202 The Self-Defeating Fantasy youthful auditor, when he hears the vampire’s first descrip- tion of drinking away someone else’s life, says, “’It sounds as if it was like being in love’. The vampire’s eyes gleamed. ‘That’s correct. It is like love’, he smiled” (pg. 31). [12] But, of course, it is a love without procreation. Immortality, for the angels, for the devils, and for the creatures of modern sci- ence, is a childless state, and to that extent a denial of human potential and of human happiness. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle [13], suggested that “we have adopted […] the hypothesis that all living substance is  bound  to  die  from  internal  causes  […]  because  there  is some comfort in it”, meaning that all our own failures and our own ultimate demise seem less terrible if seen as either comparatively small or as inevitable. He goes on to assert that “The notion of ‘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.” Freud does not seem to recognize that our seeking of fatal causes – heart fail- ure, cancer, gunshot – reflects no different motive. Instead, in the spirit of Victor Frankenstein, Freud expresses admiration at the writings of August Weismann who  introduced  the  division  of  living  substance  into mortal and immortal parts. The mortal part is the body in the narrower sense – the ‘soma’ – which alone is sub- ject to natural death. The germ-cells, on the other hand, are potentially immortal, in so far as they are able, under certain favorable conditions, to develop into a new indi- vidual, or, in other words, to surround themselves with a new soma. [13, pg. 616–617] This is an amazing statement. First, Freud’s utter silence here about earlier divisions of the living substance into body and soul reveals a powerful scholarly blindness which can be motivated, one supposes, only by a desperate need to believe