Abstract
Introduction: David Lichtenstein
The title given to this discussion—a panel presented in June 2022—is something of a provocation: Thanatos: Is Freud’s Concept Still Relevant? In fact, the human capacity for violent destruction has never been more evident. War, senseless murder, the despoiling of nature, the exploitation and degradation of human life—do we psychoanalysts have something relevant to say about this? Can we sort out our different ideas about the sources and meanings of this capacity for death, killing, and destruction?
Thanatos is a somewhat metaphysical concept that Freud introduced in the development of his idea of Todestrieb. I use the German word advisedly because its translation as either death drive or death instinct immediately raises questions about Freud’s intended meaning. So simply unpacking the title of this discussion—Thanatos / death drive / death instinct—suggests lines of difference and debate about what Freud was up to and what use we analysts might now make of it. It is our intention that drawing out these differences will be helpful regarding contemporary problems in our field. The different words and translations may reveal generative ambiguities. In which case, apparent dead-ends can instead be moments of invention, as an impasse in treatment can be the occasion of new work. Thus, the death drive might indeed have something to do with creation, an important theme in the discussion that follows.
Psychoanalysis demands that we think simultaneously in three dimensions: personal history, psychic structure, and the social order (or disorder). The ruptures in each of these dimensions and their interplay in the transference call us as analysts.
In the early 1920s, when Freud was reworking the place of death in his metapsychology, he had recently confronted the Great War in Europe—the War to End All Wars, as it was called by a writer of science fiction—along with the death of his daughter Sophie in the global influenza pandemic. He was also facing the clinical problems of persistent resistance and repetition in the treatments he was conducting and supervising. Freud was also developing the structural model and thus working on the concept of the superego (Uber-Ich), which, as emerges in this discussion, has significant links to the death drive.
Out of this matrix arose an axiom that has challenged psychoanalysts ever since. It is that death plays a fundamental motivating role in human life, that people not only seek death and seek to avoid it but that this interplay is formative of the human subject and of all social relations. This principle continues to be rejected by many psychoanalysts and yet is recognized as essential by many others, including the authors of the papers to follow. It is an unresolved element in our theories. We will be addressing how locating death as a psychic function led Freud to fundamentally rethink the central notion of the psychoanalytic drive.
Thanatos, aside from being deployed as a metaphysical principle, is simply the Greek word for death. However, it is also the name of the ancient God who was the twin of Hypnos, the god of sleep. Thus, the Greeks in their way marked a link between sleeping and dying.
Shakespeare took up this link through the words of perhaps the most famous neurotic in literature: “. . . to die: to sleep— / No more, and by a sleep to say we end / The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wished” (Hamlet 3.1.59–63).
However, Hamlet goes on in that soliloquy to reflect on how the wish to end heartache through the sleep of death is no solution. There is the chance of an afterlife to consider and thus a total, eternal end is needed if a real solution is to be found. In fact, the entire play is about the problem of two deaths, a problem, as we shall hear in the papers that follow, that both Jacques Lacan and the Kleinian analyst Betty Joseph quite independently recognized as fundamental to the psychoanalytic perspective on death. What is this second death, this symbolic destruction of the psyche that both Lacan and Joseph reference? How might it be linked to Freud’s Thanatos as a metaphysical force such that the apparent differences among our theories might find a point of meeting?
From the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare to Freud, Klein, and Lacan. This discussion is dedicated to a theme that remains pressing in our clinical work and in its relation to the profoundly destructive forces in contemporary social disorder. Freud’s reworking of his structural theory in light of his reworking of the drives and his introduction of Thanatos established the foundation. Melanie Klein’s attention to early infantile expressions of envy and hatred as universal and significant formative elements in subjective being became a fundamental step in situating the death drive in our clinical work. Jacques Lacan’s recognition that the symbolic function in the human psyche in its effects and in its limits involves a formal relation to death not as an organic process but indeed on a conceptual level, a kind of second death that is an inextricable part of life, reframes the death drive in ways that elaborate the thought of Freud and Klein.
In what follows, three authors, Sarah Ackerman, Lynne Zeavin, and Derek Hook, will present conceptualizations of the death instinct—from a Freudian, a Kleinian, and a Lacanian perspective, respectively. Then, after the presentation of a clinical example by Mark Goldblatt, these authors will turn these theoretical lenses to the clinical material, to flesh out the clinical implications of the death instinct.
