Worms, Cells, and the Meaning of Death

There are two prevailing and contrasting theories of how cells die. The first, more comforting theory is that cells simply wear out from the rigors of life, and as wear and tear mounts become less able to fight off predators such as free radicals. Death appears here as an enemy at the gate, to be fought off in valorous combat until achieving the most honorable death possible for the Samurai, death in battle. The second, more troubling theory contends that aging and death are in fact preprogrammed into the cell’s DNA. This perspective essentially states “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

A 2008 Stanford research study, published in the 7/24/08 edition of the journal Cell, lends its weight to the latter perspective. The study looked at the impact of genetic programming in nematode worms, and found that the process of natural selection had resulted in genetic programming that predestined the worms to aging, and, by extension, death. A web article about the research, found at www.supercentarian.com/archive/genetic.html, explains the study’s key insight thusly: “key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake.” In essence, death becomes an existential dilemma for us precisely because it is in no way a dilemma for the process of natural selection. It is perhaps the greatest of ironies that our ultimate destiny is the result of nothing but an afterthought. (I have, of course, here made the leap from the death of cells to the death of cell based organisms; with the caveat that I am layman and not a cell biologist, we would appear to be on safe ground in asserting that the death of an individual human is intertwined with the death of his or her cells to a degree that makes this leap meaningful.)

We may proceed, with due caution but also with some degree of confidence based in scientific findings such as the Stanford worm study, in further exploration of the implications of our “planned demise from day one,” as one website’s description of preprogrammed cell death puts it (http://www.howstuffworks.com/). And if we are to proceed in such a fashion, then our first stop might very well be, yet again, at the doorstep of one Sigmund Freud. Because what the Stanford scientists and other theorists of preprogrammed cell death are telling us sounds remarkably like Freud’s most controversial theory, with apologies to penis envy, the death instinct.

Before discussing the particulars of Freud’s death instinct, it is important to pause for a moment in consideration of its singular lack of popularity. For really existing psychoanalysis, the worms at Stanford may be the bearers of bad news. Psychoanalysis would prefer to go about its business as if Freud had never postulated the death instinct. Psychoanlysis, like all the rest of us, is in flight from the specter of death; as David Loy explains, “our primary repression is not sexual desire but death, and that denial returns to consciousness in distorted, symbolic ways which haunt us individually and collectively.” (for this quote and a review of Loy’s Lack and Transcendence, see http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-EPT/padmas.htm) Psychoanalysis has repressed Freud’s death instinct, but, of course, the first commandment of psychoanalysis is the return of the repressed; those worms out at Stanford signal an opportunity for that return to emerge into consciousness from its current status as the unconscious urge towards compulsive repetition found in every form of death terror. Confronted with the science of preprogrammed cell death, psychoanalysis has no choice but to own the half of its legacy it has disowned, and the first murmurings of this reawakening to the death instinct can now be heard. (For an example, see http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=NP.006.0063A)

While psychoanalysis as a whole has repressed the theory of the death instinct, it is striking that the two most important psychoanalysts since Freud, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein (Jung’s and Adler’s respective breaks with Freud led them to found significant branches of psychology, but neither can properly be referred to as psychoanalysts), both embraced the death instinct. In an article on the web about the death instinct (http://www.answers.com/topic/death-instinct-thanatos), Pierre Delion explains that “For Melanie Klein, a firm advocate of the existence of the death drive, psychic conflict is never a conflict between the ego and the drives but always between the life drive and the death drive. Anxiety is the immediate response to the endopsychic perception of the death drive. For Jacques Lacan, the death drive as something beyond the pleasure principle forms the best starting-point for introducing his concept of the ‘Real,’ in connection with the Imaginary and the Symbolic. He links to this the lethal dimension inherent in desire and jouissance.” It is my contention that Klein and Lacan achieved their theoretical insights precisely because they owned all of psychoanalysis, including the death instinct. It is my further contention that psychoanalysis has become marginalized as both a therapeutic practice and as a philosophical construct because it has only ever been, Lacan and Klein notwithstanding, half of psychoanalysis. As a mental health professional a week does not pass in which I do not hear psychoanalysis mocked by the phrase “So, tell me about your mother.” And rightly so, because psychoanalysis without the death instinct is a joke. Forget about your mother; tell me about your life in the context of your inevitable death.

To survive in any meaningful way, psychoanalysis must get real. Freud is, as ever, ready at hand with his reality principle, but we must be sure that our understanding of reality is shaped not only by our appreciation of life instincts such as libido, nor only by the demands of civilization as enforced by the superego, but also by their equal partner, the death instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud notes that “two kinds of pressures are constantly at work in living substance, operating in contrary directions, one constructive or assimilatory and the other destructive or dissimilatory.” For Freud, these dual processes are less than harmonious, as he sees “an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses.” Our neurotic inability to reconcile what Freud calls the “Vacillating rhythm” of life and death instincts is inscribed in the worst of human history, especially war. In a letter to Freud on the origins of war, Albert Einstein described our inability to cope with the death instinct succinctly: “Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction.” (for the full text of the letter, see http://www.braungardt.com/Physics/Einstein-Freud.htm)

Zeroing in on exactly what Freud meant by the death instinct helps us see to exactly what degree the theory of the death instinct foreshadowed the theory of preprogrammed cell death. Per Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons- becomes inorganic once again- then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death.’” (emphasis is Freud’s) Freud’s assertion here that death occurs due to “internal reasons” is shocking in its prescience in relation to theories of preprogrammed cell death. However, his assertion that “the aim of all life is death” contrasts with the discovery that death is a mere afterthought to processes of natural selection. We are stuck with death not because it is the aim of all life, but because life only cares for the life of the species and cares nothing for the death of the individual. To correct Freud, the aim of all individuals is death, but, inevitably, life goes on.

But if we recall that the life instinct protects the cell up until the point that it has performed natural selection’s task, only then to succumb to the death instinct preprogrammed into its DNA , then the following passage just a few paragraphs later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, indicates that Freud’s death instinct may account for natural selection after all: “The hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organic shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to organic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.” In short, Freud’s insight here is that the life instinct and natural selection are ultimately subservient to the death instinct’s agenda, in that a healthy organism will ward off external dangers in the name of natural selection, but ultimately in the service of allowing the death preprogrammed into the organism’s DNA to obtain. The death instinct has but one card to play; it must play it last and if it does it trumps all.

We continue to repress the death instinct at our collective peril. In the most literal sense possible, the only way forward for each and every one of us is though death. As Pema Chodron writes in her commentary on the Tibetan Buddhist Lojong slogans, “ Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone.” And if Freud and the scientists at Stanford are right, it not only comes for us at the end, but is there with us every step of the journey; death is a part of who we are. In the same commentary, Pema Chodron counsels us to become familiar with death throughout life: “Practice opening and letting go throughout your life so you will not panic as everything dissolves at death.” It is only by doing so that the death instinct can emerge from repression. It is only by doing so that we can remain sane in the face of our preprogrammed eath. The leap of faith here, to be watered by practice, is that underneath all that death terror is what Pema Chodron calls “the innate ability to let go and feel compassion for others.” I’d like to die trying.