Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive

In Theory, the Clinic, and Art

Rossella Valdrè

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138353572
• eBook ISBN: 9780429756245
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Evolutionary Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive is a highly accessible book that investigates the relevance, complexity and originality of a hugely controversial Freudian concept which, the author argues, continues to exert enormous influence on modernity and plays an often-imperceptible role in the violence and so-called "sad passions" of contemporary society.

With examples from cinema, literature and the consulting room, the book's four chapters – theory, the clinic, art and contemporaneity – investigate every angle, usually little explored, of the death drive: its "positive" functions, such as its contribution to subjectification; its ambiguous relationship with sublimation; the clues it provides about transgenerational matters; and its effects on the feminine. This is not a book about aggression, a type of extroflection of the death drive made visible, studied and striking; rather, it is about the derivatives of the pulsion that changes in the clinic, in life, in society, in artistic forms. With bold and innovative concepts and by making connections to film and books, Rossella Valdrè unequivocally argues that the contemporary clinic is a clinic of the death drive.

Psychoanalytic Reflections on The Freudian Death Drive seeks to relaunch the debate on a controversial and neglected concept and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Today's renewed interest in the Freudian death drive attests to its extraordinary ability to explain both "new" pathologies and socio-economic phenomena.

1
IN THEORY

Freud and after Freud, the destinies of a controversial concept

Death drives and their destinies: to relaunch a vexing topic¹

L’è il dì di mort. Alegher!

(It is the day of the dead. Be happy!)

(D. Tessa, 1917)²

Despite all the controversy, are we witnessing a renewed interest in the death drive, perhaps in metapsychology in general as well? From its first appearance in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the concept of the death drive (Todestrieb in Freud’s original German), in the precise Freudian meaning of the Nirvana principle (ibid., p. 241), has always evoked perplexity and divisions in the psychoanalytic community, although the term has somehow become common usage and part of the psychoanalytical lexicon. This reluctance is certainly not surprising: “how to admit that death is actively at work in the living being” (Le Guen, 1989, p. 536, translated for this edition), that the organism decides its own death from within, as we have also seen in Ameisen’s studies, and wants to “die only in their own way” (Freud, 1920, p. 225)? It is as if life, in a perspective that is daring and overturned with respect to current (reassuring) thinking, were an exception, an in spite of occurrence, an accidental happening, a result that is never guaranteed or to be taken for granted, a difficult mix of libidinal and destructive drives, Eros and Thanatos in a potentially always precarious and fragile oscillation, susceptible to falls and regressions, succumbing to the seduction of a defusion or, according to more current terminology (which we will encounter often in this book) of disinvestment, of unbinding (Green, 1983), of dé-liaison.³ For Freud, the living organism tends towards death not out of fury or desire, but as a sort of silent natural fate of drives, due not so much (or only secondarily) to direct attachment to self or to aggressiveness, but because staying alive, l’être vivant, is a kind of random accident or a misuse, as nature’s programme has us born to die after having given us a mixed set of drives, libidinal and destructive, upon whose success and delicate balance depends our staying alive, both physically and psychologically, or our death. Such a concept, understandably, could not fail to rouse opposition, for now of a theoretical nature (to which we will return). And so we ask many questions, including these:

• Was a concept really necessary? Was not the sexual instinct enough?

• Freud sees the death drive as tightly tied to the biological, so how can we explain the jump to metapsychology?

• If life depends on the fusion of instincts it follows that a certain degree of death drive is needed as well for balancing, and this is a common thread or fil rouge of this book; then why use the word “death” for such a tendency (Penot, 2002, 2006) if it is also indispensable to psychic life?

Thus, far from constituting an outmoded or sterilely speculative concept, I believe that the death drive, both in its Nirvana form and as disinvestment, according to the original and more Freudian formulation, both in its most destructive and active form against self or object (a form more easily understood and observable), helps us today to understand contemporaneity without losing sight of metapyschology’s compass (Di Chiara, 2009). It also helps us to understand history, as we have seen from Resta’s studies (2016). Many, if not all, symptomatic expressions of the contemporary clinic that has become a negative clinic of disinvestment and confirmation of a fragile self, as we shall see, extending to social phenomena such as drug addiction (that has always existed but nowadays permeates every social class), visible phenomena such as the exhausting pursuit of pleasure and consumption, avoiding the weight of grief and responsibility at any cost – in this context it all can be a stimulating and unrivalled theoretical contribution. Careful rereading and updating that takes the Freudian framework into account leads us to ask ourselves, according to refined (but not unnecessary) reflections from various French-speaking authors as detailed in the endnote, if it is still a unique unitary concept, or if from the so-called death drive we can glimpse not one but several destinies as well, depending on the specific internal and external balance that occurs in the subject or in the social group in an equilibrium that cannot only be intended as purely subjective.

