The Pleasure Principle and the Death Drive: 

A Freudian Reading of The Abominable Bride (part 2) 

 (Sherlock meta by notagarroter)

A continuation of my meta on TAB and The Interpretation of Dreams. 

In my previous meta, I talked about Freud’s theory that every dream is the expression of a wish. If so, what is the unconscious wish hidden in Sherlock’s drug-fueled dream in The Abominable Bride?

Sherlock’s in kind of an unusual situation here, because where most of us dream as an accidental side-effect of sleeping, Sherlock has consciously set out to have this dream to serve a particular purpose. According to Sherlock (when conscious), the purpose of this whole exercise is to figure out whether it’s possible for Moriarty to have survived their encounter on the roof of Barts.

So that’s Sherlock’s conscious wish. But what about his unconscious?

Officially, the question Sherlock is asking in The Abominable Bride is, “How could Moriarty return from the dead?” But underneath that question, I want to suggest a deeper concern of Sherlock’s: “Why did Moriarty kill himself?”

In a way, Sherlock’s world would make more sense if Moriarty did fake his death, just as Sherlock did. We might not know how, but we would certainly understand why. But if Moriarty really and truly did kill himself just to force Sherlock’s hand on that rooftop… the real mystery is, why? What pleasure or satisfaction could Moriarty hope to gain from all his carefully laid plans if he is dead?

As many other meta-writers have eloquently observed, Sherlock has personal reasons to be interested in this question: there have been many indications throughout the show that Sherlock has at times considered suicide.

He might well believe that understanding Moriarty’s motivations could help him better understand his own.

But how could suicide be the fulfillment of an unconscious wish? According to Freud, wishes are supposed to be about pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, right?

Well, this is where I need to complicate that idea a little. Because it turns out, Freud didn’t stand by the ideas in The Interpretation of Dreams all his life. Interpretation of Dreams was written early in his career. Years later, towards the end, Freud posited the existence of something he referred to as The Death Drive. He invented this idea to account for the fact that, over the course of his career, he ran into a lot of human behaviors that did not seem to fit his model of pleasure-seeking/pain-avoiding. Why, Freud asked, do people sometimes do things that cannot bring them any pleasure, and actually cause them more harm than good?

In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud guesses (and believe me, this idea remains plenty controversial) that there might be some other drive competing with the Pleasure Principle, and causing us to seek our own destruction. The reason why this might be and the mechanism for how it might work are pretty flimsy, as even Freud acknowledges. He’s really just putting this forward as a hypothesis for discussion. But whether or not this is a real drive that exists, it may nevertheless be of interest to Sherlock as he contemplates Moriarty’s apparent suicide.

And indeed, the conversation between Sherlock and Dream!Moriarty is haunted throughout by the specter of death.

MORIARTY: That’s all people really are, you know: dust waiting to be distributed. 

This idea actually gets very close to Freud’s theory of the death drive – that people are irresistibly drawn to the state that they are destined to become: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

The cannibalism angle just adds a disturbing element of pleasure to the idea of destruction. It suggests that death itself serves a pleasurable purpose—that it can feed our secret urges as much as other physical indulgences.

Dream!Moriarty goes even further than Freud, suggesting that death and pleasure might not be opposing drives at all, but inextricably linked. Death is pleasure… and maybe pleasure is itself a kind of death.

Which brings us to another player in Sherlock’s dream who has something to tell him (and us) about the relationship between pleasure and death:

Dream!Mycroft gives us a few more clues to the mystery at the heart of Sherlock’s unconscious. On a simple level, we get John’s admonition that Mycroft’s gluttonous behavior is unhealthy and, pleasurable though it may be, could result in his early death. This falls in neatly with Freud’s early theory of life as a balance between pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance, and could be construed as merely a warning to avoid pleasurable excess.

But what’s particularly interesting is the way Mycroft doesn’t balk at the threat of death, but embraces it. Like dream!Moriarty, Mycroft isn’t interested in avoiding death or even ignoring it. He is actively courting it.

In fact, one gets the idea that chasing death (i.e., the death drive) may actually be the greater motivator for Mycroft than whatever dubious pleasure he receives from devouring three plum puddings in a sitting.

Some readers have read elements of this scene as foreshadowing Mycroft’s death in some future episode, but it’s important to remember that this Mycroft has very little to do with the actual character. Instead, he has everything to do with Sherlock’s repressed desires, anxieties, and fixations.

Despite Sherlock’s grand plan to use this dream to solve a real life mystery, ultimately a dream can only lead the dreamer back to himself. As Dream!Moriarty insistently reminds Sherlock, there is no new information to be gleaned from a dream:

In other words, a dream can only give very limited information about someone else – a regurgitation of what the dreamer already knows. The real revelations are necessarily going to be about Sherlock himself.

Thus, the Mycroft figure in the dream is really just a tool to allow Sherlock to investigate his own repressed urges without admitting to them. It’s not really about Mycroft’s weight or his pleasure or his health, but about Sherlock’s repressed desires and what might happen if he gave into them.

And what are those desires? Drugs? Food? Sex? Love? I’d argue: yes, all of the above. Dream!Mycroft is the literalization of Sherlock’s fears about what might become of him if he lost control and allowed himself to indulge in any or all of his various urges. Sherlock fears he could become something grotesque – too big, too much.

Perhaps even to the point of death.

Or is that death not merely an unfortunate side effect of indulgence, but what Sherlock ultimately desires most of all? Sherlock, who takes drugs that “usually” aren’t fatal, and who fantasizes about jumping into an open grave?

Sherlock, who ends his dream by throwing himself, alone, off of a waterfall:

A triumphant moment within the context of the show, but surely a somewhat morbid one as well.

Why does he do it? Yes, he says he “always survives a fall". But he is also subtly invoking the common superstition that if you die in a dream, you won’t wake up. This is no idle risk for Sherlock, as we know that in real life, he is actually overdosing on a drug cocktail. There is a very real threat that he won’t survive this “fall”.

We don’t get a really firm answer to this “final” problem – indeed, I doubt one is possible. But there may be a hint in Sherlock’s certainty at the end of The Abominable Bride that Moriarty really is dead. That suggests that Sherlock’s unconscious has convinced him death did have a compelling appeal for Moriarty, against all logic. And if for Moriarty, why not for Sherlock too?