Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive

In Theory, Clinical Practice and Culture

Victor Blüml, Liana Giorgi, Daru Huppert, Victor Blüml, Liana Giorgi, Daru Huppert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429620492
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive provides a sustained discussion of the death drive from the perspective of different psychoanalytic traditions. Ever since Freud introduced the notion of the death drive, it has been the subject of intense debate in psychoanalysis and beyond.

The death drive is arguably the most unsettling psychoanalytic concept. What this concept points to is more unsettling still. It uniquely illuminates the forces of destruction and dissolution at work in individuals as well as in society. This book first introduces Freud's use of the term, tracing the debates and developments his ideas have led to. The subsequent essays by leading Viennese psychoanalysts demonstrate the power of the death drive to illuminate psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and the study of culture. Since this book originally arose from a conference in Vienna, its final segment is dedicated to the forced exile of the early Viennese psychoanalysts due to the Nazi threat. Due to its wide scope and the many perspectives it offers, this book is a tribute to the disturbing relevance of the death drive today.

Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive is of special interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, social and cultural scientists, as well as anyone intending to understand the sources and vicissitudes of human destructiveness.

Part I
Theory

Chapter 1
The struggle between good and evil: The concept of the death drive from a Kleinian perspective

Hemma Rössler-Schülein

Introduction

This chapter focuses on applications of the death drive theory in the Kleinian psychoanalytic tradition. This body of knowledge was mainly developed in the English-speaking world and by analysts forced to emigrate from Austria and Germany following the outbreak of World War II. Therefore, it might be interesting to begin discussing this concept by briefly referring to the difficulties entailed in the translation of the German term “Trieb” into English. In a speech recorded by the BBC in December 1938, Sigmund Freud referred to the role of instinctual urges. Several other psychoanalysts, beginning in the 1930s with Stevens (1930) and Lampl-De Groot (1933), prefer “drive” instead of “instinct” or use both terms synonymously (Jekels & Bergler, 1940). In his paper “The Drive to Amass Wealth,” Fenichel (1938) cautions against the tendency to closely link the theory of neuroses or those about social institutions to our understanding of biological instincts, despite the fact that psychoanalysis may have taught us to highly value the role of concrete, as in physical, infantile experience. Along similar lines, Hanna Segal felt it was both possible and desirable to formulate the conflict between the life and death instincts in purely psychological terms. She adds in a footnote: “I have always disagreed with the translation of Trieb as ‘instinct.’ I agree with Bettelheim that the best translation is the French ‘pulsion.’ The nearest in English would be ‘drive’” (Segal, 1993, p. 55). Kernberg (2001) made this distinction even clearer: he pointed out that in contrast to the innate and inalterable nature of instincts, drives have an essentially psychic nature; they are continuous, individualized, and are subject to modification through displacement or condensation throughout development.

The preference for the term “death drive” in the Kleinian tradition underscores how life and death drives constitute powerful ever-present psychological processes or forces in the mind. This approach is based on clinical experience and tries to minimize terminological ambiguity by stressing the psychological character of the death drive and by avoiding simplistic biological equivocation.

Starting points from Freud’s theory

In his third theory of drives Freud embarked on a reformulation of his ideas based on explorations of phenomena encountered in clinical work such as repetitive processes in traumatic neuroses, sadism and masochism, the melancholic superego, and the negative therapeutic reaction. In addition, he sought to understand societal phenomena such as war and populism from a psychoanalytic perspective. Possibly, the idea of the death instinct was influenced by the experiences and trauma of World War I (Jones, 1957, pp. 41–43; Laub & Lee, 2003).

Freud tried to understand why people tend to repeat painful or traumatic experiences, since such behaviour struck him as contradictory to the “pleasure principle.” In line with the idea that “the aim of all life is death” (Freud, 1920, p. 38), and seeking to resolve this contradiction, he formulated the idea of the death instinct in his work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920). There, the death instinct was described as a compulsion to reproduce the very experience of chaos and trauma. Freud described this inner dynamic as an instinct that operates silently and unobtrusively and as “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (Freud, 1920, p. 36). The ultimate goal of this instinct is “to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world” (Freud, 1920, p. 62). When the “earlier state of things” is chaotic or traumatic, the urge to restore ends up operating as a force of traumatic repetition.

