Death and Mastery

Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism

Benjamin Fong

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542616
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

The first philosophers of the Frankfurt School famously turned to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to supplement their Marxist analyses of ideological subjectification. Since the collapse of their proposed "marriage of Marx and Freud," psychology and social theory have grown apart to the impoverishment of both. Returning to this union, Benjamin Y. Fong reconstructs the psychoanalytic "foundation stone" of critical theory in an effort to once again think together the possibility of psychic and social transformation.

Drawing on the work of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, Fong complicates the famous antagonism between Eros and the death drive in reference to a third term: the woefully undertheorized drive to mastery. Rejuvenating Freudian metapsychology through the lens of this pivotal concept, he then provides fresh perspective on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse's critiques of psychic life under the influence of modern cultural and technological change. The result is a novel vision of critical theory that rearticulates the nature of subjection in late capitalism and renews an old project of resistance.

PART I

Dream

1 Death, Mastery, and the Origins of Life

Sigmund Freud’s Strange Proposal

The “death drive”…is a concept which can only be correctly situated at a specific moment in the drama of the Freudian discovery. Outside of that context, it becomes an empty formula.

—Jean Laplanche, “The So-Called ‘Death Drive’”

In this first chapter, I will be teasing out the basics of a metapsychological narrative first outlined by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I have already discussed, in the introduction, the deep theoretical crisis out of which this text emerged. For my present purposes, I want simply to emphasize that the metapsychology produced there, in the background of every theoretical innovation that Freud would make for the rest of his life, is indeed a narrative. Whereas the earlier metapsychological venture of the 1910s sought to lay out a set of categories that analysts could apply schematically, in Kantian fashion, to the empirical content of their analytic encounters, the later “metanarrative” provides more of a Hegelian schema-in-motion, a set of ideas that can only be properly grasped in the story in which they unfold. The various concepts that emerge from this development (id, ego, and superego) are not simple additions to the pre-1920 analytic toolbelt but rather characters in a fundamentally new story, the central personage of which is undoubtedly the death drive.¹

Before turning to the narrative itself, however, I will offer a brief conceptual history of the death drive and its unfortunately undertheorized vicissitude, the drive to mastery.² Despite its recurrence throughout Freud’s work, this latter concept has failed to receive due treatment; where it has been addressed, it is more often than not assimilated to more familiar concepts like aggression. It is my aim here to demonstrate that the drive to mastery is not a footnote in the history of psychoanalytic theory but a key to understanding Freud’s later dual drive theory and, by extension, the structural model of id, ego, and superego. The death drive, on the other hand, though widely rejected by the professional analytic community, has been fruitfully developed in a number of directions. Unfortunately, this development has typically taken place outside the narrative of which it is the critical part.

In the effort thus to re-embed the death drive in its natural habitat and unveil the importance of the drive to mastery for psychoanalytic theory,³ I will attempt a cohesive presentation of sections 4 and 5 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which contain what many would argue are the most ludicrous hypotheses to be found in Freud’s grand corpus. Given the fragmented and wild nature of his endeavor there, this task will require some intensive textual work. To take another early cue from Jean Laplanche, the aim of this reading will be not so much to criticize Freud, nor simply to recapitulate his views, but rather to think alongside of him, to retrace his steps, and, if necessary, to veer slightly from his own path to inspect the conceptual surroundings.⁴ My hope, by the end of this chapter, is to have elucidated the basic tension between the death drive and the drive to mastery, which, like eerily similar personalities whose opposition comprises a plot’s intrigue, form the antithetical counterpoles of the drive theory that will occupy the attention of the remaining chapters of this book.

A Brief History of Mastery and Death

In 1920 Freud shocked the bourgeoning analytic community with the introduction of the death drive (Todestrieb),⁵ the unsettling hypothesis that all living things are unconsciously driven to their own demise. This new drive theory was meant to provide a comprehensive solution to a set of conundrums that had hitherto eluded psychoanalytic explanation, most notably the “compulsion to repeat” traumatic situations and thereby retroactively attempt to gain some degree of mastery over them.⁶ New as the speculations of Beyond the Pleasure Principle were, this concern with psychic mastery had been a mainstay of Freud’s thought throughout his career.⁷ Very early on, in a paper from 1894, he suggests the importance of “mastering somatic excitation” (Bewältigung der somatischen Sexualerregung),⁸ a phrase that would repeat in a number of his most well-known essays: in “On Narcissism,” where he calls “our mental apparatus…a device for mastering excitations [Bewältigung von Erregungen] which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects”;⁹ in the case of the Wolfman, where he discourses on the failure “to master the real problems of life” (Bewältigung der realen Probleme des Lebens);¹⁰ and in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” where he emphasizes the importance of “mastering stimuli” (Reizbewältigung).¹¹

A somewhat different concern with mastery is found in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), where Freud posits a “drive to mastery” (Bemächtigungstrieb) associated with “masculine sexual activity” and aggressive, anal behavior.¹² It is also, curiously enough, linked to “the instinct for knowledge,” which is deemed “a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery.”¹³ Between the Three Essays and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the phrase would appear sporadically and always in the limited sense accorded it in the Three Essays.¹⁴ As Kristin White explains, Freud most likely had Alfred Adler’s concept of Machtstreben (striving for power) in mind every time he used Bemächtigungstrieb.¹⁵ Adler was an important but threatening interlocutor of Freud’s throughout the 1900s, but rather angrily broke with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1911. It would thus make sense that Freud employed the term sparingly and to restricted effect.

