Slightly less esoteric is Freud's theory of the death drive.
|
|
Expressions of the death drive can take two forms: external or internal.
|
|
Was it, perhaps, that I had merely survived a prolonged adolescent death drive?
|
|
Freud's concept of the Death Drive has always been a deep metaphor for me.
|
|
Now, we have a new rarefied ingredient to covet while entertaining our collective death drive.
|
|
Like Freud's concept of the death drive, that what we fear also drives us forward.
|
|
The rapid degradation of the planet has made radicalism rational and incrementalism a kind of civilizational death drive.
|
|
Carol keeps trying to choose the life she doesn't even want, with death drive as her pre-existing condition.
|
|
I used to think of cigarettes as a homeopathic treatment for my death drive, but even those, I've given up.
|
|
He explores a death drive, calling his work the "Hanging and Beheading Paintings" and titling them after people who met untimely ends.
|
|
In a way, imagining the apocalypse has always been a fantasy for young people — kind of like Freud's theory of the death drive.
|
|
Because as Freud pointed out, we do have a death drive—a drive for destruction, as well as a drive for self-preservation.
|
|
Rather, I think that the performative aspects of politics in the age of Trump indulges in the death drive — a seduction of destruction.
|
|
There's tremendous potential there for a humorous portrait of fanaticism, of the personal side of fascism as it hits its end-state death drive.
|
|
"Death Valley n°21868" (21971) reflects an interest in American subjects (especially film noir), but also the death drive of planned-obsolescence consumer culture.
|
|
It was something like what Freud called the death drive: an urge toward failure and collapse, especially of the things we want most in life.
|
|
So far, the biggest meme of 2018 has been intentionally poisoning yourself, a joke that seems to reflect a general upshift in our collective death drive.
|
|
Through a simple text-based structure, you progress through Travis Strikes Back, collecting the six death balls needed to access the actual gameplay in the Death Drive.
|
|
"There is a death drive in these smells," he said over coffee, waving a tin of authentic ambergris from the belly of a whale under my nose.
|
|
Since the heart disease death rate didn't decline this year, Ahmad speculated that it may have helped the smaller causes of death drive the overall rate up.
|
|
And as Simona Forti argued in this series, modern violence cannot simply be explained in terms of the negation of life or a subconscious, Freudian death drive.
|
|
They spiral into everything that is wrong with humanity's relationship with the natural world: ownership, possession, domination, an endless risk-seeking, thrill-hunting death drive and profound betrayal.
|
|
Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads …we must remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed, the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive.
|
|
On Thursday, I watched an intergalactic alien god of sex, drugs, and death drive his massive hoof through the body of a grimy man wearing only a Santa hat.
|
|
As Roiphe observes, this is an exemplary illustration of his own concept of the death drive, the way a person can long in some quarter of herself for annihilation or extinction.
|
|
Most people have a death drive that merely serves to balance out their life force; most people are too interested in self-preservation to entertain the idea of hurting themselves on purpose.
|
|
There's this console inside the game called the Death Drive Mark 513, and Travis goes into that console and plays the games that are on that console—they're sort of like retro games.
|
|
"For years I could only understand these pursuits of shadowed water, blind rivers and terrible depths as fierce versions of the death drive — fiercer even than what drove the most fearless mountaineers," he writes.
|
|
For many years, even as writers were discarding the more patently absurd elements of his theory—penis envy, or the death drive—they continued to pay homage to Freud's unblinking insight into the human condition.
|
|
The power of losing and negative thoughts goes unrecognized among most players, Mr. Turner said, as does the inner "will to lose" that all people have, fueled by a primal masochism and the death drive put forth by Freud.
|
|
Here you can switch out t-shirts, check the ramen blog, read faxes, get your bearings, and lament the sheer amount of steps you have to take to actually play the game aka access the other two arenas: the Death Drive Mk II and your motorcycle.
|
|
I mean it makes sense that the winter holiday is a bigger hit, because the Christmas holidays are way more amenable to the consumerist death-drive with which the West has replaced its soul, so, that probably explains why celebrating the holidays features so prominently in film and music.
|
|
" In Megan Milks's review of Socialist Realism for Bookforum, she notes that a decade ago "many queers were enamored with the alluring radicality of queer negativity" — think Lee Edelman's 2004 polemic No Future, about the queer death drive — but "in the Trump era such grandiose nihilism seems puerile.
