Concept
Death drive
Freud's hypothesis, put forward in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), of a drive that tends to return the living being to an inorganic state and to undo connections, set against the life drives, Eros, which bind matter and minds into ever larger unities. Turned outwards it shows as aggression and destructiveness; Freud tied it to the compulsion to repeat, to masochism and to the negative therapeutic reaction. Many analysts rejected it, while others, among them Melanie Klein and André Green, each in their own way made it central to their thought.
Development
1920
Sigmund Freud introduced by
Freud put forward the death drives in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), setting them against the life drives and suggesting that the pleasure principle itself seems to serve them.
1930
Sigmund Freud developed by
In Das Unbehagen in der Kultur Freud treats the drive to aggression as the main derivative and representative of the death drive, sees civilisation as the struggle between Eros and death, and explains the severity of conscience as aggression turned back against the ego by the super-ego.
Undated
André Green reworked by
Green recast the death drive in psychic rather than biological terms, as a disobjectalising function that withdraws investment from objects and the ego, and tied it to a negative narcissism aiming at zero.
Relations
introduced by
- 1920 Sigmund Freud
Freud put forward the death drives in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), setting them against the life drives and suggesting that the pleasure principle itself seems to serve them.
diverges from
- 1920 Destruction as the cause of coming into being
Freud acknowledged that Spielrein had anticipated part of his speculation, but where she placed destruction inside the reproductive drive, as one of its two antagonistic components, he set the death drives apart from and against the life or sexual drives.
opposed by
- 1920 Life drive
Freud's second drive theory is a dualism: Eros binds living substance into ever greater unities, while the death drive tends to undo connections and lead back to the inorganic. All of life, he writes in 1930, is the interplay and struggle of the two, which are usually found fused.
developed by
- 1930 Sigmund Freud
In Das Unbehagen in der Kultur Freud treats the drive to aggression as the main derivative and representative of the death drive, sees civilisation as the struggle between Eros and death, and explains the severity of conscience as aggression turned back against the ego by the super-ego.
gave rise to
- 1971 Destructive narcissism
Rosenfeld framed destructive narcissism as a clinical approach to Freud's theory of the life and death instincts: the idealized destructive narcissistic organization is where, in his account, the death instinct shows itself in the clinic.
- Negative narcissism
Negative narcissism is Green's narcissism of the death drive: where life narcissism binds the ego into a unity, it pursues the ego's extinction.
- Disobjectalising function
Green conceived the disobjectalising function as the way the death drive works: undoing the links that invest objects, as against the objectalising work of the life drives.
reworked by
- André Green
Green recast the death drive in psychic rather than biological terms, as a disobjectalising function that withdraws investment from objects and the ego, and tied it to a negative narcissism aiming at zero.
Works
- 1912
Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being
Spielrein’s best-known paper starts from a question that earlier analysts, among them Stekel, Gross, Freud and Bleuler, had touched on: why does the reproductive drive, the strongest of the drives, bring with it anxiety and disgust as well as pleasure? In a first part, drawing on biology and individual psychology, she argues that reproduction requires the individual to dissolve: the drive to preserve the species expresses itself psychically in a dissolution in which the “I” passes into a “we”, and so it works against the drive of self-preservation. The reproductive drive demands destruction from the individual, and its destructive urge gains in tension when it is left unsatisfied; destruction can be carried out symbolically so as to escape it in reality, and self-destruction can be replaced by the destruction of a victim. A second part offers samples from mythology to show that becoming arises from destruction, and the paper concludes that the reproductive drive consists, psychologically too, of two antagonistic components, as much a drive of destruction as of becoming. Spielrein notes that Jung sets ideas of death in opposition to sexual ideas, whereas she places destruction within sexuality itself. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud acknowledged that she had anticipated part of his speculation on the death drives.