Freud’s Conceptualization Of The Death Instinct: Sarah Ackerman
Freud maintained a dialectical approach to his theory of the mind throughout his life. He began with a conflict between the self-preservative and the sexual instincts, imagining a tension between ego instincts centered around self-preservation and libidinal instincts driving toward sexual satisfaction. During this time, Freud was working with a topographical model, where the unconscious was conceived as a “cauldron full of seething excitations,” and the conscious mind developed defenses to ward off the unpleasure caused by allowing these raging desires into awareness (1933a).
Over time, this model began to burst at the seams. Freud became increasingly aware that the defenses against unconscious impulses were themselves unconscious, meaning that the unconscious was not entirely a pot of desires, but also a knee-jerk repudiation of those desires—a range of moral prescriptions and judgments, a need for punishment, or an unconscious sense of guilt. In “On Narcissism” and “Mourning and Melancholia,” published in 1914 and 1917 respectively, we can hear Freud troubling with a sense that we have some kind of unconscious conscience, which drives us to block off untoward impulses without knowing it. Namely, in “On Narcissism,” Freud posits that our ego-libido, which fuels the feelings of megalomania that we see in young children, shifts into a force toward repression, shunning urges that are culturally unacceptable but preserving a place for self-love in our attachment to our ideal ego. “What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (p. 94). We can feel Freud’s reach for the structural model, and specifically for the superego, which he would propose in 1923 in “The Ego and the Id.” Understanding the unconscious nature of superego proscriptions destabilized Freud’s perspective on the instincts, and Freud would need to introduce the death instinct before he could conceptualize the structural model. The question that was pressing on Freud was why we keep ethical constructs out of awareness. This led him to theorize about the role of aggression. After wedding the self-preservative instincts to the sexual instincts under the concept of Eros, Freud could reveal a novel instinctual element, which he called Thanatos. The death instinct “is at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter” (1933b, p. 211).
Why did Freud need a death instinct to theorize the triad of id, ego, and superego? What was crucial about the structural theory was the notion that aspects of the ego and the superego are outside of our awareness—but how does the death instinct enter into this?
Freud conceives of the death instinct after musing about war veterans who had repeated traumatic dreams that seemed to be aberrations of the idea of wish fulfillment, as well as his observations of Ernst, his little grandson who was so driven to throw things away (“Fort!” “Gone!”) and at times to haul them back (“Da!” “There!”). While he could understand the sense of mastery and the opportunity to turn passive into active in these phenomena, he was also impressed by the relentless need to repeat. The death instinct, then, embodied a powerful urge deep within us to return to a state of inertia. This, Freud conceived, is written into our DNA—there before Eros or libido or the ego, part of our originary narcissistic structure. Loewald points out that the idea of the death instinct is not entirely new. Freud’s model of the pleasure principle—this idea that we seek to diminish all excitations, understood as unpleasurable—suggests that we seek a kind of homeostasis that is not all that different from inertia. However, Loewald also notes that at this moment Freud radically alters his meaning of the word instinct: the death instinct is a profound shift away from the earlier model, where Freud used the word drive. This new dialectic of Eros and Thanatos, says Loewald, “has connotations of primary polar forces universally applicable along the scale of cosmic evolution” (Loewald 1971, p. 61).
Before we go further, I would like to pause to consider Freud’s path. He diminishes the importance of a self-preservative drive only to replace it with a self-destructive one. This seems parsimonious, and even poetic. In a way, we might imagine self-preservation and self-destruction to be opposing sides of the same coin. But it is worthy of consideration why Freud didn’t pair Eros with pure, outward aggression. He will tell us that we never see the death instinct in its pure form and that we mostly catch sight of it as it has been projected outward into aggression, so why did he need to dream up this instinct in this particular way, a way in which we have to rest on his assertion, because it is not outwardly observable? Let’s hold on to this question as we proceed.
The death instinct is the source for qualities that Freud refers to as dumb, mute, daemonic, relentless, the uncanny as well as entropy. It is imbricated into the structural model, the negative therapeutic reaction, the unconscious sense of guilt, and the repetition compulsion. The superego plays a particularly special role in relation to the death instinct. Freud understood the origin of conscience, the emergence of the superego, as springing from the death instinct. The superego, then, is the closest embodiment of the death instinct, and in melancholia we witness “a pure culture of the death instinct . . . [that] in fact often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death” (1923, p. 53). We cannot truly conceive of the superego without relying on the concept of the death instinct, and the extent to which we employ a notion of the superego in our work reflects an assumption of the workings of the death instinct, whether we acknowledge this or not.
Freud would go on to describe Eros and Thanatos as “our mythology,” “mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness” (1933a, p. 95). However, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), written ten years after Freud conceived of Thanatos, Freud confesses: To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way. To my mind, they are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than any other possible ones; they provide that simplification, without either ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific work. I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with erotism; but I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of lives [pp. 119–120].
