Difference between revisions of "Death drive"
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# every drive involves the subject in repetition, and | # 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. | # every drive is an attempt to go [[beyond the pleasure principle]], to the realm of [[excess jouissance]] where enjoyment is experienced as suffering. | ||
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[[Category:Psychoanalysis]] | [[Category:Psychoanalysis]] | ||
[[Category:Concepts]] | [[Category:Concepts]] | ||
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Revision as of 01:15, 5 June 2006
Contents
Death Drive and Freud
Sigmund Freud articulated the concept of the death drive (Fr. pulsion de mort) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. [1] In this work he asserts a fundamental opposition between life drives (eros) - associated with cohesion and unity - and the death drives - associated with destruction and fragmentation.[2]
(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. He wrote: "to ignore the death instinct in his [Freud's] doctrine is to misunderstand that doctrine entirely."[3]
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.[4]
In 1946, Lacan associates the death drive with the suicidal tendency of narcissism.[5]
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."[6]
Death Drive and Biology
For Freud, the death drive was closely bound up with biology, representing the fundamental tendency of every living thing to return to an inorganic state. By situating the death drive firmly in the symbolic, Lacan articulates it with culture rather than nature; he states that the death drive "is not a question of bjolog,"[7] and must be distinguished from the biological instinct to return to the inanimate.[8]
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, but now Lacan argues that the death drive is not a separate drive, but is in fact 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."[9] Hence Lacan writes that "every drive is virtually a death drive;"[10] 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.