|
|
See occurrences of "death drives" and of "death drive". 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. Subsequent psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein have defended the concept.
|
|
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.
|
|
13-4 His writings reveal an ongoing debate with Freud – whose concept of the death drive he rejected as unscientificR. Weatherall ed., The Death Drive (1999) p. 128 – over the importance of companionship as against sex in the mother-child relationship: a theme (tinged with Christian thinking) which was to influence the thinking of W. R. D. Fairbairn, and anticipate the work of D. W. Winnicott and John Bowlby.
|
|
Lacan, p. xvi and p. 234 Lacan also linked jouissance to the castration complex,Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (1997) p. 319-24 and to the aggression of the death drive.
|
|
311 and 313. In 1933 he conceded of his original formulation of the death drive 'the improbability of our speculations. A queer instinct, indeed, directed to the destruction of its own organic home!'.Freud, New, p. 139.
|
|
Depiction of Thanatos by Mexican artist Mauricio García Vega Hypnos and Thanatos: Sleep and His Half-Brother Death, by John William Waterhouse, 1874. According to Sigmund Freud, humans have a life instinct—which he named "Eros"—and a death drive, which is commonly called (though not by Freud himself) "Thanatos". This postulated death drive allegedly compels humans to engage in risky and self-destructive acts that could lead to their own death. Behaviors such as thrill seeking and aggression are viewed as actions which stem from this Thanatos instinct.
|
|
Beyond the Pleasure Principle () is a 1920 essay by Sigmund Freud that marks a major turning point in his theoretical approach. Previously, Freud attributed most human behavior to the sexual instinct (Eros or libido). With this essay, Freud went "beyond" the simple pleasure principle, developing his drive theory with the addition of the death drive(s), Todestrieb[e]. (Thanatos is the Greek personification of death, and some of Freud's followers refer to the death drive by this name.)In this work, Freud used the plural "death drives" (Todestriebe) more often than in the singular.
|
|
In Archive Fever, Derrida discusses the nature and function of the archive, particularly in Freudian terms and in light of the death drive. The book also contains discussions of Judaism and Jewish identity and of electronic technology such as e-mail.
|
|
From a philosophical perspective, the death drive may be viewed in relation to the work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His philosophy, expounded in The World as Will and Representation (1818) postulates that all exists by a metaphysical "will" (more clearly, a will to live), and that pleasure affirms this will. Schopenhauer's pessimism led him to believe that the affirmation of the "will" was a negative and immoral thing, due to his belief of life producing more suffering than happiness. The death drive would seem to manifest as a natural and psychological negation of the "will".
|
|
He also connects the idea to Freud's death drive. He goes on to define repetition as "difference without a concept" (13). Repetition is thus reliant on difference more deeply than it is opposed. Further, profound repetition will be characterized by profound difference.
|
|
"This Is a Lovesong... For the Loveless" was compared to Coldplay. "Leave Like a Ghost (Drive Away)" is about leaving a small town. Detar said "I Love You to Death (Drive Safe)" served as a "lullaby for the end of the world".
|
|
It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing ("das Ding an sich") and the death drive that goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition"—"the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order." By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand.
|
|
In his essay on the sociobiological backgrounds of Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, J. Adam Johns describes how Butler's narratives counteract the death drive behind the hierarchical impulse with an innate love of life (biophilia), particularly different, strange life.Johns, J. Adam. "Becoming Medusa: Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood and Sociobiology." Science Fiction Studies 37.3 (2010): 382–400.
|
|
Mark Lipovetsky commented that she is the most terrifying characters of the stories. She is a beautiful girl and a demonic dangerous creature at the same time. He claims that she is characterized by three major Freudian motives: the sexual power, the death drive and the castration anxiety (loss of power).Lipovetsky 2014, p. 217.
|
|
The novel relates the story of Hedwig Marga de Fontayne, the scion of a wealthy family, whose sexual frustration manifests itself as a death drive. After the death of her mother her father turns alcoholic, wasting the family's fortune. She begins to fantasize about sex and becomes a habitual masturbator, something she feels guilty about. At nineteen, Hedwig marries a man named Gerard.
|
|
Hitch-Hike (), also known as Death Drive is an Italian crime film directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile. The film stars Franco Nero and Corinne Cléry as a couple in a troubled marriage, and David Hess as a fugitive who takes them hostage. The musical score was written by Ennio Morricone. The film is based on Peter Kane's novel The Violence and the Fury.