- 1920
The essay in which Freud revised his theory of the drives. He starts from facts the pleasure principle does not account for: the dreams of the traumatic neuroses, including the war neuroses, which keep returning the patient to the accident; a small child’s game of throwing away a reel so that it is “gone” (fort) and pulling it back with a joyful “there” (da); and the patient in analysis who, instead of remembering the repressed, repeats it in the transference. From these he infers a compulsion to repeat that seems more original, more elementary and more drive-like than the pleasure principle. Trauma is described as excitation strong enough to break through the mind’s protective shield against stimuli, leaving it the task of binding the incoming quantities. Freud then proposes that the drives are conservative, striving to restore an earlier state, so that “the aim of all life is death”, and he sets death drives against the life or sexual drives, the libido he identifies with the Eros of the poets and philosophers. Biological findings on natural death and on the immortality of protists neither confirm nor remove the hypothesis, and he holds to the distinction between death drives and life drives, adding that the pleasure principle seems to serve the death drives. A footnote acknowledges that Sabina Spielrein had anticipated a good part of this speculation.
- 1924
The Economic Problem of Masochism
Freud's 1924 paper asks how masochism can exist at all if mental life is ruled by the pleasure principle: if pain and unpleasure can become aims rather than warnings, the guardian of mental life seems paralysed. He first revises the position of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which had equated the pleasure principle with the Nirvana principle, the tendency, after Fechner and in Barbara Low's term, to reduce excitation to zero. Because there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations, pleasure and unpleasure cannot depend on the quantity of tension alone but on some qualitative factor, perhaps rhythm. He therefore sets out a series: the Nirvana principle expresses the death drive, the pleasure principle is its modification by the libido, and the reality principle a further modification due to the external world. Freud then distinguishes three forms of masochism. Erotogenic masochism, pleasure in pain, underlies the other two. Feminine masochism, described from the fantasies of masochistic men, casts the subject as a helpless, naughty child and, more deeply, in characteristically female situations: being castrated, copulated with or giving birth. Moral masochism is a norm of conduct. Erotogenic masochism rests on libidinal co-excitation and on the fate of the death drive: the libido diverts much of it outward as the destructive drive, part of which serves sexuality as sadism, while the portion that stays inside, libidinally bound, is primary masochism; sadism turned back on the self adds a secondary masochism. Erotogenic masochism takes on the guise of each libidinal phase, from the fear of being eaten to the wish to be beaten by the father. Moral masochism has loosened its tie to sexuality: the suffering itself matters, not who inflicts it. Freud finds it in the negative therapeutic reaction and the unconscious sense of guilt, which he proposes to call a need for punishment. He distinguishes the heightened sadism of the super-ego, usually conscious, from the masochism of the ego, which stays hidden and seeks punishment from the super-ego or from fate. Since the super-ego arose through the desexualisation of the Oedipus complex, moral masochism resexualises morality and revives the complex, tempting the subject to act against their own interests. Freud closes by observing that the cultural suppression of aggression strengthens conscience, and that even self-destruction does not take place without libidinal satisfaction.
- 1930
Civilization and Its Discontents
Freud’s essay on the conflict between the individual and civilisation. It opens with Romain Rolland’s “oceanic feeling”, which Freud traces to the infant’s early ego-feeling rather than to a source of religion. People seek happiness by many methods, yet civilisation, which protects them against nature and regulates their relations, demands that they renounce sexual and, above all, aggressive drives. The aggression this restrains is turned back against the ego as the super-ego, and its tension with the ego is felt as a sense of guilt, much of it unconscious, that grows with civilisation. Freud presents the history of civilisation as the struggle between Eros and the death drive, and ends by asking whether Eros will prevail.
