Psychoanalytic Psychology
© 2021 American Psychological Association 2021, Vol. 38, No. 2, 115–117
ISSN: 0736-9735
At Witz End: Theory in a Time of Plague
Elizabeth Rottenberg, PhD
Department of Philosophy, DePaul University
Death enters psychoanalytic theory in the middle of an epoch-making “plague.” We must not forget that
Freud begins working on Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the book that brings us the “death drive,” in March
1919, that is, in the middle of the 1918 influenza pandemic. This article describes the devastating impact the
pandemic had on Freud’s life as well as the creative act that literally and figuratively brings the death drive
to life.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Keywords: death drive, Derrida, fort/da, Spanish flu, Witz
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There is a bitter little pill of a joke currently circulating among
infectious disease experts. It is short: The nineteenth century was
followed by the twentieth century, which was followed by the : : :
nineteenth century. (Alfred W. Crosby, 1989, p. xiii)
Invited by G. Stanley Hall to give a series of lectures at Clark
University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Sigmund Freud set off for
the New World on August 21, 1909. Sailing with him, aboard the
magnificent George Washington, were his friends and collaborators,
Sándor Ferenczi and Carl Jung. Freud enjoyed the Atlantic crossing
very much and showed surprising good humor when he appeared on
the passenger list under the name “Freund.” He was also thrilled to
discover his cabin steward reading a copy of The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life.
As the George Washington glided through the mouth of the
Hudson and approached the shores of the New World on the evening
of August 29, 1909, Freud, like many before him, beheld the
glorious statue illuminating the universe. At which point, or so
the story goes, Freud turned to Jung and uttered these words: “They
don’t realize that we’re bringing them the plague.” I have always
imagined this pronouncement to have been accompanied by an
impish grin. After all, America was a land Freud loved to hate.
Americans were uncultured, shallow, prudish, enamored of money,
and covertly antisemitic. Freud may have hoped that the subversive,
rebellious, irruptive, outbreak quality of psychoanalysis would spell
the end of a certain “American way of life.”
Now, when I tell you that Freud never spoke these words, that
these words are the pure invention of Jacques Lacan, who
attributed them to Freud in order to sound the death knell of
American ego psychology, you may not believe me. The aura of
Freud’s mythical phrase is such that everyone really believes
Freud said it. Freud’s actual words, as chronicled by Jung in his
Elizabeth Rottenberg, PhD https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6585-4638
This article is adapted from a longer version of this text: “At Witz End:
Theory in a Time of Plague,” by E. Rottenberg, 2020, Derrida Today,
13(2), pp. 210–216 (https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2020.0240). Copyright
2020 by Edinburgh University Press. Adapted with permission.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Elizabeth
Rottenberg, PhD, DePaul University, 2352 North Clifton Avenue, Suite 150,
Chicago, IL 60626, United States. Email: erottenb@depaul.edu
115
https://doi.org/10.1037/pap0000362
interview with Kurt Eissler at the Library of Congress, were far
less provocative: “If they only knew what we are bringing to
them.” Freud may have wished to ruffle a few American feathers,
but he was also aware, as he wrote Ferenczi, that it was they, the
European analysts, rather than their puritanical American coun-
terparts, who risked finding themselves—and this is Freud’s
description of the potentially sticky situation—“up shit creek”1
when it came time to revealing “the sexual underpinnings of
[their] psychology” (Freud & Ferenczi, 1993, p. 33). For, when
push comes to shove, plague is a “shit storm” that blows both
ways. On his return to Vienna following his American tour, Freud
was plagued by digestive problems. At the same time, psycho-
analysis spread explosively in the New World: within a few years
of Freud’s visit to Worcester, psychoanalysis had become “the
most popular ‘mental treatment’ on the North American conti-
nent” (Roudinesco, 2016, p. 158).
Ironically, however, death does not enter psychoanalytic theory
until Freud’s return from America. In fact, it only enters psychoan-
alytic theory in the middle of an epoch-making “plague.” Let us not
forget that Freud begins working on Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
the book that brings us the “death drive,” in March 1919, that is, in
the middle of the 1918 influenza pandemic. I will say more about
Beyond and its contamination by “plague,” but first I would like to
recall a few details about the “plague” in question and the devastat-
ing impact it had on Freud’s life.
