Desire, life, death, and drive

Socrates, Cicero, and Montaigne have all said that to philosophize is to learn how to die.

This line is from a review in the Times Literary Supplement (21 May, 2008) by Daniel Pick of a new book by Mark Edmundson
THE DEATH OF SIGMUND FREUD
Fascism, psychoanalysis and the rise of fundamentalism
282pp. Bloomsbury. £18.99.
978 0 74758607 4

My thanks to Penny Geogiou for bringing this to my attention moments after I received an email from from a sociologist who had told me the rather pitiful tale of one of his colleagues. They are suffering an excess of audit in their department and being asked to spend lots of time on form filling that has no value for the work that they do, in fact it is detrimental. The colleague was very vocal in her refusal to indulge in such nonsense. Her outburst was sufficient to call a senior administrator in to defend his labyrinthine predilections. Perhaps it is the shift in power relations that led the academic to immediately capitulate. She found herself praising the virtues of the red tape equally loudly, much to the surprise of her colleagues. The administrator withdrew, satisfied.

I wondered what happened to this woman. It is not unusual to find someone beating themselves up after such an unpleasant encounter. When a bully succeeds in pressing home his power, the bullied has three options to deal with the residue that results. Self punishment. Passing the indignity onto someone else. Sublimation, or turning it into something more creative. 

Figuring out how to live with the excesses of our drives is one of life's more important questions. Antiquity and classical literature is full of it, and Freud and Lacan champion it. But in modern British life, it appears to have fallen out of fashion.