This text can be regarded as a turning point in Freud’s thinking about the workings of the mind, yet it raised several theoretical questions. Subsequently, Freud tried to situate the dualistic drive concept in relation to the conflict between the instances of the id, the ego, and the superego. He thought the link was the guilt-consciousness characteristic of melancholia that he equated with the domination of the superego by the death instinct: “What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time by the change round into mania” (Freud, 1923, p. 53). Nonetheless, instinctual fusion remained hard to grasp. In the 1924 paper “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud talked about moral masochism as “a classical piece of evidence for the existence of ‘instinctual fusion’: its dangerousness lies in its origin in the death instinct and represents that part of the latter which escaped deflection on to the outer world in the form of an instinct of destruction” (Freud, 1924, p. 170). In later texts, Freud (1930, 1937) spoke of aggression as the “descendant and chief representative” of the death drive. Besides talking about a primary form of destructiveness, which tends to dissolve units and is present right from the beginning of life, he also reflected about the fate of aggression that is either deflected outwards or bound by the superego and about the resulting relations between ego and superego.

It might be assumed that the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof. A more fruitful idea was that a portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self.

(Freud, 1930, p. 118, own italics)

Freud also used the theory of the death instinct to further his understanding of deep-seated resistances against analytic treatment. The negative therapeutic reaction is an indication of a deep-seated unconscious resistance that comes from the superego, or, more precisely, from specific relations between ego and superego. By linking this resistance to the death instinct, Freud takes a step further and elevates this resistance into something much bigger:

One portion of this force has been recognized by us, undoubtedly with justice, as the sense of guilt and need for punishment, and has been localized by us in the ego’s relation to the super-ego. But this is only the portion of it which is, as it were, psychically bound by the super-ego and thus becomes recognizable; other quotas of the same force, bound or free, may be at work in other, unspecified places. If we take into consideration the total picture made up of the phenomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative therapeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many neurotics, we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental events are exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the presence of a power in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction according to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death instinct of living matter.

(Freud, 1937, pp. 242–243, own italics)

Insofar as it is derived from the death instinct, the negative therapeutic reaction is rooted in the economy of psychic life. More specifically, guilt represents the workings of that portion of the death instinct that is psychically bound by the superego. Loewald (1972) explains that the aggressive share of the superego, which is composed of the aggressive forces of the introjected oedipal imagos and the subject’s aggressive impulses, constitutes a structured representative of the death instinct, while other portions of it manifest themselves in ways that seem analytically inaccessible since they have not attained definitive or circumscribed psychic representation.

Melanie Klein’s “evil principle” and subsequent adoption of the notion of the death drive

The use and application of the concept of the death instinct was at the centre of debates between the Vienna and British Societies from early on. Melanie Klein and her followers were particularly interested in the fate of the superego and that of incorporated objects. Isaacs firmly stated that Melanie Klein’s views on the concept of the death drive were not only derived from Freud’s own theories and observations but in large parts were identical with his. “Where they differ they are a necessary development of his work” (King & Steiner, 1991, p. 377). In this regard, it may be helpful to remember how Freud himself dealt with new theoretical findings. When revising his drive theory for the first time he pointed to the significance of clinical observation: “For these ideas are not the foundation of science, upon which everything rests: that foundation is observation alone. They are not the bottom but the top of the whole structure, and they can be replaced and discarded without damaging it” (Freud, 1914, p. 77).

Melanie Klein developed her ideas on the basis of observations made in the course of psychoanalytic work with children. The so-called evil principle first made its appearance in November 1925 in the discussion of the six-year-old obsessional neurotic girl called Erna.

In a careful reconstruction of the case of Erna, Claudia Frank and Heinz Weiss (1996) show how Melanie Klein intuitively arrived at her theoretical formulation of destructive phenomena. In Erna’s drawings, the evil principle is represented by a witch who regularly takes on the characteristics of the good princess or vice versa. Eventually the two opposing figures come to resemble each other. In one specific narrative, at the sound of a thunderbolt the ugly figure repeatedly turns into the beautiful one and the beautiful one into the ugly one. This demonstrates quite vividly the unsuccessful endeavour to integrate the two parts of the little girl’s personality, the splitting arising “out of the necessity to ward off the evil principle” (cited in Frank, 2009, p. 178). Claudia Frank (2011) points out that Melanie Klein’s formulation captures important characteristics: there is something in oneself that is “completely evil” and which feels like an impersonal power (or “principle”) that cannot simply be warded off. There is a struggle between the opposing tendencies aiming at the “dissolution of the context,” in this case the “decomposition into two parts of the personality,” as opposed to the attempts to form one “larger unity, in an effort to keep the two parts together, to connect and to merge somehow” (Frank, 2011, pp. 81–82, own translation).