We see then that the death instinct covers a vast terrain for Freud, encompassing sadism and masochism, but also the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness. I would argue that it is in Freud’s nature to look for what lies behind our outward aggression, assuming that the unconscious sources of destructive behavior are more elemental, more daemonic. The death instinct fuels outward violence like the war in the Ukraine, but also our impulse to self-destruction, as in our greedy production of greenhouse gases that only hasten the end of humanity.
Much of Freud’s later work, from Civilization and Its Discontents to “Analysis, Terminable and Interminable” (1937), are incomprehensible without an understanding of the death instinct. With this instinct in mind, Freud could finally reckon with masochism. He could speculate more specifically about the sense of guilt that is written into human nature, as we try to withstand the demands of civilization. I would add that clinically the death instinct revolutionized Freud’s understanding of the practice of psychoanalysis. I will return to this in my clinical discussion.
The Kleinian Perspective On The Death Instinct: Lynne Zeavin
A relentless and exhaustive uncertainty that goes well beyond the nameless dread and existential uncertainty of one’s own individual death or the death of those one loves—to something more diffuse, more all-encompassing, the collapse of whole systems of material sustenance, the death of an intelligible social order, the annihilation of the planet.
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At a time when anxieties over survival are rampant, this topic could not be more timely. My task is to describe Melanie Klein’s theorization of the death instinct, which, though applicable to the social world, has traditionally been read as profoundly intrapsychic. Klein construes the death instinct as a persistent and unconscious phantasy that is part of a lifelong psychic struggle. For Klein both the object and a rudimentary ego are present from birth, and the drive is intrinsically connected to and expressed within relations with objects. Klein regarded the death instinct (as postulated by Freud) as being inscribed in the very earliest experiences registered in the infant’s mind. In other words, for Klein the infant is born already having an apprehension of death. This awareness originates along with the residual anxieties from birth to which Klein gives the name annihilation anxiety. Annihilation anxieties originate in the death drive, and they likewise fuel it. The anxieties generated by the death drive form a substrate of psychic experience basic to all development and constitute one of the bases for Klein’s paranoid schizoid position; in early life the infant is driven to rid itself of these terrifying anxieties (which are in part fueled by the infant’s own destructive urges), splitting them off or projecting them into the object while taking in good experiences (on the side of the life drive, if these are available) that potentially modify it.
There are a number of ways in which the death instinct colors our relationships—both to ourselves and our world of objects—which David Bell (2015) has summarized as growing out of three main models. I am drawing on Bell’s formulations in the summary that follows:
The aim of the death instinct is “the destruction of life and all that is identified with living, in particular thought,” and the capacity to take in, and perceive, capacities that thought itself depends upon. The pleasure of the death drive is an “instantaneous pure pleasure in destruction” (p. 412), often thought by the Kleinians to be an expression of a primary envy. Envy itself is part of a biologically rooted destructive force in the mind.
The death drive is directed at an overall deadening of both the self and its objects. It prevents development by imposing a kind of paralysis on self and other which gives rise to a sense of satisfaction. It is easy to imagine how the satisfaction taken from deadening one’s object or the object’s capacities informs the transference and works against the development of something creative and good in therapeutic work.
The death drive might operate more as an enduring disposition, which becomes manifest as a “seductive lure into mindlessness.” Its main activity then is in the pursuit of “a deadening passivity” that itself undermines engagement with life and creativity (p. 412).
In her paper on the clinical utility of the death instinct, Hanna Segal (1993) describes how at the end of Jack London’s Martin Eden (1909), Martin commits suicide by drowning. As he sinks, he finds himself trying to swim. Segal: “It was the automatic instinct to live. He ceased swimming, but the moment he felt water rising above his mouth his hands struck out sharply with a lifting movement. ‘This is the will to live,’ he thought, and the thought was accompanied by a sneer” (p. 55).
Segal makes much of this sneer as an expression of hatred and contempt for the part of oneself that wishes to live: One could formulate the conflict between the life and death instinct in purely psychological terms. Birth confronts us with the experience of needs. In relation to that experience there can be two reactions, and both, I think, are invariably present in all of us, though in varying proportions. One, to seek satisfaction for the needs: that is life-promoting and leads to object seeking, love, and eventually object concern. The other is the drive to annihilate the need, to annihilate the perceiving experiencing self, as well as anything that is perceived [p. 55].
