The text below is a letter/email I sent a couple of months ago, in response to a really wonderful article by Dr Daniel Greenberg that was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis back in 1990: “Instinct and Primary Narcissism in Freud’s Later Theory: An Interpretation and Reformulation of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’" (unfortunately behind a paywall.) I never received a response from Dr Greenberg. I guess I really did write to him 25 years too late. But the text below includes a lot of my latest thinking of the problem of primary narcissism, alongside a Hegelian/Rosean conclusion on the question of love and how it relates to metapsychology in Freud. I will be putting up some other longer texts on primary narcissism in the near future focussing on how it works in Adorno.
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Dear Dr Greenberg,
I do not know whether to begin with a thank you or an apology. The two are conjoined. I would like to apologise for writing to you out of the blue (you do not know me, nor I you, and thank you very much for getting in touch with me so I could email you), but I would also like to express my gratitude to you for an article that you published nearly 25 years ago now on the question of primary narcissism in Freud in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. I’m a PhD student from London (living currently in Berlin) working on Adorno and memory and found myself in the depths of the debates over primary narcissism in the 1910s and 1920s. And I just wanted to say something to you of my appreciation for your article which has helped me a lot in my thinking on this question – it is a beautifully clear and careful thing, and kinder to this debate than almost any other literature I know (if there is any question of metapsychology that calls for kindness it is this!) I agree absolutely with your methodological gambit of attempting to uncover the latent content of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I guess it’s not the done thing to say thanks for articles – of the hundreds that I read each year yours is the first for which I have felt prompted to write an email like this. So perhaps my appreciation also comes also out of the apology with which I began, from the untimeliness of this thanks (a quarter of a century has passed and the three-year old I was when you wrote the piece was perhaps less capable of reading it than I am now.) So I hope this little message of gratitude finds you well.
I also have something of an ulterior motive in writing to you, which is to raise a couple of questions about the argument you make in the article. But these are perhaps by the by. I’ll write them down here in case you want to respond to them, but I have no expectation of response or dialogue. To me the important part of this email is to say thank you. And I imagine also that your article may well find itself, with the passing of time, alien to your spirit (I personally am capable of retaining the vivacity of my own arguments for a number of weeks, never mind decades.) But perhaps also you would be interested in entering into dialogue on these questions, which still remain – as far as I understand it – broadly ignored and underdeveloped by both the psychoanalytic and philosophical community. I expect you will find yourself too distant or busy to respond, and please don’t worry if this is the case. Perhaps you will just take what I write here as a commentary. I should apologise also that these notes are quite lengthy. Somehow this letter got a little out of control – please excuse its excess!
My main question is about an argument that you make in the article in the invocation of Piaget in the piece. You make an argument about the infant’s innate capacity to differentiate itself from external object, which makes the cognition of objects possible, but which precedes the disruption of feelings of omnipotence by reality. It struck me that the position you end up with is not distant from (or is perhaps identical to) the Kantian problematic of transcendental subjectivity. The question that you ask against Freud is something like Kant’s "how are a priori synthetic judgments possible.” The question arises because you argue that were the systematic unity of the child and world absolute it would have no capacity even to register its disruption by reality. Are we not strangely close to an old question of theodicy here – a question of how justified those feelings of omnipotence are? A question of their omnipotent sovereignty over psychic life in the context of their antagonism with reality – and at the same time a question of whether that disruption is endogenous or otherwise? Perhaps I should keep these theological questions to one side for a moment. What concerned me was that this type of argument – the invocation of an innate capacity, a determination of something like a transcendental subjectivity that can determine categorially the limits and conditions of experience at some distance from the empirical subject’s feelings of omnipotence – is that it is broadly amenable to Freud’s earlier theory of instincts that you claim is transcended in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In fact Freud writes some difficult lines on this question at the end of the first section of his essay on ‘The Unconscious’: “The psycho-analytic assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us, on the one hand, as a further expansion of the primitive animism which caused us to see copies of our own consciousness all around us, and, on the other hand, as an extension of the corrections undertaken by Kant of our views on external perception. Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psycho-analysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object.”