- 1971
An invited contribution to the 27th Congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association in Vienna in 1971, in which Rosenfeld approaches the theory of the life and death instincts through clinical work with narcissistic patients. He distinguishes the libidinal aspects of narcissism, in which the self is idealized through the omnipotent possession of good objects, from its destructive aspects, in which the omnipotent destructive parts of the self are themselves idealized. In destructive narcissism these parts turn against any loving dependence on an object, the analyst included, and against the parts of the self that want it. Rosenfeld likens the narcissistic organization to a gang, run like the mafia, that holds the dependent self captive and punishes any move toward help. The paper introduced the term destructive narcissism; it was reprinted in Melanie Klein Today (1988) and was later taken up by André Green and Otto Kernberg.
Show all 8 Show fewer
- 1983
Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism
A collection of André Green's essays on narcissism, some previously unpublished, by an author who had worked on the subject since 1963. Freud introduced narcissism in 1914 and let it recede after the revisions of around 1920: the opposition of life and death drives, the second topography and a new theory of anxiety. Green ties narcissism to that last drive theory. Beside the positive narcissism of the life drives, which seeks the unity of the ego, he postulates a death narcissism, which he calls negative narcissism, aiming at the ego's abolition in an aspiration towards zero. A first part treats the theory of narcissism (the same, the other and the neutral; primary narcissism as structure or state; anxiety), a second describes clinical forms (moral narcissism, the neutral gender, the dead mother), and a postface on the ego as mortal and immortal ends on the figure of a Janus-faced Narcissus. Published by Éditions de Minuit in 1983, it appeared in Andrew Weller's English translation as Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism (2001).
- 1987
Rosenfeld's last book, published shortly after his death as the first volume of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, looks back on a lifetime of work with psychotic, borderline and neurotic patients and asks why some analyses succeed and others reach an impasse. Its four parts treat the analyst's own contribution to successful and unsuccessful treatment, the influence of narcissism on the analyst's task, the influence of projective identification on the analyst's task, and a conclusion. Rosenfeld argues that an impasse is not necessarily a sign of the patient's incurability: it can arise from the analyst's misunderstanding, and it can be worked through. He gives more weight than in his earlier work to the patient's real trauma, warns that rigid or misplaced interpretation can repeat that trauma in the analysis, and distinguishes thick-skinned from thin-skinned narcissistic patients. The book caused controversy among his colleagues; a reviewer in the British Journal of Medical Psychology judged it useful both to the author's critics and to those who followed his approach.
- 1993
André Green's book on the negative in psychoanalysis. The notion comes from Hegel; Lacan brought it into psychoanalysis in his reinterpretation of Freud and later dropped it. Green gathers under the work of the negative repression, foreclosure, disavowal and negation, together with splitting and negative hallucination, to show what unites them while distinguishing their effects, which best reveal the subject's structure and shape the outcome of an analysis. After comparing Hegel and Freud, he traces the negative where it usually goes unrecognised in Freud, as in dream-work, mourning and identification, and follows Freud's clinical path from neurosis as the negative of perversion to the masochism behind the negative therapeutic reaction, whose pessimism he reads as typical of borderline structures. Later chapters treat the death drive, negative narcissism and the disobjectalising function, masochism in analytic failures, splitting in borderline cases, negative hallucination and sublimation. The negative is not only pathological: the drive in excess has to be refused for a person to belong to the human community. The book ends by asking why, for some, this no becomes a refusal to live. Published by Éditions de Minuit in 1993, it appeared in Andrew Weller's English translation as The Work of the Negative (1999).
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Work of the Negative1993 Evidence for a relation
- Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism1983 Evidence for a relation
- A Clinical Approach to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Life and Death Instincts: An Investigation into the Aggressive Aspects of Narcissism1971 Evidence for a relation
- Impasse and Interpretation: Therapeutic and Anti-Therapeutic Factors in the Psycho-Analytic Treatment of Psychotic, Borderline, and Neurotic Patients1987 Evidence for a relation
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle1920 Evidence for a relation
- Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being1912 Evidence for a relation
- The Economic Problem of Masochism1924 Evidence for a relation
- Civilization and Its Discontents1930 Evidence for a relation