The turn to the inorganic then represents a turning away from the pain of life and psychic pain. If pain comes from living, annihilation represents the killing off of the perceiving self and the object perceived.
Freud referred to the superego as a pure culture of the death instinct in cases of severe obsessional neurosis and melancholia. The Kleinians too—Rosenfeld (1971), Bion (1962), Segal (1993), O’Shaughnessy (1999) in particular—posit a form of superego development that is at the behest of the death drive. What Freud had described in melancholia as a “superego that succeeds in driving the ego into death” (1923, p. 36) is taken up by Bion as the ego-destructive superego that attacks the ego and “entices it to turn away from life, to dissociate from its objects, and ultimately to destroy itself” (O’Shaughnessy 1999, p. 176), which is basically an iteration of the melancholic superego Freud had described, though now with an emphasis on internal object relationships and their lived expressions and moral imperatives.
The workings of the ego-destructive or melancholic superego as described by Freud and Bion influence the lifelong conflict between love and destructiveness that for Klein is at the heart of the human struggle. It is the struggle each of us must engage. As development proceeds, the superego’s severity can be modified by love and understanding—and yet, importantly, the malign superego mocks understanding itself. Klein herself (1958) could be somewhat optimistic about this, stating that the archaic superego originates as a split-off part of the ego, which contains the destructive impulses and thereby protects the integrity of the self. Thus, the primitive superego works in its early stages as a repository for all the bad urges and feelings that are split off there. Klein believes that this rudimentary superego is able to take in aspects of the life instincts and loving experiences and if it is able to do so, it can change its character. She refers to this as a process of integration—of the life drives along with the destructive urges and phantasies characteristic of the death drive. “The death instinct,” she writes, “is bound, with the result that the action of the super-ego ranges from restraint of hate and destructive impulses, protection of the good object and self-criticism, to threats, inhibitory complaints and persecution” (p. 240).
For Bion (1959, 1962), what Klein refers to as integration rests on a capacity to make links—inside oneself and one’s mind and with one’s objects. The capacity to make links is an expression of the epistemophilic drive—the drive for knowledge. Bion described a principle, K, which signifies that thinking always involves a connection with emotion. Minus K is a tendency that separates thought from feeling, shears ideas of their significance, and attacks meaning and understanding. For Bion, minus K refers to a destructive process in the mind that is fueled by the death drive.
And then there is the enjoyment of pain—is this on the side of the death drive or the life drive? Freud (1924) writes that “even the subject’s destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satisfaction” (p. 170). Bell (2015) usefully clarifies that it is not the pleasure derived from the satisfaction of any particular desire, but a pleasure that derives from the negation of all desire that Freud is describing here—and that the contemporary Kleinians have further developed in subsequent discussions of the death drive.
Certainly there is pleasure in the triumph of the death-dealing part over the wish to live which, in analysis and in the transference can be felt as triumph over the analyst’s efforts to think and to work. Martin Eden regards his wish to live with a sneer. This sneer (of triumph and contempt), whether conscious or not, underpins the negative therapeutic reaction and fuels the sadistic defeat of the analyst. It is present also in the masochistic pleasure that lies at the heart of an identification/enthrallment with the sadistic superego. In other words, such an identification propels a sense of triumph over the part of oneself that might wish to grow and to live.
Betty Joseph (1982) has described this as a powerful pull toward despair and death in certain people which she insists is not a longing for peace or freedom from effort; she writes that “indeed, just to die, although attractive, would be no good. There is a felt need to know and to have the satisfaction of seeing oneself being destroyed” (p. 456). This, which resonates with Lacan’s idea of a second death, is in a nutshell the profound dilemma of the death drive.
A Lacanian Conceptualization Of The Death Drive: Derek Hook
What does a Lacanian approach have to offer with respect to how we think of the death drive? It is worth noting here, at the outset, that Lacan’s reconceptualization of Freud’s notion of the death drive does not amount to one theory, but to a series of retheorizations dispersed across his work (Hook 2016). I will take up two tasks here. The first is to state very explicitly what the death drive is not for Lacan. The second is to highlight six salient concepts that emerge in Lacan’s reconceptualization of Freud’s idea of the death drive, concepts of particular value in conducting clinical work with patients in states of extreme duress.
