Concept
Life drive
In Freud's last theory of the drives, introduced in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), the drives that tend to preserve life and to bind living substance into ever larger unities, which he also called Eros. They take in both the sexual drives and the drives of self-preservation that he had earlier opposed to them, and stand against the death drive. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930) describes the history of civilisation as the struggle between the two.
Development
1920
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In Jenseits des Lustprinzips Freud gathers the sexual drives and the drives of self-preservation into the life drives, Eros, which strive to combine living substance into ever larger unities, and sets them against the death drives. Das Ich und das Es builds the second drive theory on this pair.
In The Ego and the Id (1923);Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
Relations
- 1920 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In Jenseits des Lustprinzips Freud gathers the sexual drives and the drives of self-preservation into the life drives, Eros, which strive to combine living substance into ever larger unities, and sets them against the death drives. Das Ich und das Es builds the second drive theory on this pair.
- 1920 opposes Death 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.
Works
- 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.
- 1923
The book in which Freud sets out his structural model of the mind. Since much of the ego is itself unconscious, the division conscious/unconscious is not enough. Freud distinguishes the id, a term he takes from Georg Groddeck, as the reservoir of the drives; the ego, the part of the id modified by the influence of the external world, first and foremost a bodily ego; and the super-ego or ego ideal, formed by identification with the parents as the heir of the Oedipus complex. He restates the dualism of life drives and death drives, discusses fusion and defusion of the drives, the unconscious sense of guilt and the negative therapeutic reaction, and ends with the ego as a poor creature serving three masters: the external world, the libido of the id and the severity of the super-ego.
- 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.
See also
People
References
- The Ego and the Id1923Evidence for a relation
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle1920Evidence for a relation
- Civilization and Its Discontents1930Evidence for a relation