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1 Childhood and the Fear of Death in The Parenticide Club and “Visions of the Night” Now a word was brought to me stealthily, my ear received the whisper of it. Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake. —Job 4:12–14, Revised Standard Version iographers have long puzzled over—and sensationalized—Ambrose Bierce’s alienation from his parents, and particularly his mother, as well as the apparent reflection of these tensions in the recurring theme of parricide that appears in his short fiction. Broadening previous psychoanalytic approaches that have been reductively biographical in focus, this chapter will use post-Freudian perspectives on the psychology of death and the unconscious, as well as relevant historical, cultural, and literary contexts, to consider Bierce’s childhood, his subsequent commentary on his parents, and some of his nonmilitary writings that feature family violence. In this process, special attention will be paid to The Parenticide Club, a collection of four bizarre tales of parricide, and to “Visions of the Night,” Bierce’s recollection of three persistent nightmares from his youth and adulthood. These writings suggest that in many ways Bierce anticipated the theories of psychoanalysis regarding the importance of dreams in the work of the unconscious and the primal nature of the fear of death in humanity. As Daniel Liechty explains, “[t]he theory of Generative Death Anxiety (GDA) suggests that at the deepest level, human behavior is motivated by the unavoidable need to shield oneself from consciousness of human mortality” (x). According Childhood and the Fear of Death 2 to this developing body of research, “death anxiety is more than just one emotion or fear among others. It is understood as the root [unconscious] anxiety. . . which literally defines humans as a species” (x–xi). Liechty and others have traced the origins of this theory back at least to Socrates, but the modern synthesis of GDA began with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Freud, all of whom believed in the importance of the unconscious in human motivations. Freud’s protégé Otto Rank wrote extensively about the fear of death, and a number of theorists have built upon Rank’s work in this area.1 However, the theorist most associated with GDA is cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, who, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death, first gained widespread public attention for GDA by arguing that the terror of death is an innate fear that haunts humanity from birth. As Becker explains, because this fear is a defensive reaction to the omnipotent reality of creation in relation to one’s own limited powers and possibilities, the individual from childhood must repress it “from the entire spectrum of his experience, if he wants to feel a warm sense of inner value and basic security” (52). From this perspective, anxiety becomes “a matter of the reaction to global helplessness, abandonment, fate” (53).2 In reorienting Freud’s understanding of human motives, Becker echoes Norman O. Brown, who argues that the central problem of the child’s life is not the narrowly sexual problem of lust and competitiveness that Freud in his early work termed the Oedipus complex but rather the Oedipal project of how to become an active agent in control of one’s own life instead of a passive, helpless victim of fate.3 As Brown observes, The Oedipal project is not, as Freud’s earlier formulations suggest, a natural love of the mother, but as his later writings recognize, a product of the conflict of ambivalence and an attempt to overcome that conflict by narcissistic inflation. The essence of the Oedipal complex is the project of becoming God—in Spinoza’s formula, causa sui. . . . By the same token, it plainly exhibits infantile narcissism perverted by the flight from death. (118) In Becker’s words, “The Oedipal project is the flight from passivity, from obliteration , from contingency: the child wants to conquer death by becoming the father of himself, the creator and sustainer of his own life” (36). Repression of the fear of death then “is inevitably self-generated in the child and is directed against the parents, irrespective of how the parents behave” (Brown 120). According to both Becker and Brown, fear of death, though repressed, is natural and present in everyone. Arguing that this basic anxiety is actually an expression of the instinct for self-preservation, Gregory Zilboorg also concurs with this view, stating succinctly...

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