For Lacan, the death drive is not biological; it is not, in the literal sense, an instinct. It is not an organic craving for inertia or an impulse to self-annihilation; it is most certainly not a Nirvana-like release of tension or one of two cosmic forces (i.e., Thanatos as opposed to Eros) (Žižek 1989). Well then, what is it? Perhaps the most direct way of responding to this question is to stress that the death drive is an inherent capacity within the drive itself. What we are dealing with then, from a Lacanian standpoint, is not so much a bifurcation, a splitting of drive into two opposed directions, as it is the inherent potentiality of the drive. A binary conceptualization will not suffice for Lacan once we acknowledge that any ostensibly life-sustaining drive can become caught in a jouissance-generating circuit of repetition that takes the subject beyond the parameters of pleasure, beyond the realm of instinctual or life-sustaining practices.
The death drive then, in Lacan’s words, “is not a perversion of instinct, but a desperate affirmation of life” (1966, p. 263). It is, in this sense, the opposite of what it appears; it is an excess of life, pursued beyond the limits of pain or self-preservation. The factor of jouissance—that is, the painful arousal of libidinal gratification—is impossible to avoid here. What this concept highlights for us is that gratification and pain are perhaps never quite so distinct as we would like to believe. Indeed, the borderline between bodily intensity and the traumatic is far less clear-cut than we imagine (Leader 2020).
Drive / Surplus Life / Jouissance
We have foregrounded three ideas then: (1) the death drive as inherent potentiality within any instance of drive; (2) the death drive as expression of pure excessive or surplus life; and (3) the inescapability of jouissance in respect of the death drive. I think this goes some way to “humanizing” the concept, to avoiding an implicit disowning which comes with readily identifying the death drive in others, others who seem at times less than human because of how much they appear to embody this notion (in extreme, self-damaging acts, for example). By the same token, it helps to mitigate the sensationalizing tendency that often creeps into everyday references to the death drive. While it is possible within Lacanian theory to make a distinction between pathological and nonpathological instantiations of the death drive (Hook 2020)—a fact that perhaps sets Lacanian accounts of such phenomena apart from many other psychoanalytic accounts—it helps here to note that we all endeavor to “find a way” with jouissance. We all attain forms of libidinal gratification, and as such are all, in some way, on a path that potentially unfolds to self-damaging excess.
Another counterintuitive Lacanian idea: the death drive is itself a form of agency. In fact, the death drive, as libidinal surplus, as life-in-excess-of-life, is fundamentally denaturing; it is a decisive factor in what makes us human (Žižek 2010). How so? It enables us to override not just the boundaries of pleasure, but the limits of instinct, most particularly, of our instincts of self-preservation. In this sense the death drive is definitively not natural; it enables us to transcend an existence as merely natural (that is, instinct-governed) beings. We could say then that the death drive underpins both acts of great courage and of great—and at times horrific—destruction. This then is the fourth Lacanian idea worth highlighting: the death drive is a particular form of psychic agency—terrible, formidable, and distinctly human—that ensures that we surpass an existence as merely instinctual beings.
The Two Deaths
An important qualification must now be made. We have stressed that Lacan is decidedly against thinking of the death drive as a kind of inbuilt will to annihilation. Yet, while there is in Lacan’s psychoanalysis an emphasis on the death drive as unrelenting life-in-excess-of-life, as a push to jouissance that is willing to sacrifice virtually everything in pursuit of enjoyment, destruction admittedly does play its part. Here it helps to reference Lacan’s notion of the second death (1959–1960), that is, a death, typically of a symbolic sort, that in some way exceeds or preempts biological death.
The death drive doesn’t aim merely to bring a biological life to an end (although this can of course be part of its broader agenda). We should think about the destruction that the death drive is capable of in broader terms. An illustrative example: the Marquis de Sade allegedly requested, upon his death, that all his possessions be destroyed and that his place of burial be unmarked. Disingenuous as such a wish may have been, it indicates a symbolic death occurring in addition to a biological death. A melancholic patient who was incessantly preoccupied with suicide—and who presented many detailed suicide plans in sessions—evoked this notion of a second death, a death of a higher order, when he said, “I don’t just want to die, I want to never have existed.” What ultimately prevented him from killing himself was that he didn’t want his body to be found—that, after all, would mean a funeral, a memorial, a service, an obituary; in other words, a type of symbolic life. He preferred to remain as symbolically dead as possible, anonymous, unrecognized, unknown. In a striking similarity to Sade’s alleged wish, he preferred that all physical markers of his existence might themselves be erased. The notion of the second death is the fifth idea in our brief survey of Lacanian contributions to the concept of the death drive. Let us now turn to a sixth: the assertion that the death drive invariably entails an instance of creation.
The “Creationist Dimension”
Given the importance of the symbolic order for Lacan, one understands that death for him is always more than merely biological: the death drive needs be situated in the historical domain. Death connotes not merely “the possible end date of the individual’s life” but must be grasped in relation to the historicity of the subject (Lacan 1966, p. 262).