Where metapsychology becomes the arena for outlining the capacities of experience, the categories of psychoanalysis become the boundary stones for the psyche itself. It’s always troubled me that in our English-speaking world Freud’s use of the term “Grenzbegriff” has been stripped of its philosophical heritage. Jones translated it – in the famous description of the instinct – as a “frontier-concept” between psyche and soma. But Kantians have always known this word in English as a “limit-concept”. And the quotation above explains something of why the Kantian heritage might be important to Freud in the development of instinctual life.
But here is also where I think I can begin a criticism proper of your article. I loved very much that you opened with this quotation from Hegel – it is absolutely appropriate to what is at stake in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but I am worried that somehow you end up not following Hegel at all, and in fact the appearance of this transcendental subject with its innate pre-conscious capacity for differentiation marks the beginning of the difficulty.
The word that always seemed to me to be most important in the title of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the “Beyond.” Maybe that is an entirely obvious thing to say, but perhaps more important than it looks. Certainly it is the word that Freud seems to have most trouble with too – never quite convinced that he really has got beyond the pleasure principle. But this word, this jenseits, as I read Freud’s essay, has a particular meaning: the nirvana principle moves beyond the pleasure principle in one specific respect: that of regression. As Freud says, the state of inorganic unity precedes life, it precedes even the apparent unity of ego and world in primary narcissism. Both the life instinct and the death instinct have a regressive aspect (or as Freud calls it, a “conservative nature”) – the pleasure principle always has an aspect of an attempt to return to the situation of primary narcissism, while the nirvana principle always has an aspect of an attempt to return to a situation of the inorganic unity of matter (beyond the apparent unity of primary narcissism.) Maybe this is a little tricky to see in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but the matter is certainly clarified in this respect in ‘On the Economic Problem of Masochism’ a couple of years later. I labour this point because I suspect from your article this is something we would disagree on. But also I am aware that this really is a contentious issue – or at least was a contentious issue for metapsychology back in the 1920s. In your article you seem keen to assert that rather than moving beyond the pleasure principle, Eros and Thanatos exist concurrently with the same regressive pull to the same moment of the origin of life. As you write, “Both of these instincts arise as attempts to restore the same earlier state of things, ‘the unity of the inorganic’, which was split apart when life began.” That is, Eros and Thanatos both come into the world as a result of an original fracturing of a unity. I am less convinced that this is Freud’s argument, but the reason why requires a little more explanation.
In your essay the justification for claiming that both the pleasure principle and the nirvana principle attempt to restore the unity of the inorganic is that complete regression through either is equally fatal for the ego. The regression to primary narcissism and the regression to the unity of the inorganic would be equally (or identically) disintegrative and destructive. Both are death. It is certainly true that both regressions result in the disintegration of the ego, but I would like to suggest that there really are two versions of death at stake for Freud, and that the implication that they are identical may merely be a result – to paraphrase Freud – of the analysis being too coarse to distinguish between them.
I think you are correct to assert that in the earlier metapsychology one can find an “innate instinctual conflict tied to the opposition between self-preservation and the preservation of the species.” And certainly this opposition finds itself challenged by the impossibility of distinguishing ego and libido instincts in primary narcissism. And from your analysis, you would probably agree that what is at stake in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the reassertion of something like this conflict, but you do not go so far as to say that this is strictly a reassertion of the conflict between the individual and the species. I am not convinced that species is quite the right word here, but I think what Freud is getting at is something like the recovery of this conflict, and this is where the question of death (or two – or perhaps even three – types of death) becomes significant. It may sound like a completely banal point, but the species has a means of dealing with the death of an individual, while the individual himself cannot deal in any way with his own death. The third term here, and indeed the crucial one, is civilisation [Kultur]. The question of how civilisation not only is able to absorb the death of the individual, but is in fact produced out of the death of the individual provides a third – and probably the most difficult – aspect of Freud’s metapsychological theorisation of death to which I will return. What has seemed significant to me in reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that this death instinct belongs only to the individual, and not to the species. Freud, at least tentatively discusses this with regard to death being driven by “internal reasons”, and ultimately the separation of life and death instincts equivalent to the separation of (mortal) soma which stands for the individual and (“quasi-immortal”) germ-plasm which stands for the species. This is to say that in the differentiation between life and death instincts we can once again derive a conflict between the species and the individual. Even where there is a problem with the biologism implied, this is a significant return.
