It happened quickly, so quickly that you’d think it was impossible to retain the image. The Ohio Turnpike in October 2024, 5:30 a.m. and pitch-black, the road straight and level and empty of cars, 80 miles per hour—just right to make it to central Wisconsin by sunset—high beams and no radio, only the hum of the engine, when out of nowhere a buck leapt into my lane, a thick tan body and towering antlers dashing in from the right. I knew instantly what it was. I wasn’t drowsy—I’d just spent five hours sleeping in the back at a rest stop near the state line—but I couldn’t avoid him. I’d barely touched the brake and cut the wheel an inch before we hit. I doubt more than a half-second passed since he entered my sight. The crunch of metal, plastic, flesh, and bone was just that, a crunch, not sharp or loud. The hood of the car swung up to the windshield, the airbag blew, the car slowed and drifted to the shoulder. Ten seconds passed with no noise or motion. The skin on my face started to burn (from the chemicals in the airbag, I am told). I opened the door, stepped out, and spotted a dark mass a hundred feet back, lying half in the roadway, unmoving. I reached inside and clicked the hazard lights.
A tow truck driver dropped me at the Toledo airport, where I rented a car and made it home that night. A week later I left Wisconsin for good, moving to Boston for a time before settling in Washington, D.C., far from the place where I had seen more Amish carriages than cars passing my front door. Every week or so, the image comes back. The road, the lights, the deer flash in my mind as if I were in a theater at the start of a movie, the black screen suddenly illuminated. The sight of a Ford Flex on Wisconsin Avenue might cause it, or the deer that were nosing around the gardens outside my building last week. Sometimes it has no cause at all—it just happens. Each recurrence is a jolt. The ordinary day is broken. I wasn’t hurt, wasn’t shocked, suffered no trauma physical or mental, no tender feelings for the poor buck (though I loved that car). I felt only astonishment at how suddenly the world had changed. It is not the impact but the moment before it, the split-second awareness that something bad is going to happen, and I can’t prevent it—that is what comes back again and again.
The study of dreams may be regarded as the most trustworthy approach to the exploration of the deeper psychic processes.” So wrote Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which addressed nightmares suffered by veterans of war that seemed to contradict the theory he had laid out twenty years earlier in The Interpretation of Dreams. In that earlier book, Freud had characterized “dream work” as a mode of wish-fulfillment. In a dream state, the ego relaxes and repressed desires are given expression, though in distorted form. Those desires are shameful, cowardly, selfish, disturbing, or otherwise contrary to the moral sense, but they are in us and have been since early childhood. We dream because we must, because “the return of the repressed” can’t be checked, for such desires never go away, only simmer in the unconscious. In healthy individuals, the repressed returns by means of sublimation, whereby destructive instincts are channeled into safe habits that meet our psychic needs without endangering social relations (as lust, for instance, is contained by marriage). It is, in Freud’s view, a tragic compromise that leaves us never fully satisfied. But civil society cannot survive without it.
What about the ex-soldier who falls asleep and dreams of the trenches, mad with fear and uncertainty as bombs fall for hours, a friend beside him clutching his rifle and soon to die in the mud? It was common in 1919. There were an “immense number of such maladies,” Freud writes, with no “basis of organic injury.” Such dreams reenacted the worst moments, pulling “the patient back to the situation of his disaster, from which he awakens in renewed terror.” The agony put the Freudian model to the test. What wish was granted, what pleasure got its release? What perverse mechanism forced the veteran to relive what he never deserved to experience in the first place? The source of these miseries was like a foreign body lodged deep inside, Freud observed, hidden and malignant. It kept the trauma fresh as a living torment. Psychoanalysis did not help these patients. The analyst couldn’t get the patient to recognize what had been repressed in his waking life and expressed in those nightmares, because the dream content didn’t belong to the patient. Something else, a daemon inside (Freud uses the Greek term), was in control. The patient could not claim and examine the content of the dream, only endure it.
To have an image in your mind, unpleasant or disastrous, which may pop up at any time, with or without a relation to the present, isn’t so different. Many people experience memory-flashes, and though the objects are less intense and lethal than those of Freud’s subjects, the mechanics are the same. It used to be that everyone in America recalled exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that JFK had been shot. A special announcement, the newscaster’s voice, the look on the face of a person beside you, all rushed into consciousness whether you wanted them or not. The memory has a will of its own. Freud described how hard it is to discuss these visions when they reach traumatic levels: The patient “is obliged rather to repeat as a current experience what is repressed, instead of, as the physician would prefer to see him do, recollecting it as a fragment of the past” (emphasis in original).
This is correct. When the deer flares up these days, shying back too late, my reflex too slow, I’m not remembering. The moment is repeated (not by me), and the bus I’m riding or the corner I’m standing on dissolves, and I’m back on the road in the dark, and the impact is coming. I can’t do anything with this apparition, can’t make it stop or start, can’t find a meaning in it. When I recall the moment deliberately, the effect is different, a shiver, not a jolt. It doesn’t help; I can’t be cured. My desires are sometimes shameful, but at least they’re human. This occurrence isn’t human at all. Freud gives it a name, “repetition-compulsion,” and tries to grant the nightmares a purpose when he says they are the mind’s attempt to face danger by staging over and over the traumatic moment as if it were an exercise, so that we can better respond when another threat arrives.
It’s a hollow rationale. Look at the man who underwent a shock and wakes up trembling long after, or the woman who picked up the phone one lazy afternoon and heard the news that a loved one was gone, and the ringing in her head breaks the dead of night for years. Try telling them that a terrible thing has happened, yes, and that they must re-experience it until the edge has softened, ponder and interpret it, step back and get some distance—and they’ll answer with a grimace or a moan. They can barely describe it. Nothing in these echoes is revelatory or forward-looking. What purpose can repetition serve? What moral instruction does it impart, what good comes of it?
Why is human nature like this, self-tormenting? Freud the scientist replies, “It just is.” In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, repetition becomes a rule. The best outcome for a trauma victim is never to think of what happened again, but the daemon won’t allow it. When a trauma upsets the placidity of daily life, the sufferer is compelled to repeat the experience in some other mode (a dream, a game), even if it means re-experiencing the pain, until the troubling side falls away. Life goes on. The inscrutable will doesn’t care about his feelings, only its serenity. Quiescence, not happiness, is the goal. In fact, for Freud, the ultimate repetition is death—out of nonexistence we came and to nonexistence we go: “The goal of all life is death.”
But I don’t see any lessening of intensity with each repetition of that early morning in Ohio. I’m no more in control of the image many months later than I was of the event at the time. I think millions of Americans are walking around at this very moment with cursed traces in their heads that strike without notice and have lost none of their bite, remnants of a past they’d much rather forget, concentrated into an instant. It might be a fender-bender, the loss of a job, a breakup, or much worse. Probably it’s a matter best avoided when meeting a new co-worker, chatting in the yard with a neighbor, falling in love by the third date. What dark phantoms lie within, what bits of life that hit hard and linger but give no relief or insight, only shadow the bearer and teach us sternly that we are not entirely ourselves?