The most extreme instantiations of the death drive, imagined or otherwise, are made possible via the symbolic order. Only humans can contemplate or bring about the end of everything, only human beings can conceptualize totalizing negation or take up a campaign of systematic genocide. All of this is to say that for Lacan we need to conceptualize the death sought by the death drive on a large scale, as the possibility of a type of radical effacement. It entails the obliteration of social relations, symbolic ties, bonds, identifications, etc., whose destruction is often far more impactful and long-lasting than the loss of a biological life. So, we might ask, with respect to any act of physical destruction, what, beyond the range of material or biological life, is being destroyed in the act of destroying something? An example: when rape is used as an instrument of war and is directed at the partners, wives, daughters, or family members of the enemy, the idea is that those families might themselves be destroyed, given that the bonds holding them together will presumably be rendered unsustainable. A further question comes to the fore, especially when we bear in mind the rather disturbing notion of agency noted above: what is being created by virtue of what is being destroyed? In view of the example just cited, we might say: a thirst for revenge that might well last several generations, a radicalized sense of purpose, a communal identification or sense of solidarity, etc. Bluntly put: the death drive is not just about death. A radical instance of negation might, for instance, serve very powerfully to clarify and substantiate an identification.
We can make sense of the oddly creationist dimension to Lacan’s take on the death drive by referring to Darian Leader (2020), who stresses that “Subjectivity and self-harm . . . [can] share the same space” (p. 79). The idea here is that an act of refusal or destruction can be foundational for individuation. Destruction and desire need not be opposed; they can work together, operating in conjunction, especially when it comes to striking distance from an Other intent on determining one’s identity. Desire, after all, can take precisely the form of a refusal of the demands of the Other. “Without refusal” says Leader, there might be little other option than assimilation to the Other’s demand, which effectively negates the subject. This act involves a certain kind of self-harming satisfaction, as subtraction brings with it a measure of both pain and fulfillment [p. 79].
Leader notes that such a convergence of suffering and gain can be seen in a wide variety of psychic phenomena, from sulking to the political drama of Brexit. What mattered in Brexit, despite numerous arguments explaining why arguments for leaving the EU were demonstrably wrong, was a pure . . . act of refusal. Europe was the best and only real thing people [in the UK] had to say No to. . . . Even politicians who were perfectly aware of the potential catastrophes that might ensue stuck with the Brexit trajectory, in an unreconstructed gesture of self-harm [pp. 79–80].
Form Rather Than Content
We have introduced six ideas that, for Lacan, are crucial when thinking about the death drive. Namely, death drive (1) as inherent to drive; (2) as excessive / surplus life; (3) as necessitating jouissance; (4) as a form of agency; (5) as related to more than one mode of death; and (6) as entailing the dimension of creation. The number of auxiliary conceptualizations at play here alerts us to something. Lacan is notably reticent to accord the death drive the status of a primary explanation when thinking about psychic life. We find this, interestingly, also in the work of Jonathan Lear (2000). What is labeled Thanatos, Lear argues, can be thought of as an inconsistency within the psychic apparatus itself. Lear argues that Freud has erroneously imported a teleological principle into psychoanalytic theory. We can “sketch a picture of the mind that is functioning with an inherent tendency toward disruption—[indeed, as a ‘self-disrupting organism’] and not thereby commit ourselves to that disruption’s being the expression of an overarching principle” (p. 107).
While from a Lacanian perspective it is essential that we retain this concept—Lacan insisted very strongly on this—Lear’s critical position brings two ideas to the fore. First, the death drive is less a thing, a force, a substantive something, than a form, which is to say, a tendency, a gravitation, a repetitive insistence, a trajectory toward something excessive. Second, if we accept Lear’s critical position, we should not rely on the death drive in and of itself in an explanatory capacity. We should treat it rather as a movement or a tendency, an inherence that occurs within a wide variety of psychic phenomena, such as acting-out, identification—or, as we have seen—attempts at individuation via instances of refusal or negation. If we opt then not to accord the death drive the status of a primary explanatory concept—and there are good reasons for this, such as the fact that any destructive behavior can ostensibly be “explained” by means of the death drive—then we should always ask what other psychic operations are at work in what is being witnessed clinically. To what other ends is the death drive being enacted?
To ask such questions is to reiterate Lacan’s idea regarding how the death drive occurs in an historical domain and his assertion that the death drive often entails a form of creation (i.e., we should ask what else is being done, in the symbolic domain, by the doing of the death drive). To ask such questions is also, incidentally, to reiterate Lacan’s ideas that the death drive entails a form of repetition automatism (1966). Lacan’s revision to Freud’s repetition compulsion—that is, the term automatism—aims to stress the role of symbolic factors, precisely such as identification with or against an Other.
