Freud Instincts And Their Vicissitudes Pdf File

AbstractThis paper addresses the emergence of the ‘death drive’ in SigmundFreud’s later work, and the significance of this development for hispsychoanalytic theory as a whole. In particular, the paper argues that the‘death drive’ is a pivotal concept, articulating a connection between what arecommonly understood as the ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ functions of the psyche.Moreover, the death drive is pivotal in a second sense, in that it articulatesa turn away from the strictly empirical realm of science, to a dark and obscurefield indicated (in terms of lack), but not comprehended, by observablephenomena. Finally, the paper suggests that as Freud’s departure from hisscientific methodology into the wilderness of speculation, the death driverepresents his most valuable contribution to psychoanalysis.

With the deathdrive, Freud is able to engender a new perspective of human being: one that isnot already encompassed by the mechanistic neurological viewpoint from whichhis researches first issued. Late in his career,Sigmund Freud demonstrated what might be described as a crisis of faith withregard to the central tenets of his psychoanalytic account of the human psyche.In his paper “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” he momentarily shifts from a modeof discourse that embraces a scientific regard for the priority of evidence andexperimentation, to a highly speculative discourse that, in a particular light,appears directly to challenge his scientific perspective. Freud attempts inthis work to elucidate an aspect of human being that refuses to yield to thescientific gaze, he hypothesises, because it is residual of an inorganicheredity, existing within the organism, but ontologically prior to theinterchange of stimulus and reaction charted by neurology. That most subterraneanpocket of the psyche — the unconscious — harbours within it an even furtherinaccessible vestige of the organism’s inorganic origin, the ‘death drive.’According to Freud, this precipitate of the organism’s prehistory circumventsthe pleasure principle, which ensures a level of homeostasis in the body onlyonce it has organised itself as a functional whole.

In opposition to thepleasure principle, the ‘death drive’ — residual of a pre-organic, chaotic past— attempts to undo the organic whole. Indeed, it finds its specific pleasureprecisely in what is most painful and disturbing to the organism.Yet, while Freuddesignates the death drive as the body’s primitive — most inhumanelement — there are also intriguing connections between this most archaic andautomatic impulse and that which we understand to be most cultured, creative,and human: conscience, art, religion, or what Freud nominated as the sublimateddrive, and the superego. What he calls the highest human achievements—andpresumably considers furthest from ‘brute instinct’—are also, in part, productsof a primeval genetic legacy, according to Freud. In this manner, the ‘lowest,’the most acephalous drive, intersects with the ‘highest,’ most creative andintelligent, in the region beyond the pleasure principle. This ‘beyond’ of thepleasure principle interests me because, somewhat appropriately, it takes Freudbeyond his comfort zone as a scientific thinker, and as a respected ‘man ofletters.’ For, while the concept of the death drives is useful to Freud (forreasons that I will elaborate below), these remarks are also usually onlybrief, tangential, and speculative, and are frequently accompanied byqualifications that suggest a certain embarrassment (regarding their lackscientific objectivity) on Freud’s part. Accordingly, if Freud derived bothpleasure and discomfort from his idea of the death drive, then perhaps thisidea itself is an experience ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle.

Freud Instincts And Their Vicissitudes Pdf File Format

If this is thecase then, I would contend, it also constitutes his most valuable (i.e.,sublime) contribution to psychoanalysis.IFreud’s ‘deathdrive’ remains one of the most enigmatic and metaphysically obscure of hisconcepts. While it became central to Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan’sdevelopments of psychoanalysis, many dedicated Freudians baulk at therevelatory tone adopted by Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” where thedeath drive is introduced, and consider the concept to be eccentric at best. In1919 we find in Freud’s work what appears to be a decided break from the tenorof his previous theoretical commitments. This was the year in which he wrote on‘war neuroses,’ and completed “The ‘Uncanny’,” as well as the first draft of“Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In these works we find Freud increasinglydissatisfied with the all-encompassing scope that he had previously awarded thepleasure principle. The general hypothesis that the nervous system seeks to dischargeitself of excitation — or unpleasure — failed to explain, in a satisfactorymanner, many of his clinical observations.

