Death drive
Contents
Death Drive and Freud
The death drive (French: pulsion de mort) is first elaborated by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Here 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. 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 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."[1]
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.[2] In 1946, Lacan associates the death drive with the suicidal tendency of narcissism.[3] 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."[4]
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."[5] The death drive is not the biological instinct to return to the inanimate.[6]
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."[7]
Lacan writes that "every drive is virtually a death drive;"[8] 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.