Having broached the importance of repetition in relation to the death drive, we should offer one further qualifying point. We often think of the death drive as the repetition compulsion, and yet repetition is inherent to the drive itself. As such, in identifying the death drive as the repetition compulsion, we are simply identifying the operation of the drive itself. Hence the Lacanian idea that all drive is potentially an instance of the death drive. The drive finds satisfaction in missing its object, in its own failure to attain this ostensible target. The drive needs to miss what it aims at so that its gratifying process can be continued, reiterated, begun again and again. In short, repetitiveness and, more significantly, the repetition compulsion are internal to the circuit of activity that is the drive. With these Lacanian ideas in mind, let us now turn our attention to the case material.
The Death Instinct In A Clinical Presentation: Mark Goldblatt
Stella, 1 a university student with chronic self-hatred and self-injury, came for treatment in the midst of a severe depression with intense suicidal distress. She had tried to kill herself as a teenager but turned to a religious community that helped her control her self-loathing and suicidal thoughts. When she experienced internal agitation, she obtained relief by cutting herself on her arms, which calmed her down. Now, however, that was only partially successful, and the cutting was becoming deeper and deeper. As her self-hatred and self-attack escalated, she told others in her religious community, and they responded that she needed to pray harder. Deeply hurt, she formulated a serious suicide plan about one month before seeing me. She had experienced previous attempts at therapy as shaming, as they reminded her that she had a problem, that she was not really in control of how she felt, and that she was angry. However, she thought she would give one more therapist a try before she acted on her plan to kill herself.
Stella was the oldest of three children. Her father, a successful businessman, was envious of Stella’s academic success. He felt he was poorly educated and saw her as an intellectual. Her mother too was a successful professional whom Stella experienced as distant and unavailable. Stella felt unlovable. When she was four years old and her brother was born, they were left in the care of a nanny who was sadistic toward Stella, calling her fat, ugly, and stupid. She felt neglected by her parents and hated by her caregiver.
Stella was grossly overweight by age twelve when she entered junior high school. At that time she first began to appreciate her intellectual capacity. She gained a measure of self-esteem, lost fifty pounds, and began to find friends. She joined a Christian youth group at this time and became intensely religious. She enjoyed being part of this community because she felt they had to like her. However, she soon felt that this sense of belonging was too much of a good thing. “I wanted to be the center of attention, and when I didn’t get it, I got depressed and weird. I thought suicide would make people care more.”
When I met Stella, I found her to be a pleasant, overweight young woman. She seemed physically awkward and may have intended to put others off with her several body piercings. She felt deeply unattractive and thought that young men would not like her, which contributed to her intense and conflictual feelings about sex. She was intensely self-critical but obtained a sense of value from helping others. She seemed to keep me at arm’s length, close enough to share her feelings of desperation but avoiding intimate details of her life.
Course of Treatment
I saw Stella initially once a week sitting up. Later this increased to twice weekly. My approach in the therapy focused on helping Stella clarify her emotional experience, the effects of her debilitating depression and childhood trauma. I limited my comments to the material she brought up, making clarifications about her affective responses or behavior (especially her self-destructive urges) and her disregard for her own body. I did not suggest that she change her desire to hurt herself or die. In fact, I would recognize that trying to change had been very difficult, despite her best intentions. I also made a point of underscoring the hostility she experienced from others, which became merged with her own intense self-criticism. Her physical body was the battleground where she focused her self-attack. I tried to be an active participant in the therapy, to help her describe her experience in words by commenting on the aggression and sadism that had not previously been acknowledged. My activeness was also a response to my sense of being unrecognized by Stella—I felt either idealized or avoided.
I will now present some process material that might reveal the presence of the death drive in my work with Stella. Here I am not attempting to give an account of the course of treatment, but rather to illustrate some of the moments of fixity that erupted in our work.
By the fourth session she said, “This therapy is going well. You are making me feel a lot better. You are legitimizing the way I feel. That’s good.”
I said, “Due to your past experiences, I feel I cannot remain silent or passive. I think that silence on my part, or even neutrality, would come across as hostile, or condoning your self-attack. You attack yourself and treat yourself poorly, perhaps because that is all you have experienced others doing to you.”
She said, “I value other people’s opinions more than my own, and I would be happier if I had a boyfriend, because that would make me feel worth something. But I can’t feel any worth inside me.”
