 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2008) |
 |
This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. WikiProject Psychology or the Psychology Portal may be able to help recruit one. (February 2009) |
In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive ("Todestrieb") is the drive towards death, destruction and forgetfulness. It was first proposed by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency towards cohesion and unity. The death drive is sometimes referred to as "Thanatos" in post-Freudian thought, complementing "Eros", although this term has no basis in Freud's own work, being rather introduced by Freud's secretary, Paul Federn.[1]
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. Freud actually refers to the "death instinct" as a drive, 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. 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).
Contents |
Origins
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, a phenomenon that Freud called repetition compulsion. This appeared to violate the pleasure principle, the drive of an individual to maximize his or her pleasure. Freud found this repetition of unpleasant events in the most ordinary of circumstances, even in children's play (such as the celebrated Fort/Da (Gone/There) game played by Freud's grandson, who would stage and re-stage the disappearance of his mother and even himself).
Freud's initial dichotomy between the reality principle (Ego) and the pleasure principle (Id) was unable to account for this phenomenon, as well as several other clinical phenomena, including primary masochism and depression. It was difficult to attribute such non-pleasurable activity to either the self-preserving ego or to the libidinal instincts solely focused on pleasure. He hypothesized a number of causes (particularly the idea that we repeat traumatic events in order to master them after the fact), but found them inadequate. Freud began to see masochism as a process that involves the instincts turning against the self ("change of objects"), while at the same time, reversing their content into its opposite ("reversal of content").
Freud acknowledged that while this theoretical construction is of some aid to the theory of instincts, it was quite clear to him that such a theory, solely based on sexual, self-preserving instincts, is insufficient, writing that "the true prototypes of the relation of hate are derived not from sexual life, but from the ego's struggle to maintain itself" and that "hate, as relation to objects, is older than love."
To explain this discrepancy, Freud postulated the existence of a fundamental death drive that would counterbalance the tendency of beings to do only what they find pleasurable. Organisms, according to this idea, were driven to return to a pre-organic, inanimate state. In doing so, Freud kept his earlier instinct theory almost intact, while omitting the property of reversal of content used to compensate for non-pleasure-principle behaviours of the sexual instincts, replacing it with a separate instinct of destruction and aggression not influenced by the pleasure principle. Thus, for example, masochism is no longer the reversal of content of the sexual/self-preserving instincts, but rather the change of objects of sadism from external to internal, notably to the ego. Sadism is thus considered "a direct manifestation of the death instinct".
Clinical application
Freud applied this new theoretical construct to the wrongdoings of Western civilization and social life. In particular, he connected aggression directly with the "restriction of the instincts" from both religious and political institutions, and summed up his analysis by writing that "it is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression." Following this thought, he also made a connection between group life and innate aggression, where the former comes together more closely by directing aggression to other groups, an idea later picked up by group analysts like Wilfred Bion. He also made the point that "instinctual aggression [is] the greatest impediment to civilization, which is in the service of Eros" and continues, "[whose purpose is] to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind."
References
See also
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
