Death drive
Pulsion de mort
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud established a fundamental opposited between life and drives (eros), conceived of as a tendency towards cohesion and unity, and the death drives, which operate in the opposite direction, undoing connections and destroying things. However the life drives and the death drives are never found in a pure state, but always mixed/fused together in differing proportions. Indeed, Freud argued that were it not for this fusuion with rotism, the death drive would elude our perception, since in itself it is silent.[1]
The concept of the death drive was one of the most controversial concepts introduced by Freud, and many of his disciplies rejected it, but Freud continued to reaffirm the concept for the rest of his life.
Lacan follows Freud in reaffirming the concept of the death drive as central to psychoanalysis. "To ignore the death instinct in his [Freud's] doctrine is to misunderstand that doctrine entirely.'[2]
In Lacan's first remarks on the death drive, in 1938, he describes it 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.
In 1946 he links the death drive to the suicidal tendency of narcissism.
However when Lacan begins to develop his concept of the three orders, in the 1950s, he does not situate the death drive in the imaginary but in the symbolic.
He argues that th 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."[3]
This shift also marks a difference with Freud, for whom the death drive was closely bound up with biiology, 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 cultural rather than nature; he states that the death drive "is not a question of biology," and must be distinguished from the biological instinct to return to the inanimate.[4]
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.
Hence Lacan writes that "every drive is virutally a death drive" because every drive pursures its own extinction, involves the subject in repetition, and constitutes an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle, to the realm of excss jouissance where enjoyment is experienced as suffering.