Your essay deals only really with the case of the individual. For the individual you say that it “cannot know what it has not experienced” and therefore cannot truly have a concept of death. Indeed, you argue in a footnote that the closest that the psyche can come to a knowledge of death is its primary experience of non-separation, of boundary-less omnipotence. I am concerned about what it means to limit the question of death in psychoanalysis to the ego. Indeed, I am convinced that this is responsible for the answer that you come to, in the affirmation of something like a transcendental critique of primary narcissism. What I have been coming to in this analysis is to say that I am worried that in the conclusions of your article you actually turn against Hegel when he says “the life of mind is not one that shuns death, and keeps clear of destruction; it endures its death and in death maintains its being.” instead reverting to a sort of Kantianism. Indeed, I worry that within your argument there remains a certain turning away from death, a “being done with it and passing it off.” Your way of doing this is to suggest that the discussion of biologism in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a displacement of the lack of innate conflict of instincts in primary narcissism – a displacement out of psychic life and on to life as such; and then to suggest that the transformation of primary narcissism into death is a “defensive negation” it is “a substitution of the lifeless inorganic for primary narcissism” in the psychic life of the individual. Ultimately “death” when read like this is fully psychologised, it is removed from actuality and transformed into a regulative idea (or perhaps more properly a “limit-concept”) of consciousness. Death appears only in reflection, while literal death disappears. I hope you’ll excuse me if I quote a whole paragraph of your essay to show this:
“The transformaton of primary narcissism into death is a defensive negation which allows the ego to take account of primary narcissism while denying that it has had this experience. The fear of death thus blocks the path of narcissistic regression and thrusts the individual into the project of instinctual interaction with objects. The ego represents primary narcissism not as a piece of its own history, but rather as something alien, other and dangerous, as a threat to the continued existence of the individual. Similarly, the wish to die, at the deepest level, must signify a wish for narcissistic regression, not literal death, or which the unconscious has no knowledge.”
The consequence of this argument is that death itself becomes absorbed into the psyche of the ego, but from this position death is abstracted into thought, becoming merely a concept. It is removed from actuality, and indeed as I suggest, this move is a turning away from the reality of death. But, if you will excuse my amateur psycho-analysis, I think that this response is tainted too with a mature egoism. And it is significant that you deal only with the question of death from the position of the individual ego and not with regard to civilisation or the species, which might provide a quite different opportunity for not shunning death, for enduring it, for looking the negative in the face and dwelling with it.
Against this absorption of death – as a concept – into the psyche of the ego, I would like to try to affirm also a genuine difference between inorganic unity and primary narcissism. Part of the problem with this discussion is that the terms remain very confused (and indeed confusing), and it is obvious that there are unresolved tensions in the writing from the 1910s. But fundamentally there remains a difference between a unity of the inorganic, free of excitation, and the situation of primary narcissism in which there is excitation but it leads only to the cathexis of the total life-world of the infant. That is, in primary narcissism, as Ferenczi says in his essay, psychic life has begun already. I think, though, that Ferenczi is too fast in his suggestion that this psychic life is an “unconscious one.” I can’t see that it makes any sense here to talk about a proper differentiation between a conscious and unconscious, although I can understand why Ferenczi says this. Similarly, when Freud describes primary narcissism in the narcissism essay he talks about it as a libidinal cathexis. You are correct to show the problem with the suggestion that this is libidinal in your article. Part of the problem though, is that in both cases there is something like an energetics at work – an ineradicable energetics of life itself that must always inflect or invoke also a psychic life. But in the discussion of primary narcissism, even the metaphorics of energy seem to break down, for what is unusually proposed seems to be an energetics without economy. Primary narcissism marks all of psychic life with its indelible energetics of surplus. So I can see where many of the terminological problems come from, but I can also see from this that there really is a difference between primary narcissism and death as the destruction of organic life into inorganic nature. Hence I can understand why Freud might posit a death beyond primary narcissism: firstly, regression to primary narcisism despite being the death of the ego, the death of the individual, is not the death of psychic life as such; and secondly, the notion of the unity of the inorganic is the eradication of even that strange energetics, excitation, and psychic life of primary narcissism. Nonetheless I still find myself stuck with some severe terminological problem for primary narcissism and the type of psychic processes involved – none of the normal psychoanalytic jargon seems to do this job well.