Yet another theoretical question: are we to deal with the death drive as a thrust that is only negative, deadly, anti-vital or, as viewed in the contributions that are the subject of my reflections and in my opinion, too, is it possible to recognise it as an element that is also positive, useful for a psychic life that is uncompromisingly not monotonous? So we can attempt a partial reassessment of one of the possible destinies of Todestrieb: that is to say, the need for an amount of unbinding that is indispensable to subjectivation, and therefore the basis of personal identity (Le Guen, 1989; Scarfone, 2004).

An exquisitely modern yet timeless concept, if viewed in this light, both for the theory as well as the psychoanalytic clinic and broadened into a wider reflection on the social sphere and culture poses the question of whether Culture, the Freudian Kultur of Civilization and its Discontents, is sufficient to bind aggressive drives that would otherwise be free and unbound, destined to discharge into pure destructiveness. Although the latest Freudian considerations, embittered by confirmation of the inevitability of war, do not appear to come out in favour, it is, however, legitimate and stimulating to investigate the inevitability of destruction, even from a theoretical point of view:

Psychological—or, more strictly speaking, psycho-analytic—investigation shows instead that the deepest essence of human nature consists of instinctual impulses which are of an elementary nature, which are similar in all men and which aim at the satisfaction of certain primal needs. These impulses in themselves are neither good nor bad. We classify them and their expressions in that way, according to their relation to the needs and demands of the human community. It must be granted that all the impulses which society condemns as evil—let us take as representative the selfish and the cruel ones—are of this primitive kind.

(Freud, 1915, p. 280)

The questions and the theoretical knots may be many, but they will not lead us further away from questions posed above. Indeed, our path winds through them_ the death instinct can be the object of not one but more destinies; it also contributes to the vital construction of the individual. It is within this acceptation, to return to the book’s opening, that I find myself among those who believe in the death drive, as a metaphor and a conjecture that has glimpsed a deep and tragic human truth, but believing its obliged biological derivation to be outdated or not clinically necessary, despite confirmation by recent research that must not, however, be given the value of a direct overlap. If, as it seems, we are facing a renewed interest, although beneath the surface, in a concept that is so controversial, crude, profoundly secular, that also calls into question the defences against the anguish of death that are present in all of us (Bonasia, 1988), I suggest that one of the reasons is the fact that the contemporary clinic as well as historical and social events have renewed the interest of Freudian speculation. Wars continue, the problem of destructiveness is far from being resolved and indeed today sees a particularly extensive expressive form, virulent and unpredictable, in the new radicalism that tears entire continents apart and, so, too, the individual cannot stop self-harming or fading away when faced with life.

Let us now briefly review the biographical, historical and cultural context in which Beyond the Pleasure Principle was born, the structure of the work, the fate of the concept after Freud until now, focusing in particular on some recent contributions that I find especially stimulating for our discussion and, in this part, giving prominence to the francophone psychoanalysis with a unitary and theoretical consistency with respect to both the clinical side as well as the more vast open side to which Freud never ceased to devote himself (and that actually characterises the late outside the walls Freud) that may today be construed as an attempt at a psychoanalytic reading of postmodernism.

Beyond the pleasure principle: the biographical, historical and cultural context

The death drive as a concept in itself appears organically described for the first time in Freud’s work in 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a complex reformulation of theoretical speculation of the drives theory, as it was structured until then. The new concept, a key turning point in Freud’s thoughts, and we could say in psychoanalysis, as the understanding of the human psyche, quite rightly defined as “the real cornerstone of metapsychology” (Couvreur, 1989), gave rise from the outset to divisions and disputes in the psychoanalytical world. It is the 1920 watershed.

