Death instinct

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With the death drive , Sigmund Freud introduced one of his most controversial terms into the theory of psychoanalysis . The death instinct - often also in the plural, the death instincts - forms the opposite pole to the life instincts (eros). Freud himself emphasized that his thoughts on the death instinct were “far-reaching speculation”.

Later this drive was often referred to as Thanatos (with the juxtaposition "Eros and Thanatos"), with the Greek god of death Thanatos serving as the namesake.

General

The title Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the 1920 work, in which Freud elaborates his reflections on the death drive, indicates Freud's understanding of the same: He strives to return life to the inorganic state of the inanimate, rigidity and death . Freud also understands the repetition compulsion as an expression of the death instinct, in general the striving of the subject for maintenance and standstill, as is expressed, among other things, in the ritualized action of obsessional neurosis .

In the anthropological concept of psychoanalysis is the death drive around a the life instinct and the libido opposite impulse . While eros tends towards cohesion and union, the death instinct strives for dissolution of this unity, for scattering and dissolution of bonds. Normally, however, according to Freud, the death and life instincts are mixed together , provided that a healthy sexual relationship always includes an aggressive admixture in order to "conquer" the partner. The disturbance of the balance between the two tendencies leads to mental illness .

Regression

The desire for the annihilation of the living can be directed towards the subject as well as towards other persons. In the first case, the death instinct takes the form of autoaggression or regression , ideally as a desire to return to the womb, i.e. a prenatal (prenatal) state. Regression can also express itself in the fetishistic fascination for inanimate things, in extreme cases up to necrophilia and coprophilia . Finally, Freud also connects the death instinct with the anal character.

aggression

If the death instinct is directed at other people, it manifests itself in a destructive instinct , the desire to destroy and hurt others, in a weakened form, for example in the sexual variety of sadomasochism . But aggression does not always have to be destructive - it often serves to preserve life, i.e. counteracting death, for example in a defensive war, and generally in defensive measures. In addition, destructive drive energy can also be converted into productive, such as artistic activities , via the detour of sublimation .

War and destructive character

For Freud, the experience of the First World War played a special role in the development of the conception of the death instinct, which revealed an unprecedented level of human desire for destruction. In his book Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), Erich Fromm analyzed, among others, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler as "destructive" characters pathologically dominated by the death instinct.

reception

Freud's conception of a death instinct, which he clung to until his death, remained hotly controversial even among orthodox representatives of psychoanalysis . Many analysts denied the primordial death drive hypothesis and tried instead to understand aggression in response to renunciation and frustration . The death instinct model also leads one to overlook the productive aspects of aggression.

Nevertheless, it took over a decade for public criticism to be articulated within the Freud School. Wilhelm Reich , one of the most respected members of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPV) in the 1920s , wrote an article in 1931 claiming to have refuted the death drive theory. After reading the manuscript, Freud decided, according to his diary, to take “steps against Reich”. Although he let the article pass, he had Reich expelled from the IPA in 1934.

The debate about the death instinct was very heated within psychoanalysis because Sometimes also touched ideological levels. Communist and Marxist- oriented psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Reich or Otto Fenichel turned decisively against the postulate of a death drive beyond the pleasure principle. It was also criticized that with such a theory war and genocide as well as social and economic exploitation etc. can be legitimized as irreversible by reducing them to a biological level. The critical analysis of the specific causes of aggression and destructiveness is no longer necessary. For Reich, these phenomena are not to be understood beyond, but within the pleasure principle : Only the suppression and alienation from basic libidinal needs mediated by social institutions (family to state) form people who are incapable of freedom and freedom, including sexuality , hating people with a sado -Masochistic basic structure.

The argument between Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich about the death drive is also the central point of departure in the book Der Urschock: Our Psyche, the Culture and the Death of the Italian psychoanalyst Luigi De Marchi , the author of the first extensive monograph on the life and work of Reich. For De Marchi, warding off death is the key to understanding the whole of human cultural history. Accordingly, he interprets the theoretical controversy between Freud and Reich as an evasion of the deeper problem: “Reich is certainly right: there is indeed no death drive. There is no unconscious desire for self-destruction, as Freud strangely and stubbornly assumed, in order to interpret a phenomenon like masochism. (...) But even Reich is not in possession of the whole truth. For if it is true that man's tendency to inflict terrible suffering on himself and on others is often the result of a poisoned society, it is also true that there is something far more terrible than the death instinct, as Freud accepted and Reich denied : There is death, the fear of death and, in humans, the consciousness of death . ”(Italics in the original).

Other successors of Freud, especially from the schools of Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan , explicitly defended the idea of ​​the death drive. Lacan writes: "Anyone who [...] omits the death instinct from his teaching totally ignores it." (Lacan: Subversion of the Subject , p. 177)

Lacan, however, deviates significantly from Freud's conception when he does not understand the death drive as an individual drive, but as an aspect that is inherent in every drive. He also does not identify the death drive with the return to the inorganic, i.e. a pre-cultural state of nature , but as a component of culture itself: for him, the death drive is not a biological term, but belongs to the “ symbolic order ”. (cf. Evans: Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis , p. 307 f.)

Following Lacan, Slavoj Žižek also interprets the death instinct:

“The Freudian death instinct has nothing to do with the desire for self-annihilation, for a return to the inorganic absence of any vital tension; rather, it is exactly the opposite of dying - a name for the 'undead', eternal life itself, for the terrible fate of being trapped in guilt and pain in the endless cycle of repetition of wandering around. The paradox of Freud's 'death instinct' is therefore that Freud uses it to designate its exact opposite, namely the way in which immortality appears within psychoanalysis, an uncanny excess of life, an 'undead' urge that transcends the (biological) cycle of Life and death, persisting from arising and passing away. The real lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never simply 'just life': people are not just alive, they are obsessed with the strange urge to enjoy life excessively and are passionately attached to an excess that stands out and that brings the normal course of things to failure. "

In Catherine Malabou's work , the death drive theorem plays an important role in rethinking the relationship between neuroscience , psychoanalysis, philosophy and ideological criticism through the use of the term plasticity .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wilhelm Reich: The masochistic character. A sex-economic refutation of the death instinct and the compulsion to repeat. In: International Journal of Psychoanalysis . Volume 18, 1932, pp. 303-351; later included as a chapter in Reich's book Character Analysis (1933; extended version 1970 ff.)
  2. ^ Sigmund Freud: Shortest Chronicle. Diary 1929-1939. Edited by Michael Molnar. Frankfurt / M .: Stroemfeld 1996; Entry from January 1, 1932
  3. ↑ See anonymously (= Reich): The exclusion of Wilhelm Reich from the International Psychoanalytic Association as well as Karl Fallend, Bernd Nitzschke (Ed.): Der 'Fall' Wilhelm Reich. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997
  4. ↑ Luigi De Marchi: Biografia di un'idea , Sugar Editore, Milano 1970 (XVII, 568 pp.); French edition 1973
  5. ↑ Luigi De Marchi: Der Urschock: our psyche, culture and death , Luchterhand-Literaturverlag, Darmstadt 1988, p. 16
  6. ^ Slavoj Žižek: Parallax. Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp 2006, p. 61.