Between March 1918 and March 1920, “the influenza plague”
(Barry, 2018, p. 376) or “Spanish flu” killed between 50 and 100
million people worldwide. Though it was one of the worst outbreaks
of disease in human history, it was not a plague in the strict sense. In
the strict sense, “plague” refers to bubonic plague—“the Black
Death”—as well as to its variants, pneumonic plague, and septice-
mic plague. That is, it refers to a disease caused by the bacterium
Yersinia pestis. The 1918 pandemic, by contrast, was caused by the
H1N1 influenza A virus; it was a highly contagious viral infection.
Nonetheless, and from the very beginning, there were rumors that
1
Although this English translation of “in Verschiß geraten” (i.e., to lose
one’s good reputation or standing) may be a little over the top, Freud does put
“Verschiß” in quotation marks and, as the great Heidegger translator David
Farrell Krell quipped when I asked him about the translation: “It’s perfect
because ‘up shit creek’ is an Americanism, and America should not cost shit,
but bring shit! Which is what we do best, vide Trump. You can put that into a
footnote!”
 116 ROTTENBERG
the Black Death had returned. Not only did the H1N1 influenza A
virus kill quickly and violently—“One army report noted ‘fulminat-
ing pneumonia, with wet hemorrhagic lungs,’ i.e., a rapidly esca-
lating infection and lungs choked with blood, ‘fatal in from 24 to
48 hr’” (Ibid., 173)—not only did it kill anonymously and without
warning—“Death could come from anyone, anytime” (Ibid., 225),
whence the “anarchy : : : loosed upon the world” (William Butler
Yeats)—but its most extreme and striking feature was also cyanosis,
which literally caused a victim’s body to turn blue, dark blue, or
even black.
One final detail: much like the legend of psychoanalytic “pla-
gue,” an apocryphal story lies at the origin of Spanish flu. Though
there are few certainties about the Spanish flu, one of these,
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paradoxically, is that wherever it came from—and theories
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include: a military camp in Kansas, USA, a small fishing port
in France, a rural province in northern China—it did not come from
Spain. Or rather Spain begat “flu” the way Freud begat “plague”:
by proxy. Since Spain was neutral during the war, its newspapers
were uncensored, unlike those in France, Germany, or the United
Kingdom. As a result, only Spanish newspapers were filled with
reports of the disease. Another certainty is that those who died of
the virus were very young. In contrast to most influenza viruses, or
today’s SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the H1N1 influenza A virus
killed people in their twenties and thirties. What killed them was
not the virus itself but their body’s (auto)immune response to the
virus. Especially at risk were pregnant women.
Women like Freud’s daughter Sophie. Sophie was 26 and
pregnant with her third child when she died—on January 25,
1920. Announcing the news to his mother, Freud wrote: “Yester-
day morning our dear, blooming Sophie died from galloping
influenza and pneumonia” (Freud, 1961, p. 332). Like so many
of her generation, Sophie was struck down in the prime of her life:
“our dear Sophie : : : [was] snatched away by influenzal pneumo-
nia, snatched away in the bloom of health : : : in four or five days as
if she had never been” (Ibid., 333). The loss of his daughter left
Freud dazed and dumb: “I do not know what more there is to say. It
is such a paralyzing event : : : Blunt necessity, mute submission”
(Jones, 1957, p. 19); “there is little to say. After all, we know that
death belongs to life, that it is unavoidable and comes when it
wants : : : [but] to outlive a child is not agreeable. Fate does not
keep even to this order of precedence” (Gay, 1995, p. 392). Fate is
not playing by the rules when it interrupts the “order of prece-
dence.” Or rather fate is playing by its own rules when it plays with
the unwritten rule according to which children do not die before
their parents or grandparents.
In his heartfelt letter of condolence to Sophie’s widower, Freud was
perhaps most explicit about this obscene scene of play: “it is a
senseless, brutal act of fate that has robbed us of our Sophie : : :
all we can do is bow our heads under the blow, like the poor, helpless
human beings that we are and with whom the higher powers are
playing” (Freud, 1980, p. 343, my translation). In the play of life and
death in which fate is king, all men and women are merely playthings.
Fate is a vengeful, Heraclitean child, playing a game of fort/da with
human pieces. After all, as we know from Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, in which Sophie’s 18-month old son plays a starring role,
Sophie’s departures are precisely what set the fort/da in motion.
