The Death Drive

Why Societies Self-Destruct

Niklas Hageback

• Publisher: Gaudium
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781592110711
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología social

Sigmund Freud’s death drive remains among the most controversial concepts in psychoanalysis, something which post-Freudians never could reach consensus on. Over time, it fell into oblivion. Recent developments, however, have actualized the interest in the death drive as political upheavals and turmoil lead to societal breakdowns that, according to reigning academic theory, should not exist. It has become a burning and contentious topic. Existing conflict theories generally unmask structural factors considered as explanatory root causes, whether social, economic, or political in nature, but, typically, these factors may have been in place for decades. These models consistently fail to identify the triggers that ignite abrupt change and what heralds it. Anecdotally, a certain self-destructive sentiment seems to suddenly hold sway, where the established order, the status quo, simply must be destroyed, and the psychological urges to do so are too great to resist. But why would individuals or collectives elect a self-destructive path, which on a superficial level seems to conflict with the survival instinct and the assumption of perpetual human progress? Thus, the question must be posed: are these manifestations of the death drive? The Death Drive: Why Societies Self-Destruct offers an explanatory framework and methodology to predict periods of destruction that often have grim effects on societies, taking as its starting point the controversial death drive concept. The book provides a model to understand and forecast the seemingly irrational destructive human forces that hold such great and sinister influence on world affairs.

CHAPTER 1
PSYCHOANANLYSIS - A PRIMER

This chapter provides the layman reader with a limited understanding of psychoanalysis with the definitions and insights to the various concepts that are being discussed in the succeeding chapter, this to empower and facilitate the reading. Anyone already familiar with psychoanalysis can omit this chapter, as some later sections are partly overlapping.

Despite the human fascination for psychology, which can trace its roots to the earliest days of mankind, a number of key concepts such as the mind, the unconscious, and free will are still hard to pin down and exactly define, which to some extent has held back scientific progress in the understanding of the human mental apparatus.

The Mind

The function of the human mind, and especially how it relates to the body, has been deliberated going back millennia, and the debate is yet to be concluded. Strange as it might seem, something so essential in defining the human species still remains elusive and difficult to grasp. The concept of the human mind has been studied from many perspectives; historically, as part of religion and philosophy, and in modern times directed toward psychology and, more recently, neuroscience. What has and has not been considered as part of the faculties of the mind has differed over time, however a current definition of the mind reads:

the collective conscious and unconscious processes in a sentient organism that direct and influence mental and physical behavior.^[1]

The elements of sentience being the brain, nerve processes, cognition, and the motor and sensory processes.

But its exact traits remain the subject of academic debate and have yet to be precisely defined. Some argue that only “higher” intellectual functions constitute the mind, in particular reason, imagination, and memory, while emotions such as love, hate, fear, and joy are of a more instinctual character and should be excluded. Others hold that rational and emotional (read: irrational) states cannot be so distinctly separated as their origins are shared, so both are considered to be part of the mind. What is generally acknowledged is that the mind includes attributes such as perceptions, reason, imagination, awareness, memories, emotions, and a faculty for exchanging information.

The current focus of research which is geared towards neuroscience and the man-machine relationship is putting the biological perspective in the forefront. It has been evidenced that certain functions of the mind can be pinned to certain parts of the brain. The study of patients with brain damage shows that injuries to specific parts of the brain result in impairments in functions seen as part of the mind. Experiments with drugs have also revealed brain-mind links, for example, sedatives reduce awareness while stimulants do the opposite. But the advances of neuroscience and genetics have not yet provided a comprehensive picture of how the brain produces and relates to various functions of the mind. For example, although some emotions can be directly related to certain brain structures, neuroscience still falls far short in fully explaining emotions in terms of brain processes.^[2]An important concept in the debate is qualia, the individual subjective description of a perception or experience, such as describing an emotion, the level of pain, describing a color, how something tastes or smells, and so on. In essence, qualia means that it is difficult to objectively describe an experience without it containing a subjective element that others can find difficult to understand or relate to. Qualia brings the mind-body problem to its core as so far it has not been possible to neuro-scientifically explain the subjective ‘making sense’ of a certain experience and why it can differ from person to person.^[3]

Instincts

The concept of instincts has evolved since it was introduced into the field of psychology by the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) in the 1870s. Initially, most repetitive behavior was considered instinctual, over time, however, in the 1960s, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) argued that humans do not have instincts, as evidenced by the fact that we are able to override them. Citing the reproductive instinct and the survival instinct, Maslow pointed out that some women deliberately choose not to have children, that some mothers suffering depression have been known to kill their own children, and that some people choose to commit suicide. Maslow felt that although the overriding of the reproductive and survival instincts often coincided with mental illnesses, human ability to deliberately interfere with them diluted the concept of humans having instincts, unlike animals. He and his contemporaries saw instincts rather as strong biological tendencies and motivators for certain human behaviors, but they distinguished them from (animal) instincts and referred to them as drives.^[4]

The most up-to-date research supports the existence of drives, or innate abilities as they are now commonly referred to. Regardless of how they are labelled, they have a strong tendency to influence behavior whether that be on an individual level or in groups bounded by genetic clusters, thus their influence is estimated on a probabilistic scale rather than a deterministic one. So, the current view is that humans have drives, which unlike instincts can be deliberately overridden, but generally they are not. These drives usually involve a greater degree of ‘education’ than that of animal instincts, and they can be situation-dependently flexible. The academic discipline that studies human behavior from a biological perspective, socio-biology, does not consider there to be defined human instincts, but rather biological bases for human behavior – possibly just more word play to avoid the use of the term “instinct.”^[5]

Reflexes, on the other hand, are a simpler form of behavioral pattern. The stimulus in a reflex may not even require brain activity, like the message flowing to the spinal cord and then being transmitted back without travelling to the brain through a path called the reflex arc^[6] – for example, the involuntary kick your doctor generates when he taps your knee with a hammer.