I should say here in passing that I am left with a troublesome theoretical problem here. The reason that both Ferenczi and Freud go to such pains to claim that psychic life of some sort must begin before the differentiation of subject and object is that they want to claim that this situation and the feelings of omnipotence experienced are lodged as in memory in the psyche, and it is out of this mnemonic structure that they continue to exert a regressive force. The trouble comes when considering the case for the unity of inorganic nature – neither would make a claim that psychic life begins there, and yet its very unity, a truly unknown and unknowable unity, also seems to exert a regressive force. This would seem to imply a certain dangerous panlogism! Perhaps this is the radical dialectical inversion of the question of a theodicy of primary narcissism? It certainly echoes the move from the problem of evil to the elucidation in darkness visible of a fallen world.
In dealing with death only from the standpoint of the individual ego you are able to reduce the question of death to the destruction of the ego: death as the destruction of life (the reversion to inorganic matter) becomes mere psychic figuration, a mark of self-alienation within the unified life of the subject which is always already completely a psychic life. At this point insofar as the individual must by definition not know his own death, you seem to demand that psychoanalysis cannot know his death either. I am not so convinced of this.
Hovering in the background of this discussion is Ferenczi’s Thalassa. There Ferenczi also seems rather unconvinced that Freud has moved beyond the pleasure principle in his consideration of the death instinct. His argument is somewhat different to yours. The most significant difference between Ferenczi’s position and Freud’s is that in Thalassa he argues that the death instinct is not limited to the individual but is also active in the generality of life itself, or the species. Once again (and not in a way dissimilar from his destruction of the dualism in early Freud in his ‘Stages’ essay) Ferenczi attempts to destroy the dualism that Freud reasserts in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Although Ferenczi’s argument is broad and subtle it is possible to draw from it a number of simple arguments: There is a life of a species that is drawn to death, and this life of the species is identical to the history of civilisation (this is justified with Lamarckian evolutionary theory); civilisation is to be treated in evolutionary terms and can therefore become the object of an psychoanalytic natural science; ultimately the species and the individual are synthesised and reconciled under “catastrophe” and the natural-history of catastrophes.
But the consequences of this synthetic theory are also broadly idealist. The history of the species actually starts to look increasingly like the life of the individual. Indeed, in Thalassa the great movement of evolution is the exit of life from the ocean, dessication, which Ferenczi figures as an analogue for birth. And although this movement out of the ocean is able to be differentiated in expression between the species (for which it is real), the civilisation (for which it is symbolic) and the and the individual (for which it is fantastic), they are ultimately reconciled in the perpetually and perenially catastrophic unifications of nature, which are nothing but the perpetual repetition of the catastrophe of birth and the apparent splitting of subject and object. The major fault of Ferenczi’s work is his willingness to allow the apparent parallelism between the individual and the species to actually subordinate and idealise the natural-history of humanity to a model of the life of the ego. Hence the history of the species revolves around a catastrophe equivalent to birth in emergence from the sea. And the sea, for all of its enormity and boundlessness becomes strangely human. Meanwhile, the nihilism of Ferenczi’s book (“in reality it seems as though life had always to end catastrophically, even as it began, in birth, with a catastrophe”) is merely the other side of the idealistic principle in which he posits “bioanalysis” as the new scientific field of psychoanalysis, in which the total object of analysis is a naturalised synthesis of life and death. As Ferenczi says contra Freud, “we should have to drop once and for all the question of the beginning and end of life, and conceive the whole inorganic and organic world as a perpetual oscillating between the will to live and he will to die in which an absolute hegemony on the part either of life or of death is never attained.” Here the death instinct does not move beyond the life instincts because they are actually both elements of a synthetic and universal bios that is the object of an idealist natural science. Nihilism and vitalism become identical, and psychoanalysis becomes the natural science of their universal elucidation. But from Ferenczi’s description it seems that all of this is still powered – or at least coloured – by the human subject.
