Difference between revisions of "Death drive"

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==Death Drive and Freud ==
 
==Death Drive and Freud ==
  
The [[death drive]] ([[French]]: ''[[pulsion de mort]]'') is introduced by [[Sigmund Freud]] in ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'' (1920).
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The [[death drive]] ([[Fr.]]: ''[[pulsion de mort]]'') is introduced by [[Sigmund Freud]] in ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'' (1920).
  
 
===Life and Death===
 
===Life and Death===

Revision as of 14:22, 7 July 2006

Death Drive and Freud

The death drive (Fr.: pulsion de mort) is introduced by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

Life and Death

Freud posits a basic opposition between the life drive (Lebestriebe or Eros) and the death drive (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.

Freud's Death Drive

According to Freud, the death drive exhibits the regressive tendency of all living beings to return to an (earlier) inorganic 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 aggressive or destructive behavior.)

Controversy

The theory of the death drive is grounded in the descriptions of the compulsion to repeat.

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.

The theory of the death drive remains controversial (even though Freud continues to uphold it in his very last writings).

Freud] describes the death drive as 'silent'

Melanie Klein

Of the non-Lacanian schools of psychoanalytic theory, only Kleinian psychoanalysis takes the concept seriously.

Many post-Freudian analysts dismiss the notion of a death drive as mere speculation by Freud, but Klein adopts it whole-heartedly, regarding the tyranny of the early superego as it crushes the child's ego as the first clinical manifestation of its power.

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."[1]

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.[2]

Lacan associates the death drive with the suicidal tendency of narcissism.[3]

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."[4]

Lacan situates the death drive in the symbolic.

Death Drive and Biology

There are differences between Lacan's concept of the death drive and Freud's.

For Freud, the death drive was closely bound up with biology.

Lacan states that the death drive "is not a question of biology."[5]

Lacan articulates it with culture rather than nature.

The death drive is not the biological instinct to return to the inanimate.[6]

Death Drive and Drives

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.

Lacan argues that "every drive is virtually a death drive"[7] because:

  1. every drive pursues its own extinction,
  1. every drive involves the subject in repetition, and
  1. 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 to go beyond the pleasure principle and to attain the painful joys of jouissance.


See Also

References

  1. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.301
  2. Lacan, 1938: 35
  3. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p.186
  4. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 1988. p.326
  5. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.102
  6. {S7}} p.211-12
  7. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. 844

[1]

  1. 3, 1, 64-5, 94, 135 Conversations.