Klein may not have fully realized the value of her discovery at the time, making no further use of the concept of the evil principle (Frank, 2015, p. 431). However, in her clinical practice she continued to address the manifestations of a harsh and punishing superego, the vicious circle between aggression causing anxiety again enhancing aggression, and the interplay between internal and external factors in early development. In an effort to accommodate her findings within Freud’s theoretical framework, she finally adopted Freud’s concept of the death drive. In 1932 she wrote:

In that early phase of development which I have termed the phase of maximal sadism, I have found that all the pre-genital stages and the genital stage as well are cathected in rapid succession. What then happens is that the libido enters upon a struggle with the destructive impulses and gradually consolidates its positions. Side by side with the polarity of the life-instinct and the death-instinct we may, I think, place their interaction as a fundamental factor in the dynamic processes of the mind. There is an indissoluble bond between the libido and the destructive tendencies which puts the former to a great extent in the power of the latter. But the vicious circle dominated by the death-instinct, in which aggression gives rise to anxiety and anxiety reinforces aggression, can be broken through by the libidinal forces when these have gained in strength. As we know, in the early stages of development the life-instinct has to exert its power to the utmost in order to maintain itself against the death-instinct. But this very necessity stimulates the growth of the sexual life of the individual.

(Klein, 1932, pp. 211–212)

By depicting the experience of the struggle between love and hate as a normal, albeit frightening ambivalence inherent in all relations, it quickly became evident to Melanie Klein that the death instinct is an opponent of libidinal forces, just like the so-called evil principle. The anxieties associated with this struggle are a major topic throughout her work. In 1946, Klein described some problems of the early ego, claiming it lacked cohesiveness. The ego’s tendency towards integration alternates with a tendency towards disintegration. Anxiety arising from the operation of the death instinct within the organism is felt as fear of annihilation (death) and takes the form of fear of persecution. The fear of the destructive impulse attaches itself to an object and is experienced as fear of an uncontrollable overpowering object. Other important sources of primary anxiety are the trauma of birth (separation anxiety) and the frustration of bodily needs. These experiences too are felt to be caused by bad objects. Furthermore, even if these objects are thought to be external, they become internal persecutors through introjection, thus reinforcing the fear of the destructive impulse within. The vital need to deal with anxiety forces the early ego to develop primary mechanisms and defences. The destructive impulse is partly projected outwards (deflection of the death instinct) and attaches itself at once to the primary external object, the mother’s breast. In line with Freud, Klein argued that the remaining portion of the destructive impulse is bound by the libido within the organism. However, neither of these processes entirely fulfils their purpose, and therefore the anxiety of being destroyed from within remains active. Under the pressure of this threat the ego tends to fall to bits due to its lack of cohesiveness. This falling to bits underlies states of disintegration in schizophrenics.

Comparing Freud’s and Klein’s use of the death drive concept

According to Freud, primary destructiveness involves the fusion of life and death instincts. In turn, aggressiveness involves the turning of the fused instincts outwards. Klein, too, thinks that the death instinct is projected outwards into external objects, but she is of the opinion that this additionally involves splitting: both good from bad internal objects, and good from bad parts of the self. According to Klein, insofar as the struggle between the two instincts is operative from the very beginning of life, this also explains why there is an ego from birth onwards (Klein, 1958, p. 246). The mastery of anxiety is one of the ego’s main functions. The primitive ego experiences this anxiety as a threat of annihilation from within. In defence, it projects it outwards onto and into objects. Freud talks of this process in more abstract terms: it is the organism (rather than the ego) that deflects (rather than projects) the death instinct outwards into objects.

Unlike Freud, Klein thinks that the unconscious contains a representation of death which coincides with the representation of bad and persecutory objects (Blass, 2014). The primitive sup...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION The death drive: a brief genealogy of a controversial concept
• PART I THEORY
• PART II CLINICAL ASPECTS
• PART III CULTURE
• PART IV HISTORY
• INDEX