If Ferenczi rebuts Freud’s claim that the death instinct moves beyond life it is because his science takes as a presupposition their catastrophic synthesis, and shines its light merely on their parallelisms and not on their antagonisms. But there are to my mind many problems with Ferenczi’s position: firstly he shuns death. Or rather he will make the claim that even inorganic nature is not properly dead. “There are still ‘germs of life’ in so called ‘dead matter’” he says. And in a footnote he argues that inorganic matter has an ‘irritability’ like living matter. This sounds to me like unsustainable monistic vitalism (although it does offer one solution to my problem of how the death instinct might be based in memory.) But worse than that, history – the history of the individual and the species – is transformed into an enormous Liebestod. Ferenczi certainly had tendencies in this direction for a long time. In response to Freud’s narcissism essay he wrote a letter in which he said, “You speak of two kinds of “end of the world” (that of dementia and that of being in love).’ The world actually only gets lost in dementia, while being in love has to do with the end of the ego, which can nevertheless bring with it no lesser cataclysms and can be just as revolutionary psychically as the regression to narcissism is in dementia.” And this thought only comes to a later full expression in Thalassa.
If Ferenczi was always a theorist of a somewhat nihilistic reconciliation, it is here that his views and Freud’s also start to divide. Freud, against Ferenczi, will always focus on the antagonism. And furthermore, Freud in general refuses the Lamarckian identification of the life of the species with the course of civilisation. But the question of civilisation is certainly minimised, perhaps even demeaned, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle compared to Freud’s other works. Like you I find this really is troublesome. Beyond the Pleasure Principle really does display some confusion common to much metapsychology of the period in not always caring about the divisions of species (and zoogenesis or perigenesis), ego (and ontogenesis), and civilisation (and phylogenesis), and how these relate to death. But the question of a third type of death – the relationship of death to civilisation as opposed to the death of life or the death of the ego – becomes important in Freud, and I would argue leaves a certain mark on Beyond the Pleasure Principle. To my mind this mark is something of Freud’s clearest thinking on these questions.
In the early 1910s the question of civilisation and its relation to individual life starts to be developed in Totem and Taboo and similar arguments exist Ferenczi’s essay on ‘Stages’. In Totem and Taboo Freud develops a speculative parallelism of ontogenesis and phylogenesis: primary narcissism and its hallucinatory continuation in early childhood parallel an archaic animism in which the individual and world are organised by a singular unified life-force. Both primary narcissism and animism are frustrated, but how they are frustrated is interesting. While primary narcissism is frustrated by the unpleasures of reality, animism is frustrated by the incursion of death into the world. And quite rightly, what business would death have in appearing in a world animated by a singular and universal life force? But this is exactly what Freud says in Totem and Taboo:
“Man’s first theoretical achievement – the creation of spirits – seems to have arisen from the same source as the first moral restrictions to which he was subjects – our observances of taboo. The fact that they had the same origin need not imply, however, that they arose simultaneously. If the survivors’ position in relation to the dead was really what caused the first primitive man to reflect, and compelled him to hand over some of his omnipotence to the spirits and to sacrifice some of his freedom of action, then these cultural products would constitute a first acknowledgment of Ananke [Necessity], which opposes human narcissism. Primitive man would thus be submitting to the supremacy of death with the same gesture with which he seemed to be denying it.”
The unity of animism is fractured and in the power of spirits – fundamentally the power of myth – the universality of the life force, the universal proximity of the all, is given up to separate forces and powers which are distant, alien, inscrutable. That is, out of the experience of the death of the Other, humans first create culture. This is not just the splitting of the subject and object, but also the conditions and actuality of the production of their mediation in history in the form of culture! That is, what is at stake in the story of the splitting of subject is always more than something like a Kantian epistemology, and is already closer to Hegelian phenomenology. But it is also conditioned by an experience of death – and an experience of death in particular. This is not the ego not knowing his own death, but instead a death that the ego knows as if it could be his own. I am quite convinced that when Freud thought about this passage when he was drafting Beyond the Pleasure Principle. A few lines of Chapter 6 echoes it closely.
