**spoiler alert**!!!!!!
When the fictional Freud writes about his own impending death, he foresees the death of his sister Dolphy (who would die three years later in history on the way to the concentration camp). Death is omnipresent, to say the least. “The pain will be with me until I say my final goodbye,” Freud/Miéville/Reeves writes. Plainly, he is ready to accept the pain. Freud then presents a case study of a patient he saw only three times, the last time when the world was at war. The patient poses a riddle to Freud that is similar to the riddle the Sphinx poses to Oedipus and is the source of some of the theories of psychoanalysis.
“I kill and I kill and I kill,” he said, “and the truth is, I want to rest… and sometimes, not often, but many times in my life, I die, and it’s painful.”
And then come back again.
“I come back, kill again, kill again, die again, and the merry-go-round goes on. So please — Doctor — what kind of man am I?”
This is, of course, about the immortal warrior hero B. He wants to die, to be mortal, but he can’t, because he cannot die his own death. Freud tries to re-explain this for B in psychic terms, and that is the essence of their joint analytic work. Much of this intervening book, which begins and ends with Freud’s voice, can be read as a lost case study. “You told me you didn’t want to be a metaphor. But you have no choice.” What is it that kills us, that makes us die, and that regenerates us? Like it or not, B is a metaphor for the death drive.
The death drive is not exactly a sci-fi weapon or engine, but a theory that the (real) Freud introduced to revise his idea of the pleasure principle, the idea that we all always try to minimize pain and seek pleasure. War-torn Europe had shown Freud that there was something else to explain, that we are not only driven to good, but also to evil, or “unpleasantness.” He therefore came up with the death drive at the end of the First World War and during the Spanish Flu, when his beloved daughter Sophie suddenly died. Freud denied until his death that Sophie was the inspiration, but here Miéville got Freud’s wish. In Miéville’s hands, B embodies the death drive. And he went to Freud, just as many people go to analysts for treatment. And Freud does what analysts do best: infer from a single patient to a universal theory. In this other world, the immortal B showed Freud what we are all like. When I asked Miéville about it, he replied, “I think you could say that B is saying, ‘I want to be a man, I want to be a real boy.’ So it’s the story of Pinocchio.”
Even if it is Freud’s original BRZRKR It’s a comedy, so it’s easy to see why Miéville was so attached to it. All of this was written at a time when Chyna was deep in thought about whether he could imagine himself living. “For me, depression was less about something having happened, and more about the realization of what had happened,” he told me. “These books”—he’s referring to Somewhere Elsewhere Book But he’s not yet allowed to talk about his next magnum opus, Moby Dick/Albatross, other than to say that it has just been sent off to publishers, but that it is “drawing to a close with the tentative, and hopefully, belief that the worst is over.”