|
|
His second book, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, explores the significance of gay literature. His third book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, is a post-Lacanian analysis of queer theory. It was reviewed by Carolyn Dever of Vanderbilt University in Victorian Studies and Antonis Balasopoulos of the University of Cyprus in the Journal of American Studies.
|
|
Freud defined libido as the instinct energy or force. Freud later added the death drive (also contained in the id) as a second source of mental energy. The origins of Freud's basic model, based on the fundamentals of chemistry and physics, according to John Bowlby, stems from Brücke, Meynert, Breuer, Helmholtz, and Herbart. In 1928, Carl Jung published a seminal essay entitled "On Psychic Energy".
|
|
N. Malberg, The Anna Freud Tradition (2012) p. 391 Among her theoretical contributions were an exploration of libidinal elements in the wish to die - the Death drive - and an examination of female masochism through the figure of Charlotte Brontë.O. Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1946) p. 209, 362, and 618 She also wrote on the link between crime, and defects in the development of ego/superego.
|
|
Robert Rowland Smith is the author of seven books. Three of these are academic. Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 1995) was based on Smith's doctoral thesis, and won a Choice award for 'Outstanding Academic Title'. Death-Drive: Freudian hauntings in literature and art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) is an examination of Freud's metapsychological works in relation to other theorists of death including Heidegger, Durkheim and Pascal.
|
|
Characteristically, he stressed the linguistic aspects of the death drive: "the symbol is substituted for death in order to take possession of the first swelling of life .... There is therefore no further need to have recourse to the outworn notion of primordial masochism in order to understand the reason for the repetitive games in ... his Fort! and in his Da!."Lacan, Ecrits pp. 124 and 103.
|
|
The object relations theory of Melanie Klein pivoted around the importance of love and hate, concern for and destruction of others, from infancy onwards.P. Marcus/A. Rosenberg, Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition (1998) p. 118-120 Klein stressed the importance of inborn aggression as a reflection of the death drive and talked about the battle of love and hatred throughout the life span.
|
|
Of his twelve, often heated and extensive books,The Lives They lived some half dealt with issues in Freud's life and work, the other half with figures from high culture such as Shakespeare and Goethe. Eissler provided a spirited defence of the death drive,P. Gay, Freud (1989) p. 768 and introduced the term 'parameter' to codify deviations from pure interpretation in the Freudian tradition.
|
|
In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1921, Freud considered the possibility of "the operation of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it".On Metapsychology, p. 287. By examining the role of repetition compulsion in potentially over-riding the pleasure principle,On Metapsychology, p. 293. Freud ultimately developed his opposition between Libido, the life instinct, and the death drive.
|
|
In Freudian psychology, eros, not to be confused with libido, is not exclusively the sex drive, but our life force, the will to live. It is the desire to create life, and favors productivity and construction. In early psychoanalytic writings, instincts from the eros were opposed by forces from the ego. But in later psychoanalytic theory, eros is opposed by the destructive death instinct of Thanatos (death instinct or death drive).
|
|
In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive () is the drive toward death and destruction, often expressed through behaviors such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness.Eric Berne, What Do You say After You Say Hello? (London, 1975) pp. 399-400. It was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein in her paper "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being" Free pdf of the full essay by the Arizona Psychoanalytic Society.
|
|
In the closing decade of Freud's life, it has been suggested, his view of the death drive changed somewhat, with "the stress much more upon the death instinct's manifestations outwards".Albert Dickson, "Editor's Introduction", Civilization, p. 249. Given "the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness", he wrote in 1930, "I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man".Freud, Civilization, pp.
|
|
Paul Ferdinand Schilder (February 15, 1886, Vienna – December 7, 1940, New York City) was an Austrian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and medical researcher. Neurological research work (in both neurophysiology and neuropathology), coupled with an active interest in philosophy, led to involvement in psychoanalysis. He became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society founded by Sigmund Freud, although he never underwent analysis himself. He deviated from accepted psychoanalytic doctrine (especially regarding the existence of a death drive) and published his own ideas.
|
|
Mark Lipovetsky commented that she is the most terrifying characters of the collection, a beautiful girl and a dangerous demonic creature at the same time.Lipovetsky 2014, p. 217. He believed that she represents the struggle and unity between Eros and Thanatos,Lipovetsky 2014, p. 220. and that she is characterized by three major Freudian motives—the sexual drive, the death drive (her realm is the realm of the dead) and the castration anxiety (loss of power).