“If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime Ananke [Necessity] than to a chance which might perhaps have been escaped. It may be, however, that this belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those illusions which we have created ‘um die Schwere des Daseins zu ertragen’ [in order to endure the burden of existence]. It is certainly not a primaeval belief. The notion of a ‘natural death’ is quite foreign to primitive races; they attribute every death that occurs among them to the influence of an enemy or of an evil spirit.”
In both the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the Ferenczi of Thalassa, there is often a confusion of civilisation and species. Perhaps this can be most clearly seen in Thalassa in which Ferenczi so happily skips between an evolutionary history of humans, from fish leaving the ocean and a symbolic mythic history in which the ocean plays its part. From what I understand of these texts, the reason why the two are so easily taken together by Freud and Ferenczi is that they represent aspects of existence that are able to deal with death in a way that the ego cannot. To the species, which for Freud is immortal, the death of the individual is strictly irrelevant and other – two irreconcilable cosmic forces – as long as the individual procreates. But the relationship of death to civilisation is different, and it preserves itself not through finding itself completely other to the death of the individual, but instead through absorbing it.
I think that you’re absolutely right to be sceptical about the biologism Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but I am also uneasy about your concluding position, in which nature is radically excluded from psychoanalytic questions – both in terms of zoogenesis and in terms of a radical exclusion of nature as death qua the unity of the inorganic. If Ferenczi runs the risk of generalising the natural-history of humanity as pure nature, then your position on the contrary runs the risk of absolutely eliminating nature from these questions, of making them aspects of the pure psychology. In this move the reality of the death of life (and not just the death of the ego) is shunned. Freud, though, seems to refuse both of these positions, and this is one of the reasons I care about Beyond the Pleasure Principle. When Freud is thinking badly he equates civilisation with the species – he presupposes its immortality, and finds it to be absolutely ahistorical. But when he is thinking well the question of the ego’s relation to a particular (rather than a universal) death arises, which includes within it a dialectic of nature and history. How civilisation absorbs or naturalises death is the very matter of history.
For Freud the death of the ones who are dearest to us results immediately in the production of Law – of the ego-alien civilisation, myth. Survival means producing a civilisation capable of absorbing death and then for the individual to adopt it as his own (i.e. sublimation.) For Freud this is a position of resignation: the law is thus created and to continue to live I must adopt it. But what if the solution here is something radically different from Freud’s pessimism. Is there not a truly Hegelian answer to this proposition? Is there not a possible life of the mind that does not shun death, which endures it, and which looks the negative in the face and dwells with it? This to me, precisely against Freud’s pessimism, is the work of love: it is the work of living beneath the law but recognising one’s non-identity to it; understanding law as myth, understanding that although only civilisation can absorb the death of those dearest, that this civilisation cannot adopt the tenderness towards them that one felt. Love is alienation from one’s own sublimation, and love might be perpetually melancholy. Love is the immortal labour of reckoning with the mortality of the other; not the mortality of a generic other, and not the abstract death that limits the ego, but the mortality of those held dear. Love is the negativity that resides in the law that claims to have already been converted into pure being. Love is the work of knowing those limits and, in the experience of particularity, transcending them. Perhaps I stand on the side of civilisation against the individual when I say this, but I say it absolutely for the sake of the individual.
This letter has become rather longer than I had intended. I am sorry to have burdened you with it – you may well have had all these thoughts many years ago, but maybe some of these ideas will be useful. As a concluding remark I should say something brief: despite the disagreements I have with you conclusions about the problem of primary narcissism, I agree absolutely with your methodological gambit of applying principles of psychoanalysis to Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In uncovering the latent content of the work you certainly reap theoretical rewards. But what I have suggested above I offer only as a little corrective, or perhaps a second view, overlaid and showing waves of interference. Is there not in Beyond the Pleasure Principle a certain pronounced manifest content that your analysis has happily passed over: a certain repetitive motion, a circumlocution? If what I have said in my remarks might seem dark and melancholic, perhaps you can take them to be additions to the vividness and clarity of your reading of the essay. Drawn together, if not fitting together, they might give some new definition to these aging questions.
Yours in distant friendship,
Jacob Bard-Rosenberg