Death drive

In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive (German: Todestrieb) is the drive toward death and self-destruction. It was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein in her paper 'Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being' (Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens) in 1912, which was then taken up by Sigmund Freud in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This concept has been translated as 'opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts'. In Pleasure Principle, Freud used the plural 'death drives' (Todestriebe) much more frequently than in the singular. In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive (German: Todestrieb) is the drive toward death and self-destruction. It was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein in her paper 'Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being' (Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens) in 1912, which was then taken up by Sigmund Freud in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This concept has been translated as 'opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts'. In Pleasure Principle, Freud used the plural 'death drives' (Todestriebe) much more frequently than in the singular. The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives. The death drive is sometimes referred to as 'Thanatos' in post-Freudian thought, complementing 'Eros', although this term was not used in Freud's own work, being rather introduced by Wilhelm Stekel in 1909 and then by Paul Federn in the present context. The Standard Edition of Freud's works in English confuses two terms that are different in German, Instinkt ('instinct') and Trieb ('drive'), often translating both as instinct; for example, 'the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state'. 'This equating of Instinkt and Trieb has created serious misunderstandings'. Freud actually refers to the term 'Instinkt' in explicit use elsewhere, and so while the concept of 'instinct' can loosely be referred to as a 'drive,' any essentialist or naturalist connotations of the term should be put in abeyance. In a sense, the death drive is a force that is not essential to the life of an organism (unlike an 'instinct') and tends to denature it or make it behave in ways that are sometimes counter-intuitive. In other words, the term death 'drive' is simply a false representation of death instinct. The term is almost universally known in scholarly literature on Freud as the 'death drive', and Lacanian psychoanalysts often shorten it to simply 'drive' (although Freud posited the existence of other drives as well, and Lacan explicitly states in Seminar XI that all drives are partial to the death drive). The contemporary Penguin translations of Freud translate Trieb and Instinkt as 'drive' and 'instinct' respectively. It was a basic premise of Freud's that 'the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle... with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure'. Three main types of conflictual evidence, difficult to explain satisfactorily in such terms, led Freud late in his career to look for another principle in mental life beyond the pleasure principle—a search that would ultimately lead him to the concept of the death drive. The first problem Freud encountered was the phenomenon of repetition in (war) trauma. When Freud worked with people with trauma (particularly the trauma experienced by soldiers returning from World War I), he observed that subjects often tended to repeat or re-enact these traumatic experiences: 'dreams occurring in traumatic have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident', contrary to the expectations of the pleasure principle. A second problematic area was found by Freud in children's play (such as the Fort/Da game played by Freud's grandson, who would stage and re-stage the disappearance of his mother and even himself). 'How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?' The third problem came from clinical practice. Freud found his patients, dealing with painful experiences that had been repressed, regularly 'obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something belonging to the past'. Combined with what he called 'the compulsion of destiny come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome', such evidence led Freud 'to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat—something that would seem more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides'. He then set out to find an explanation of such a compulsion; in Freud's own words, 'What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection'. Seeking a new instinctual paradigm for such problematic repetition, he found it ultimately in 'an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things'—the inorganic state from which life originally emerged. From the conservative, restorative character of instinctual life, Freud derived his death drive, with its 'pressure towards death', and the resulting 'separation of the death instincts from the life instincts' seen in Eros. The death drive then manifested itself in the individual creature as a force 'whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death'. Seeking further potential clinical support for the existence of such a self-destructive force, Freud found it through a reconsideration of his views of masochism—previously 'regarded as sadism that has been turned round upon the subject's own ego'—so as to allow that 'there might be such a thing as primary masochism—a possibility which I had contested' before. Even with such support, however, he remained very tentative to the book's close about the provisional nature of his theoretical construct: what he called 'the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses'.