Although in Beyond the Pleasure Principle the concept finds its full formulation, the idea of the existence of a death drive in psychic life, of a non-exclusivity of the pleasure principle, is traceable in Freud’s thinking right from the start. He soon intuits that the pleasure principle is essential to keeping us alive, but that life does not end with its fulfilment: there is a beyond, a shadow zone, dark and silent.

Still from an economic point of view, in a Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) a search to reduce tension is identified in the neuronal cell, in accordance with the principle of constancy to which psychic life aims. We find it again, indirectly, in the Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning in 1911, a short work but rich in insight that clarifies the relationships and the complex passage between the pleasure principle and the reality principle; then again in 1914, dealing with the vicissitudes of narcissism; and still more fully in the work that precedes Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Instincts and their Vicissitudes in 1915. Here, while still lacking a full metapsychological system, Freud identifies the four possible destinies of the drive that, regardless of Eros, may: (1) be desexualised in sublimation; (2) turn towards the actual person of the subject; (3) move towards removal and (4) be converted into the opposite, from love to hate.

Hatred, in relationship with objects, is the oldest of emotions, older than love; love, if the environment is sufficiently inviting (as subsequent psychoanalytic developments will clarify) will enable the drives to mix in such a way that the libidinal drive will prevail over the death drive, without the latter disappearing from unconscious life, however. It is with a shout, and not with a smile, that we come into the world. Overwhelmed by needs (hunger, love), dependent, lost, still lacking in language: the prevalence of life, in Freudian man, the presence of pleasure, this must always be stressed, do not offer themselves up but for negation, for subtraction. There is life if the priority thrust towards death does not prevail; there is pleasure only in the absence of the primitive dis-pleasure. I think this is what is meant by so-called Freudian pessimism, a view I do not share. This vision of life and of pleasure not only as a struggle, but as a fortuitous negative, depending on the goodness of our first objects and of our drive constitution, seems to me to be a realistic, albeit bitter, assessment. We find the death drive once more in the form of one of its derivatives in The Economic Problem of Masochism in 1924, and we shall encounter this again in the clinical part, in which Freud postulates the priority of an original erotogenic masochism, essential and structural to being, and clarifies how sadism and destructiveness, that is to say phenomena that are more easily observable in external reality, are but necessary eversions of the death drive: without an outlet or an opening to the outside, onto the object, the drive would be destined – as sometimes happens – to turn solely against the self.

He will finally turn to the death drive in his mature work – in Civilization and its Discontents in 1930 and in 1938 in An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in which, if on the one hand he reiterates his own distance from an “oceanic feeling” (1930, p. 558) in himself, on the other hand he is now unequivocally certain of the death drive, investigating above all its manifestation in society and, last but not least, seeing it as the cause of human unhappiness. Thus Freud in one important piece of writing, systematises a concept that had already appeared in previous works and would never be abandoned but would be reviewed in the light of new discoveries, in 1920 urged by unexpected clinical discoveries and also for personal and historical reasons, matured a profound conviction that would accompany his thought from his initial intuitions up to the vast explorations of his mature years. Indeed, this provides the underlying theme not only of the development of psychoanalytic theory, but of the actual conception of humankind, of life and death. With the death instinct, as well as for the other “grand conjectures” (Conrotto, 2008) of Freudian thought, we leave the comfort of the psychoanalytical sofa to venture into human nature, the essence of life itself, at the heart of life as Ameisen puts it, whether or not one agrees with the correctness of the concept itself. This is, in my opinion, the greatness of Freud, so rare in subsequent psychoanalysis that has not been able to provide (with the exception, in part, of Bion and Green) equally strong, suggestive and large-scale theories of the mind.

The 1920s saw many losses for Freud, by now some 64 years of age: the death of his beloved daughter Sofia,⁴ the suicide of his pupil Tausk in 1919, the death of his friend and benefactor Von Freund but especially the devastation left in Austria and Europe by the Great War, affording an opportunity not only to question himself on why humankind does not know how to evade wars, but also to observe more directly the neurosis of war and the paradoxical return, in the traumatised, of traumatic dreams. Where does all of this fit in? How can the books be balanced with the primacy of the pleasure principle? Why in the heart of the most evolved civilisation present on the world scene at that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The silent drive: death inside life
• 1 In theory: Freud and after Freud, the destinies of a controversial concept
• 2 In the Clinic
• 3 In Art
• 4 Contemporaneity: is it really the Age of Sad Passions?
• Conclusions
• Index