|
|
It has even been suggested that Shinji's entering into Unit-01 is a Freudian "return to the womb", and that his struggle to be free of the Eva is his "rite of passage" into manhood. The series contains many references to philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts, such as the oral stage, introjection, oral personality, ambivalence,Platinum Edition Booklets, ADV, 2004–2005. and the death drive, including some elements of the works of Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard and others.
|
|
Eric Berne too would proudly proclaim that he, "besides having repeated and confirmed the conventional observations of Freud, also believes right down the line with him concerning the death instinct, and the pervasiveness of the repetition compulsion".Eric Berne, What Do You say After You Say Hello? (London, 1975) pp. 399-400. For the twenty-first century, "the death drive today ... remains a highly controversial theory for many psychoanalysts ... [almost] as many opinions as there are psychoanalysts".
|
|
Whereas Freud himself never named the aggressive and destructive energy of the death drive (as he had done with the life drive, "libido"), the next generation of psychoanalysts vied to find suitable names for it. Paul Federn used the term mortido for the new energy source,Eric Berne, A Layman's Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (Middlesex 1976) p. 101 and has generally been followed in that by other analytic writers.J. G. Watkins, The Therapeutic Self (1978) p.
|
|
She has written many articles on fat acceptance and gay rights issues for websites, magazines and newspapers, including Diva, the U.K.'s leading lesbian magazine and UK national newspaper The Guardian. Cooper is also news editor for RainbowNetwork.com, the largest gay and lesbian portal in the UK. She is a prolific author of zines and performs in the queercore band 'Homosexual Death Drive'. Charlotte Cooper describes her approach to fat activism: > I challenge biomedical discourse on fat through my activism.
|
|
Roy's practice is cross disciplinary, with a focus on drawing, painting and animation. Her work investigates material intelligence in a post-humanist perspective. The evolution of her practice draws upon Freud and Bataille, demonstrating modes of fantasy, eroticism, and compulsion by way of changed symbols and recognized icons. The Canadian artist's use of cartoons also aligns her with the domain of the death drive: According to Žižek, characters like Wile E. Coyote occupy a libidinal space where one can live through any catastrophe.
|
|
It is regarded as "the great reservoir of libido",Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, On Metapsychology (Penguin Freud Library 11) p. 369. the instinctive drive to create—the life instincts that are crucial to pleasurable survival. Alongside the life instincts came the death instincts—the death drive which Freud articulated relatively late in his career in "the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state."Freud, On Metapsychology p. 380.
|
|
Laplanche, Jean; Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand (2018) [1973]. "Instinct (or Drive)." 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.
|
|
She previously appeared on the show The Detour, and in the 2014 film Death Drive. Nayfack is a founding member and artistic director of New York's Musical Theatre Factory, and her one-woman show Manifest Pussy was highly regarded by the Manhattan theater scene. In 2016, she took Manifest Pussy on tour in North Carolina in response to HB2. In 2015, she received the Lilly Award, which supports women in the theater and promotes gender parity for theatrical productions, in the "working miracles" category.
|
|
However, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that the concurrence of sadism and masochism proposed in Freud's model is the result of "careless reasoning," and should not be taken for granted. Freud introduced the terms "primary" and "secondary" masochism. Though this idea has come under a number of interpretations, in a primary masochism the masochist undergoes a complete, rather than partial, rejection by the model or courted object (or sadist), possibly involving the model taking a rival as a preferred mate. This complete rejection is related to the death drive (Todestrieb) in Freud's psychoanalysis.
|
|
The essay describes humans as struggling between two opposing drives: Eros, which produces creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self- preservation; and the "death drive" (what some call "Thanatos"), which brings destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction. In sections IV and V, Freud posits that the process of creating living cells binds energy and creates an imbalance. It is the pressure of matter to return to its original state which gives cells their quality of living. The process is analogous to the creation and exhaustion of a battery.
|
|
Declaring that "the aim of life is death" and "inanimate things existed before living ones",Freud, Beyond. p. 311. Freud interprets an organism's drive to avoid danger only as a way of avoiding a short-circuit to death: the organisms seeks to die in its own way. He thus found his way to his celebrated concept of the death drive, an explanation that some scholars have labeled as "metaphysical biology". Thereupon, "Freud plunged into the thickets of speculative modern biology, even into philosophy, in search of corroborative evidence"Gay, Freud. p. 401.