Nothing in the pre-1920 appearances of the term Bemächtigungstrieb thus prepares us for the significance it acquires in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud explains the efforts of his grandson’s Fort/Da game¹⁶ in terms of an “instinct for mastery [Bemächtigungstrieb] that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not.”¹⁷ No longer a simple “component instinct” as it was in the Three Essays, Bemächtigungstrieb is now put forth as counterevidence to Freud’s belief, held for some thirty years, that all life is governed by the pleasure principle. In addition, it is made responsible for the compulsion to repeat in that it is what causes us to return to traumatic scenes and retroactively “master or bind its excitations” (die Erregung zu bewältigen oder zu binden).¹⁸ Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis help us make sense of this surprising conceptual transformation: during the war years, they argue, Freud came to realize that the “mastery of the object” characteristic of aggressive behavior “goes hand in hand with the binding together” of distressing stimuli.¹⁹ In other words, the problematics of Bewältigung and Bemächtigung slowly began to fuse in Freud’s mind, and by Beyond the Pleasure Principle “no strict distinction is drawn between the two terms.”²⁰ We can thus only make sense of Freud’s explanation of the Fort/Da game if we understand Bemächtigungstrieb to mean, for the first time, Bewältigungstrieb.²¹ For all of their supposed translation sins, it seems then that the Stracheys were quite justified in rendering both Bemächtigung and Bewältigung as “mastery.”²²

Aside from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the most striking usage of the drive to mastery comes in “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924), where the term is further equated with “the destructive instinct” (Destruktionstrieb) and, strikingly, “the will to power” (Wille zur Macht).²³ Freud is clearly struggling with the terminology here, as he even goes so far as to equate the destructive and the death drives (Todes- oder Destruktionstrieb).²⁴ Should we then, by the transitive property, take Bemächtigungstrieb to mean Todestrieb? As I intend to show in what follows, reconstructing Freud’s metapsychological narrative in Beyond the Pleasure Principle reveals more terminological distinction between these concepts than he offers in “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Intimately connected as the two drives in fact are, the relationship is much more complicated than one of identity.

* * *

After Freud, not much is made of Bemächtigungstrieb;²⁵ but while his thoughts on psychic mastery withered from neglect, the theory of the death drive ironically caused a great disturbance within the psychoanalytic community and was the subject of much, albeit predominantly negative, discussion.²⁶ At first, Freud himself only ambivalently proposed the idea, but it eventually “acquired such a power” over him that he could “no longer think in any other way.”²⁷ Freud’s followers, despite their general obsequiousness, were not so charmed: indeed, as Freud’s enthusiasm waxed, theirs waned. With the exception of Sándor Ferenczi, whose elaborate extensions of psychoanalytic metapsychology worried even Freud himself,²⁸ none in Freud’s inner circle came to accept the death drive.²⁹ Despite epistolary pleas for their relevance to psychoanalytic theory, Ernest Jones and Oskar Pfister both sadly reported to Freud in 1930 that they simply could not endorse his views on the matter.³⁰ Many of the continental emigrants felt similarly and did not pass up the opportunity to say so. Fritz Wittels suggested that the wild speculations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle followed upon the death of Freud’s daughter, Sophie Halberstadt, an accusation that Freud was quick to deny.³¹ Otto Fenichel contended in typically reasoned fashion that the clinical facts “do not necessitate the assumption of a genuine self-destructive instinct.”³² As de facto leader of the school of ego psychology, Heinz Hartmann sought to develop the structural theory while “omitting Freud’s other, mainly biologically oriented set of hypotheses of the ‘life’ and ‘death’ instincts.”³³ Wilhelm Reich, one of the earliest opponents of the death drive, claimed simply that “‘Death’ was right. ‘Instinct’ was wrong.”³⁴ One could go on like this for quite some time: the number of theorists who have entertained the death drive only to curtly dismiss it is rather astounding.³⁵

The only psychoanalytic theorists who have affirmed the death drive, at least in some part, have generally belonged to one of two psychoanalytic “schools”: Kleinian or Lacanian.³⁶ Hoping to draw more attention to the aggressive impulses she had discovered in her work with children, Melanie Klein was an early endorser of the concept of the death drive.³⁷ As many commentators have noted, however, Klein herself never really dealt with the death drive as it was described by Freud: her interest from the beginning was in aggression and destruction, concepts that she equated with Todestrieb.³⁸ Although Freud most certainly gave his adherents ample reason to relate the concepts of death drive, drive to mastery, and aggression beginning around 1923, the exact relation between these terms was never made clear. As Jean Laplanche argues, “Freud understands his death drive retrospectively as an aggressive drive;”³⁹ that is, in its initial formulation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle the death drive was most certainly not conceived as aggression.⁴⁰ Only later did Freud come to associate these terms. Although Klein did a great deal to advance and complicate Freudian theory, in taking this association, in rather uncomplicated fashion, to be equation, I do not believe she did any service to the concept of the death drive.

Indeed, one might argue that her work actually prevented any real discussion of the death drive in the English literature. In the early 1940s Klein and her followers were locked in an acrimonious debate with Anna Freud and other “orthodox” members of the British Psychoanalytic Society.⁴¹ When the animosity passed and Kleinians began more freely to mingle in the so-called psychoanalytic mainstream, British and American analysts were also confronting the need to make sense of the metapsychology that undergirded the structural model of id, ego, and superego. In the simplest terms, their solution went something like this: “Freud had actually been struggling with the stark fact of aggression for some time, but in order to make himself seem different from Adler, he formulated the problem in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in alien terms. Recognizing as we do the distorting nature of Freud’s ambition, we can dispose of his theoretical idiosyncrasies and focus on what we analysts all recognize to be of clinical importance: aggression.” The fact that it was the controversial figure of Melanie Klein who most powerfully made the equation “death drive = aggression” led the psychoanalytic community to feel that it had made great...