Free Will

The question whether humans have free will is closely linked with the notion of awareness. Free will is defined as:

“the ability to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints; constraints might be of a physical, biological, social/cultural, or psychological nature.”^[7]

There are two broad schools of thought arguing over the existence of free will. Determinism contests free will, with the basic assumption that present actions are caused by the past; in other words, every decision one makes is driven by preceding events, which, in turn, are driven by the events preceding them, in a causal chain that prevents one from acting independently and exercising choice. The other school of thought is libertarianism, which assumes humans to be rational agents with a capacity to make free choices among alternatives.^[8]

Between these opposing views are a number of variations and combinations that relax some of the more definite conditions; for example, even if causality exists, humans still have the option to choose their actions, such as at any time making the voluntary decision to end one’s own life. Other variations propose predestined outcomes or goals, but state that the paths to arrive there come with free choice.

The free will debate has implications that impact religious, ethical, judicial, and scientific thought. If free will can be demonstrated not to exist, can a person then be held legally and morally accountable for his actions, if these are predetermined and cannot be influenced? From a scientific viewpoint, if actions are anchored in past events, is it possible to make forecasts and produce statistical probabilities on predictable outcomes? It also involves the concept of drives; if in a certain situation strong biological motivators are triggered, albeit possible to override but highly unlikely so, do we then have free will? As with so many of the key concepts in psychology, the study of free will remains open and has moved from the academic areas of religion and philosophy to neuroscience and medicine. The definition of a death drive builds on the assumption that free will has psychological limitations, underpinning biological forces, by which mankind is constrained.

The Unconscious

Although there is broad acceptance among psychologists and neuroscientists of the existence of an unconscious part of the mind and its ability to affect thoughts and behavior, its exact functions and processes have yet to be determined.

It is important to distinguish between unconsciousness and the unconscious. Unconsciousness is a mental state during which there is little or no response to external stimuli, such as being asleep or in a coma. The unconscious, however, is defined as:

“processes in the mind that occur automatically and are not available to introspection, and include thought processes, memory, affect, and motivation.”^[9]

Initially, the unconscious was equated with unintentional acts as it coincided with the development of hypnosis in the mid-1800s and its enthusiastic exploitation in vaudeville stage performances. The strange and often bizarre acts of volunteers after being induced into a hypnotic state – a state in which behavior, as it was claimed, could be dictated, but about which the subject had no memory – popularized the idea that there is a part of the mind about which we are unaware but that can be addressed, and can influence our behavior, seemingly against our conscious will.^[10] How could a hypnotist make suggestions to subjects who are apparently asleep – though a strange form of sleep in which they can open their eyes and follow instructions – if not for the existence of an unconscious with the power to control actions?

With the theories presented by Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung in the early twentieth century, the understanding of the unconscious would be much improved and a lot of their findings still stand today.

Sigmund Freud

The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) greatly advanced the fledgling discipline of psychology, particularly in developing the theories of the unconscious. His early work focused on neurotic symptoms and traumatic memories. Through his interaction with patients, he arrived at the belief that an important factor in the development of neurosis, such as acting in ways not conforming to the reigning socially acceptable norms, was due to the repression of forbidden emotions or desires. Freud regarded the unconscious as a hidden cupboard of sorts where these forbidden thoughts were shut away as they could not be erased from memory. In particular, he felt that the repression of sexual thoughts and fantasies from early childhood into the unconscious was a key factor in a person developing neurosis. Freud explored techniques to draw out repressed memories from the unconscious, including hypnosis and dream analysis, and eventually he developed his own method, with patients lying on a couch and encouraged to speak their minds freely. By analyzing the symbolic meaning of their relaxed ramblings, he found hints as to the nature of their emotional states and neurosis. Freud referred to this technique as psychoanalysis, and it was to become his landmark contribution to psychology. Its aim was to draw repressed thoughts and desires back into the conscious because, according to him, it is then that patients can acknowledge and release the repressed emotions and thereby eventually free themselves from neurosis.^[11]

Freud summed up the features of the unconscious in his 1915 essay, The Unconscious:

It can be contradictory; opposing feelings or wishes can coexist. For example, you can feel love and hate for the same thing at the same time;

Repressed thoughts or emotions are likely to return to the conscious in some form;

The unconscious is timeless; its contents have no chronological order, the cause and effect relationship can be put out of play, and;

In people with a mental disorder, it can thrust itself into the conscious and replace physical reality with psychic reality, such as fantasies, dreams and symbolism.^[12]

As Freud gained more insight into the workings of the mind, he concluded that it was fueled by flows of psychic energy, which he labelled libido. As with any energy in a closed system, the level of libido in the mind is constant, hence an examination of the direction and intensity of its flow will give the psychoanalyst indications to imbalances between the conscious and the unconscious.

Initially, Freud considered the libido to be connected with mankind’s sexual development and desires, but later he came to see it as flowing back and forth between the conscious and the unconscious under the influence of two innate forces. The first he called the pleasure principle, which triggers the impulse to seek immediate gratification of wishes and urges, not exclusively sexual ones. Freud saw the pleasure principle as the main drive of unconscious desires. The other force he called the reality principle. It resides in the conscious and reins in the impulses seeking immediate gratification.^[13]

To fend off the drives and urges from the unconscious, as to conform with societal norms, the mind deploys defense mechanisms, usually at the unconscious level, to subdue these. There are a number of defense mechan...