|
|
Psychoanalysis, like biology, regarded these forces as physical demands made by the organism on the nervous system. However, they believed that these forces, especially the sexual instincts, could become entangled and transmuted within the psyche. Classical psychoanalysis conceives of a struggle between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, roughly corresponding to id and ego. Later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introduced the concept of the death drive, a compulsion towards aggression, destruction, and psychic repetition of traumatic events.Weiner, Human Motivation (2013), Chapter 2, "The Psychoanalytic Theory of Motivation" (pp. 9–84).
|
|
Muñoz develops a hermeneutics of "trace and residue to read the mattering of these works, their influence and world-making capacity." This world-making capacity allows for a queer futurity. Muñoz develops an argument for about queerness as horizon, hope, and futurity. Queer futurity is a literary and queer cultural theory that combines elements of utopianism, historicism, speech act theory, and political idealism in order to critique the present and current dilemmas faced by queer people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the death drive in queer theory.
|
|
Dell'Aversano believes that VHEMT fulfills Edelman's mandate because they embody the death drive rather than ideas that focus on the reproduction of the past. Although Knight's organization has been featured in a book titled Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, The Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman notes that in a phone conversation Knight seems "rather sane and self-deprecating". Weisman echoes this sentiment, characterizing Knight as "thoughtful, soft-spoken, articulate, and quite serious". Philosophers Steven Best and Douglas Kellner view VHEMT's stance as extreme, but they note that the movement formed in response to extreme stances found in "modern humanism".
|
|
Winnicott's theoretical elusiveness has been linked to his efforts to modify Kleinian views. Yet whereas from a Kleinian standpoint, his repudiation of the concepts of envy and the death drive were a resistant retreat from the harsh realities she had found in infant life, he has also been accused of being too close to Klein, of sharing in her regressive shift of focus away from the Oedipus complex to the pre- oedipal.Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London 1994) p. 120Richard Appignanesi ed., Introducing Melanie Klein (Cambridge 2006) pp. 157–8Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (London 1988) p.
|
|
It was a basic premise of Freud's that "the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle...[associated] with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure".Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", p. 275. 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.
|
|
According to Jameson, Žižek's revision looks beyond the superego as the "instance of repression and judgment, of taboo and guilt" toward a new definition that states that the superego today has become "something obscene, whose perpetual injunction is: 'Enjoy!'" Whereas the superego was once thought by Freud to prohibit certain activities, today, Žižek argues, it commands people toward the pursuit of pleasure. Jameson claims that the "death drive" is another one of Žižek's persistent fundamental themes. In his revision of the Freudian Thanatos, Žižek suggest that the death drive's true horror is that it lives through us, embodied in life itself.
|
|
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. XVIII Lacan retains Freud's dualism but in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary and not referred to different kinds of drives. For Lacan all drives are sexual drives, and every drive is a death drive (pulsion de mort) since every drive is excessive, repetitive and destructive.Position of the Unconscious, Ecrits The drives are closely related to desire since both originate in the field of the subject. But they are not to be confused: drives are the partial aspects in which desire is realized—desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations.
|
|
Others have also wondered about "inventing a so-called death instinct — is this not one way of theorising, that is, disposing of — by means of a theory — a feeling of the "demoniac" in life itself ... exacerbated by the unexpected death of Freud's daughter"?Maria Torok, in Nicolas Abraham/Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word (Minneapolis 1986). p. 90. — and it is certainly striking that "the term 'death drive' — Todestrieb — entered his correspondence a week after Sophie Halberstadt's death"; so that we may well accept at the very least that the "loss can claim a subsidiary role ... [in]his analytic preoccupation with destructiveness".Gay, Freud. p. 395.
|
|
Freud was well aware of such possible linkages. In a letter of 1919, he wrote that regarding "the theme of death, [that I] have stumbled onto an odd idea via the drives and must now read all sorts of things that belong to it, for instance Schopenhauer".Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A life for our time (London, 1989), p. 391. Ernest Jones (who like many analysts was not convinced of the need for the death drive, over and above an instinct of aggression) considered that "Freud seemed to have landed in the position of Schopenhauer, who taught that 'death is the goal of life'".
|
|
Gay, Freud, p. 402. Nevertheless, the concept has been defended, extended, and carried forward by some analysts, generally those tangential to the psychoanalytic mainstream; while among the more orthodox, arguably of "those who, in contrast to most other analysts, take Freud's doctrine of the death drive seriously, K. R. Eissler has been the most persuasive—or least unpersuasive".Gay, p. 768. Melanie Klein and her immediate followers considered that "the infant is exposed from birth to the anxiety stirred up by the inborn polarity of instincts—the immediate conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct";Hanna Segal, Introduction to the work of Melanie Klein (London, 1964), p. 12.
