive the traumatic moment and to do so in various forms: in analysis, in dreams, in unconscious habits. Given Freud' s conceptualization of the psyche before the positing of the death drive, such a tendency should not have been possible: the psyche was supposed to have defences against just such eruptions of 'unpleasure', and the pleasure principle, in its endeavours to keep tension and excitation to a minimum, was not supposed to be overridden in this way. But the evidence was clear: traumatized patients exhibited a 'compulsion to repeat' that had a drive-like quality about it, giving the appearance
of 'some "daemonic" force at work'.12 This Freud saw as a more primitive force than the pleasure principle, and thus evidence of a basic drive toward a return to the inanimate in death. Freud interpreted the act of repetition as an attempt retrospectively to master the traumatic stimulus.
