**SPOILERS AHEAD**!!!!!!
As the fictional Freud writes about his own impending death, he foresees the death of his sister Dolfi (who will die three years later in historical time, on the way to the fields). To put it mildly, death is everywhere. “The pain will accompany me until I say goodbye definitively,” writes Freud/Miéville/Reeves. He’s willing to accept it, to be clear. Freud then offers us a case study of a patient whom he met only three times, the last time when the world was at war. This patient offers Freud an enigma not very different from that which the Sphinx offers to Oedipus, and from which psychoanalysis partly arose:
“I kill, I kill and I kill again,” he said. “And the truth is I would like to rest… And sometimes, not frequently but many times throughout my life, I die. And hurts.
And then I come back.
I come back and kill, kill and kill again, and finally die again, and the whole merry-go-round continues. So please… Herr Doktor… What kind of man am I?
This is, of course, B., the immortal warrior hero. He wants to be able to die, to become mortal, but he cannot do it, because he cannot die his own death. Freud seeks to redescribe this in psychic terms for B. And that is the nature of his joint analytical work. It is possible to read much of the middle book, which opens and closes with Freud’s voice, as a lost case study. Freud declares to B.: “You told me that you do not want to be a metaphor. But you can’t choose.” What kills us and dies and is reborn? B., whether we like it or not, is a metaphor for the death drive.
The death drive is not exactly a science fiction weapon or engine, but a theory introduced by (the real) Freud as a corrective to his idea of the pleasure principle: the idea that we all try to minimize pain and strive for pleasure. all the time. time. War-devastated Europe had shown him that there was something more to explain: that we not only seek the good, but also the bad, the “displeasure.” Thus he conceived the death drive at the end of the First World War and during the Spanish flu, in which his beloved daughter Sophie died suddenly. Freud would deny until his death that Sophie was the inspiration for it, and here, Miéville grants Freud’s wish. B., in the hands of Miéville, embodies the death drive and has turned to Freud, as many have turned to his analysts, in search of a cure. Freud then does what analysts do best: extrapolate from a patient to a universal theory. The immortal B., in this alternative universe, showed Freud what kind of men we all are. When I asked Miéville about it, he said, “I think you could argue that B. says, ‘I want to be a human being, I want to be a real child.’ “I mean, it’s a Pinocchio story.”
although It was actually Reeves who presented Freud with the original book. BRZRKR comical, it’s easy to see why Miéville latched onto him. All of this was written while China was deeply considering whether or not she could imagine what was going to happen. “Depression, for me, was the realization of what has happened rather than something that was happening,” he told me. “These books” –refers not only The book from elsewhere but also his upcoming magnum opus/white whale/albatross, which I can’t talk about yet except to say it’s just been sent to the publisher, “are coming to an end in what I tentatively and hopefully think is available on the other side.” of the worst of that.”