|
|
And while the love instinct (eros) can be commandeered by society to bind its members together, the aggressive instinct runs counter to this tendency and must either be repressed or be directed against a rival culture. Thus, Freud acknowledges there is irrevocable ill-will within the hearts of man, and that civilization primarily exists to curb and restrain these impulses. In the sixth chapter, Freud reviews the development of his concept of libido to explain why it must now be separated into two distinct instincts: the object-instinct of eros and the ego-instinct of thanatos. This 'new' concept of the death drive actually has a long developmental history in Freud’s writings, including his investigations into narcissism and sadomasochism.
|
|
Gérard Rabinovitch has developed the concept of "destructiveness" elaborating upon earlier work in phenomenological (Georg Simmel) and weberian sociology centered on the role of emotions in society. He develops the concept of the ‘death drive’ in its hetero-destructive form (destructive urge) that has been theorized in the field of psychoanalysis and which echoes Kant’s notion of Radical Evil. The notion of "destructiveness" is a powerful concept for understanding Nazism, that enduring enigma of Western culture. In his book, De la destructivité humaine, fragments sur le Béhémoth (On Human Destructiveness: figures of the Behemoth) Gérard Rabinovitch reconsiders and criticizes the limited viewpoint of political, sociological and philosophical thinkers who have understood Nazism through the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan.
|
|
Martyn Gregory Diana: The Last Days, Random House, 2010, p.74 Paul had been smoking small cigars, Cigarillos, in the hours before the crash."A tender touch, minutes before death drive", The Scotsman, 5 October 2007 Another test, backed by the opponents of the official findings, showed Paul had 20.7% in his blood at the time of death; if accurate, the rate of dispersal of carbon monoxide from the bloodstream would have meant that Paul's blood had 40% saturation a few hours earlier, and he would scarcely have been able to function at all. On 9 December 2009, it was reported that DNA samples confirm the blood samples with high alcohol levels were indeed from the driver.
|
|
Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 429 and p. 598 Ernest Jones reported with approval Bibring's measured disagreement with Freud's concept of the death drive: "Instincts of life and death are not psychologically perceptible as such; they are biological instincts whose existence is required by hypothesis alone...[&] ought only to be adduced in a theoretical context and not in discussion of a clinical or empirical nature".Bibring, in Jones, Ernest, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (Plunket Lake Press 2019 e-book) While struggling with writer's block in the States, Bibring did publish a 1954 article on the role of abreaction in what he called "emotional reliving" - a theme later developed by Vamik Volkan in his re-grief therapy.
|
|
In the twelfth chapter, "The Collapse Of The Kosmos", Wilber uses Taylor's account of the effects of the Enlightenment paradigm to show how vertical depth was collapsed into horizontal span and how the ascending drive was dissociated into the "Ego camp" (Immanuel Kant's and Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Transcendent Ego) and the "Eco camp" (Baruch Spinoza's deified Nature). Utilitarianism is described as mistaking sensory pleasure for Spirit, which ultimately resulted in a fixation on hedonism and sex in modern society. In the thirteenth chapter, "The Dominance Of The Descenders", Wilber describes how the West tried to embrace the Many through science, but failed to embrace the One through mysticism. The result was the rise of Thanatos (Sigmund Freud's death drive), and Phobos (existential fear), which are the respective pathological versions of Agape and 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".Freud, "Beyond", p. 311. 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"Freud, "Beyond", p. 328. 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".
|
|
In Seminar II Lacan deliberates on the distinction made in his first seminar between discourse analysis and the analysis of the ego, both in relation to psychoanalytical theory and practice. He claims that "analysis deals with resistances." He reviews three works by Freud: Beyond the pleasure principle (on the death drive),Sigmund Freud, S.E. XVIII, 1920 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,Sigmund Freud, S.E. XVIII, 1921 and The Ego and the Id.Sigmund Freud, S.E. XIX, 1923 Consciousness is transparent to itself, whereas the I (je) is not. The I is outside the field of consciousness and its certainties (where we represent ourselves as ego, where something exists and is expressed by the I). But it is not enough to say that "the I of the unconscious is not the ego" since we tend to think this I as the true ego.
|
|