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Driving to Death
Taking the long way through trauma.
Why do trauma victims re-experience their trauma in flashbacks and nightmares? We need some help from Freud to explain.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud noted that, in their dreams, flashbacks, and patterns of behavior, trauma victims compulsively repeated their horrible experiences as if they were happening in the present, rather than remembering them as events of the past. If you believe people do whatever is pleasurable, you will not expect this. Freud came up with the death drive to explain.
This is how the death drive works. Death awaits you. Not just death, but dissolution, nothingness, and extinction, the state of everything being totally fucked up. The Abyss. You prefer not to think about it, but it forces itself into your consciousness when you have a close call, a trauma. Your trauma gave you a glimpse of the Abyss before you have had a chance to live life fully. It brought you to the brink and threatened to push you off. You would like to be prepared next time, so you don’t fall in before you’re ready.
Having a death drive doesn’t mean that you want to die. Far from it. You know you will fall into the Abyss, but you want to do so on your terms. You attempt to master the inevitable by compulsively repeating the event that brought it to your awareness. When you…
