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→Death Drive and Freud
{{Top}}pulsion de mort]]''; [[German]]: ''[[Todestrieb{{Bottom}}
==Death Drive and Freud ==
Although intimations of the concept of the [[death drive]] can be found early on in [[Freud]]'s [[Works of Sigmund Freud|work]], it was only in ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'' (1920) that the concept was fully articulated.
In this work [[Freud]] established a fundamental opposition between [[life drive]]s (''[[eros]]''), conceived of as a tendency towards cohesion and unity, and the [[death drive]]s, which operate in the opposite direction, undoing connections and destroying things.
(''[[Todestriebe]]'' or ''[[Thanatos]]'').
The former is concerned with the creation of cohesion and unity; the latter with the undoing of connections and the destruction of unity.
According to [[Freud]], the [[death drive]] exhibits the tendency of all living beings to return to an inorganic state.
All drives are regressive in that they seek to return to an earlier state or to recover a lost [[object]].
Initially inward-directed, the death drive first manifests its existence in the human tendency to self-destruction; as it subsequently turns to the outside world, it takes the form of [[aggressivity|aggressive]] or destructive behavior.
The theory of the death drive is, by Freud's own admission, speculative, and is grounded in the ddescriptions of the [[compulsion to repeat]].
The fact that Freucd describes the death drive as 'silent' makes it difficult to supply concrete clinical evidence for its existence and the notion remains controversal, even though Freud continues to uphold it in his very last writings.
Many post-Freudian analysts dismiss the notion of a death drive as mere speculation on Freud's part, but Klein adopts it whole-heartedly, regarding the tyranny of the early [[superego]] as it crushes the young child's [[ego]] as the first clinical manifestation of its power.
(The concept of the death drive was one of the most controversial concepts introduced by Freud, and many of his disciples rejected it, but Freud continued to reaffirm the concept for the rest of his life. Of the non-Lacanian schools of psychoanalytic theory, only Kleinian psychoanalysis takes the concept seriously.)
==Death Drive and Lacan==
[[Jacques Lacan]] (following Freud) reaffirms the concept of the [[death drive]] as central to [[psychoanalysis]].
[[Lacan]] wrote: "to ignore the death instinct in his [Freud's] doctrine is to misunderstand that doctrine entirely."<ref>E, 301</ref>
In 1938, [[Lacan]] describes the [[death drive]] as a [[nostalgia]] for a [[lost harmony]], a [[desire]] to [[return]] to the [[preoedipal]] fusion with the [[mother]]'s [[breast]], the [[loss]] of which is marked on the [[psyche]] in the [[weaning complex]].<ref>Lacan, 1938: 35</ref>
In 1946, [[Lacan]] associates the [[death drive]] with the [[suicide|suicidal tendency]] of [[narcissism]].<ref>Ec, 186</ref>
In the 1950s, [[Lacan]] does not situate the [[death drive]] in the [[imaginary]] (despite its association with the [[preoedipal phase]] and [[narcissism]]), but rather in the [[symbolic]].
In the 1954-5 seminar, ''[[The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis]]'', Lacan states that the [[death drive]] is simply the fundamental tendency of the [[symbolic]] [[order]] to produce [[repetition]].
"The death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order."<ref>S2, 326</ref>
==Death Drive and Biology==
For Freud, the [[death drive]] was closely bound up with [[biology]].
[[Lacan]] situates the [[death drive]] in the [[symbolic]].
[[Lacan]] articulates it with culture rather than nature.
[[Lacan]] states that the death drive "is not a question of biology."<ref>E, 102</ref>
The [[death drive]] is not the [[biology|biological]] [[instinct]] to return to the inanimate.<ref>S7, 211-12</ref>
==Death Drive and Drives==
Another difference between Lacan's concept of the death drive and Freud's emerges in 1964.
Freud opposed the death drive to the sexual drives.
[[Lacan]] rejects Freud's thesis of a duality of life and death drives.
[[Lacan]] argues that the [[death drive]] is an aspect of every [[drive]].
The [[death drive]] is an aspect of every [[drive]].
"The distinction between the life drive and the death drive is - true in as much as it manifests two aspects of the drive."<ref>gl 20</ref>
[[Lacan]] writes that "every drive is virtually a death drive;"<ref>Ec, 844</ref> because
# every [[drive]] pursues its own extinction,
# every [[drive]] involves the subject in [[repetition]], and
# every [[drive]] is an attempt to go [[beyond the pleasure principle]], to the realm of [[excess jouissance]] where enjoyment is experienced as suffering.
The death drive strives, in Lacan's view, to go beyond the [[pleasure principle]] and to attain the painful joys of [[jouissance]].
==See Also==
* [[Death]]
* [[Drive]]
==Look Up==
<ref>3, 1, 64-5, 94, 135 Conversations.</ref>
==References==
<references/>
__NOTOC__
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As with the movement of the signifying chain, which both seeks coincidence with the void which organises it and perpetually misses that rendez-vous, desire is simultaneously a drive towards and an evasion of the void at the heart of subjectivity. In this way, both desire and the signifying chain harbour death at their very core; the death drive is
immanent to the signifying chain. The subject comes into being ‘barred’ by the signifier and thereby injected with a sense of death. […] The taste for death is not something that the subject acquires through experience, as one might say, or reaches towards as a last despairing manner of delectation, for it has been there from the start as a perilous gift from the signifier, and one that cannot be refused. The drive, as it circles round the excavated centre of being, is pulled outwards towards the objects that promise gratification, but inwards too towards the completest form of a loss that it already knows. (Bowie 162-163)
Desire, subjectivity, and signification are thus inextricably intertwined with the death drive; evacuation of subjectivity on the scale which coincidence with the loss that motivates desire would necessitate means death not only for the psychic structure of the individual, but also for the biologically existent being from which it is inseparable. The absence which structures the symbolic and which gives coherence to the subject through the very instability it imparts is thus finally given a name in the appearance of death on the scene: "the death drive is only the mask of the symbolic order" (Lacan S2 326, qtd. in Evans 202).
At this point the incorrigible temporality of the symbolic order rears its ugly head again, establishing the necessity of conceiving of desire as a drive towards death. In actuality, the nature of the death-drive as motivator of desire is nostalgic; it is an urge to return to the plenitude of the pre-oedipal infant-mother relationship before it was disrupted by the specular image and the paternal interdiction: "when we wish to attain in the subject what was before the serial articulations of speech, and what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death, from which his existence takes on all the meaning it has" (Ecrits 105; see also Evans 32). And while Lacan insists on the reversible temporality of the symbolic order, he is equally vehement in stating that the symbolic is a universal totality from which there can be only one escape once it has been entered. With the utterance of the paternal interdiction and the infant’s entry into it, the symbolic order assumes the status of an always-already totality from which there can be no regression and only one kind of progression. The movement of desire within the symbolic order, then, is necessarily a tendency towards this final transcendence; the desire to return to the pre-oedipal manifests itself in the symbolic the only way it can, as a drive towards death.
==References==
<references/>
==See Also==
=More=
==Life and Death==
<references/>
<ref>3, 1, 64-5, 94, 135 Conversations.</ref>
