1) "The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night.", writes Nietzsche.

2) In his text on "Mourning and Melancholia" (1916) Freud typifies sleep as a state wherein the object cathexes of the waking state are withdrawn.:"The sleeplessness in melancholia testifies to the rigidity of the condition, the impossibility of effecting the general drawing-in of cathexes necessary for sleep"

3) The concept of the "ego ideal" is introduced in Freud's text "An Introduction To Narcissism" (1914). In this article, he writes:

The advent of the "ego ideal" is thus dependent on the experience by the ego of the demands made by other people. Its contents are interpretations of the demands that parents and other significant persons (parents, peers,...) from the environment of the subject make on the subject.

To connect the apparently comforting 'thought of suicide' which Nietzsche talks about with the 'drawing in of cathexes' which Freud talks about is the object of this entry.

People need to be loved. This is a fact. But why is this so?

When the love they crave is felt to be absent, or under threat, people become anxious.

Jekels and Bergler (1933) write:

"Freud, in 'The Problem of Anxiety', describes anxiety as the reaction to a loss, to a separation. According to Freud, the anxiety of infants, and young children no less, has as its sole condition the missing or loss of the object."

The infant abandons the exclusive investment of libido onto the self, because it is forced to recognize that the self is, unlike previously thought, dependent on other people. Consequently, the infant is unable to experience the self as 'whole' anymore, a part of the egohas split off to form the 'ego ideal'. Jekels and Bergler:

"The child's feeling of omnipotence is undermined by the demands of external reality, such as hunger, weaning, toilet training. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to restore its feeling of omnipotence, the child is faced with the alternative of relinquishing it or of maintaining it at the price of a compromise. Such a compromise is described by Freud : "We may say that the one . . . has set up an ideal in himself ... To this ideal ego is now directed the self-love which the real ego enjoyed in childhood. The narcissism seems to be now displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, deems itself the possessor of all perfections."

The self love that once was an automatic evidence, now can only be achieved through the condition that one is trying to live up to the ideal. The psyche of the child has established an "inner critic", who demands proof that one lives up to the ideal. One of the ways to "prove" this is the validation of others, of witnesses, i.e. the aforementioned significant objects (parents, peers, ...). The withholding of approval and validation from these important others, is painful and will make self love impossible.

The conformity to the ideal is therefore essentially related to object cathexes.

What happens during phantasies about suicide? In this phantasy the object cathexes which provide the painful reminder of inadequacy are annulled, since the ego to which the judgements of these objects pertain is itself annulled. Consequently, the subject can find rest and become ready for sleep.

Other methods for bringing about the cessation of self criticism so that one can get to sleep: reading novels (taking one's mind off oneself, onto others), erotic gratification (temporary annulment of existential incompleteness, validation, or a phantasy of these things), alcohol (which numbs everything including the self critical faculty), certain alimentary rituals (unconsciously associated with reunification with mother/nurturer) ...