Instincts And Their Vicissitudes Explained

Rather, some conditions appear to dwellin unpleasure, and Freud noted a ‘compulsion to repeat’ in many of his patientsthat signalled to him the emergence of a different type of drive, ordered byimperatives other than the pleasure principle. Take, for instance, the warveteran, who returns every night in his dreams to the carnage of war, asituation that defies Freud’s understanding — in accordance with the pleasure principle— of the dream as wish-fulfilment. Or, consider the neurotic who plays outagain in her relations with the analyst all those hopes and attendant feelingsof rejection that she first experienced in relation to her father, as if shecould not get enough disappointment. In each of these situations, the driveappears to circulate about a point of pure pain that is neither ejected from,nor neutralised by, the psychic system as the pleasure principle demands, andin fact attracts rather than repels the subject. This ‘unpleasure’ refuses tobe worked through, and the analysand is caught in its automatic movement,unable to discharge a tension that continues to build with each repetition ofthe dream, the symptom, or the transference.Initially, the‘death drive’ appears in Freud’s thought as a conceptual ‘gap’: that is, asFreud’s own bewilderment in the face of the persistent presence of pain andresistance to treatment that he found in his clinic.

Freud posits the deathdrive as a makeshift, yet alluring, appendix to his understanding of thepsychic economy. The death drive is opposed to the life drive — libido,or Eros — which builds life into greater and greater bodies, and so increasesthe opportunity for each smaller body (or cell) to survive. Conversely, thedeath drive tends toward bodily disintegration, and in due course will returnthe organism back to an ultimate equilibrium — beyond that sought by thepleasure principle — in death. Thus, while ‘libido’ attaches to objects,creating ties of affection, or ‘energy cathexes,’ the death drive destroys, andinitiates relations of conflict. It causes a build-up of tension that will leadto great psychic distress if it is not harnessed and redirected by the ego(from which libido issues).Yet, if the conceptof the death drive first came into existence in order to fill a conceptual gap,it does so only as what Lacan calls an Unbegriff, a gap concept, orconcept of lack (Lacan 1981, 26).

The death drive is the most unconscious, orconcealed, element of the unconscious: it resides beyond the ‘pleasureprinciple,’ which had attracted Freud precisely because it adheres toobservable phenomena (i.e., to a ‘physics’ of the human mind). The death drive,on the other hand, is obscure because it is more primordial than libido: infact Eros emerges from Thanatos, as its outward manifestation. Freudthus resorts to a mode of metaphysical speculation to illuminate the deathdrive.

In ‘Female Sexuality’ Freud also writes:“It is only in the malechild that we find the fateful combination of love for the one parent andsimultaneous hatred for the other as a rival. In his case it is the discoveryof the possibility of castration, as proved by the sight of the femalegenitals, which forces on him the transformation of his Oedipus complex, andwhich leads to the creation of his super-ego and thus initiates all theprocesses that are designed to make the individual find a place in the culturalcommunity. After the paternal agency has been internalised and become asuper-ego, the next task is to detach the latter from the figures of whom itwas originally the psychical representative” (Freud 1976b. Freud wrote in Civilization and its Discontents:“I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself.

It is not easy to dealscientifically with feelings” (Freud 1991d, 252)Copyright ©2005 MinervaAll rightsare reserved, but fair and good faith use with full attribution may be made ofthis work for educational or scholarly purposes.JoanneFaulkner is in the final stages of her Ph.D, at the Philosophy Program, LaTrobe University, Melbourne. Her thesis looks at the relation of affect betweenNietzsche and his reader, drawing upon psychoanalytic theory. She has publishedin Diacritics, Contretemps, and in a previousissue of Minerva.