It is worth remembering that when Freud turns to the fort/da game
in Beyond he does so in order to give an example of “normal,” non-
traumatic repetitive behavior. What he discovers, however, is that,
just like traumatic dreams, the child’s game reenacts the memory of
a painful event. Indeed, what Ernst is repeating—what he is
repeating symbolically when he throws his wooden spool into
his crib and utters the sound “o-o-o-o” (fort or “gone”) and then
reels it back with a joyful “da” (“there”)—is the distressing event of
his mother’s departure. Ultimately, what most intrigues Freud about
the game is not its wish-fulfilling aspect (unpleasurable departure
followed by pleasurable return). What most intrigues Freud is the
fact that a painful repetition should set a (pleasurable) game in
motion, that a painful repetition should lie at the heart of a child’s
first “creative act” (Caruth, 2013, p. 5).
We should also remember that, along with Ernst’s creative act of
playing, Freud’s creative act of writing takes place when Sophie is
alive and flourishing. A draft of Beyond had been completed in May
1919. Freud was thus able to allude to Sophie’s death in a footnote,
and it is through this footnote that “plague” leaves its mark on Freud’s
text: “When the child was five-and-three-quarters years old,” Freud
writes, “the mother died. Now that she was actually ‘all gone’ (o-o-o),
the boy showed not a trace of mourning for her. To be sure, in the
meantime a second child had been born, a child that had awakened in
him the fiercest jealousy” (Freud, 1920/1955, 16n1). In this strangely
dissociated footnote, Freud compulsively repeats the game that
symbolically repeats the distressing reality of Sophie’s departure.
Like Ernst’s game, however, Freud’s “o-o-o” not only repeats the
memory of Sophie’s painful departure; it also demonstrates the way in
which the fort/da remains in play in Freud’s work—in the creative
work that literally and figuratively brings the death drive to life.
On the one hand, then, the fort/da game memorializes Sophie’s
departure(s). On the other hand, it evokes the living memory of
Sophie. When we learn, for example, that Freud kept Sophie’s
picture in a tiny locket fastened to his watch-chain, how not to
picture the watch-chain as a string, or the locket as a spool? How are
we to interpret H. D.’s account of this accoutrement when she tells
us that Freud showed her the tiny locket and said simply: “She is
here”? (H. D., 2012, p. 128).
Yet we know that Sophie’s death did not cause Freud to interrupt his
work on Beyond for even a single day. When Sophie leaves for good,
when she is fort forever (“o-o-o”), Freud carries on; he continues to
work. Jacques Derrida calls attention to this curious continuity:
“And thus work goes on, everything goes on, fort-geht one might
say. La séance continue” (Derrida, 1987, p. 329). Derrida here echoes
Freud in a letter to Ferenczi written just four days after Sophie’s death:
“The news of death came on Sunday afternoon : : : The cremation was
at noon on Wednesday : : : And with us? My wife is very shaken. I
think: La séance continue” (Freud & Ferenczi, 2000, p. 6). He says the
same to Jones: “You know of the misfortune that has befallen me, it is
depressing indeed, a loss not to be forgotten. But : : : life and work
must go on” (Freud & Jones, 1993, p. 368). La séance continue; the
show must go on and, with it, the performance of a lifetime. I am
referring of course of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
I will end by simply noting that, in this famous and famously
speculative text, the language of repetitive play—of a “perfor-
mance” that is repeated but repeated differently—suddenly reap-
pears as Freud is shifting his emphasis from repetition as death
(death drive) to repetition as the origin of life (life drive). In short, it
is by linking child’s play to the play of those cells that work against
the death of living substance in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that
Freud marks what might be called a “departure into life” (Caruth,
2013, p. 9).
 THEORY IN A TIME OF PLAGUE
This departure is not merely theoretical, however. As Freud jokes
to Eitingon in March 1921: “For the Beyond, I have been punished
enough; it is very popular, brings me masses of letters and encomi-
ums. I must have made something very stupid there” (Gay, 1995,
p. 403). Beyond has taken the world by storm. With its far-reaching
speculations about life and death, the text touched by “plague” is
itself plagued by success. In other words, the “plague” that psycho-
analysis brings to America not only returns with a vengeance (death
drive); but it also offers a new form of departure (life drive) and with
it an influence that spreads both far and wide. This time, however,
Freud does not suffer the consequences of his American reception.
This time, Freud’s brush with success leaves him sequelae-free;
Freud is able to stomach the triumph of Beyond. In fact, you might
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say, he even fortifies himself with salty repartee.
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Received January 17, 2021
Revision received January 27, 2021
Accepted January 29, 2021 ▪