I began to try to put Stella’s repetitive behavior into words. I said, “You take on a lot of activities, like school projects, work, and social activities but then you become overwhelmed by the stress that comes with all of this. You feel you cannot back off or slow down because then you would feel very sad, and you think you can’t handle the stress, which makes you freak out and cut yourself or overdose. And then these behaviors make you think poorly about yourself, and you blame yourself for acting badly.”
I added, “You appear to be especially sensitive to feelings of loneliness, which is understandable given how isolated you felt as a child. When you feel you are losing the support of someone you need, you become panicked, and do all these activities, like work and cutting, to deal with the panic. Then you blame yourself for acting in this way and for causing the loss of your supports.”
Stella responded, “I feel I shouldn’t cut myself, but when I get into that state, the pressure becomes more and more intense until I can’t stop myself.”
At the eighth session, she said she had a glimmer of hope that therapy could help her. She reported that even though things had been very stressful, she hasn’t been “going crazy like usual.”
“I’ve never been as seriously suicidal as three months ago. I used to feel special about the depression. I realized I didn’t want it. That’s what’s different this time, I don’t like the depression anymore. It used to be that when I started to feel suicidal, I would go and tell someone to make them worried and they would do something to help me to prove that they loved me. But they couldn’t prove they loved me enough to make it go away. This time around I didn’t even tell anyone. I got tired of the cycle. I knew I was doing it for attention, and I hated that.”
That attention is like love or caring or being valued—no one can survive without it.
But I was greedy and manipulative.
Sometimes you doubt that you have any value and need reassurance.
So I need to find ways of getting attention when I need it—which is impossible.
Or find a way to generate a sense of your own value, that is not dependent on someone else’s assurances.
When I’m feeling down it centers on not feeling unique. Even if there are things I’m proud of, there’s always someone better. I don’t feel special.
When you lose that feeling of being special it feels devastating.
I could never be the best at anything at college, so I changed my philosophy. I try to think that people have intrinsic value. I think that intellectually, but I don’t feel it. I think about the relationships I form—I seem to pick the biggest jerks.
By session eleven, Stella had begun to take better care of herself.
She realized that her times of “freaking out” resulted from being really tired, and that getting to sleep would change her perspective. “This is the most normal I've felt since I was sixteen. It’s a weird identity shift. Feeling like a new person, like the depression is something from the past.” She then described an interaction in which her roommate took advantage of her, and she felt helpless.
There must be some part of you that’s angry.
I’m too scared to get angry because then people will push me away. Angry people don’t have friends, and I’m not okay being alone. I get myself into bad relationships, and I can’t get out, because then it means I’m a failure. . . . I think I want to go to California for graduate school, after taking a year off from college. I’m also thinking about taking a break from therapy over the summer because it’s so expensive.
Her thoughts then went to another student from school who had been suicidal and left the counseling center prematurely for financial reasons. Then she thought about a friend who had left town and how sad this made her. “I try not to think about him because then I realize I miss him a lot.”
I thought she was also talking in displacement about me, so I said, “This also reflects your struggle in the therapy. Either you can go deeper into the process of psychotherapy and uncover more about yourself, and possibly experience unpleasant feelings (such as loss), or you can try the approach you have taken before, telling yourself there really isn’t much wrong, and you should get by without looking further into it.”
Stella replied, “Quite a few things have changed for me. I have some friends from work, they’re older and more mature and some other friends at school that I haven’t really had before. I’m getting along with my roommates, and I’ve got these plans for the summer. I think this therapy has helped. It’s weird to feel so ordinary. Less special.”
Stella seemed to be responding to doing better by wanting to cut off the treatment. She could rationalize that this was a response to the gains she had made but it was also clearly an attack on the treatment, which, as she put it, was making her feel ordinary, less special.
Stella considered the fluctuations in her mood as something that had an independent course, unreactive to things going on in her life—or to our work. “I used to feel chronically suicidal. I didn’t think it would ever get better, but it did. Something worked, but how long do you wait for it to get better? You can't make someone want to live. Nobody could make me want to live. It just went away.”
I felt minimized and rejected. I said, “You seem to see your improved state of mind as simply good fortune, despite coming to see me and working hard in the therapy. It’s as though you dismiss the work we’ve done together, just as you experienced your parents and nanny to be dismissive of yourself.”
By week thirty-three, things had been going well for Stella. Then she developed a flu-like illness. She went to the infirmary, and they ordered some tests. She became quite excited about the investigations of her body. She said she liked to watch getting her blood drawn. She had taken a needle from the ER and back home had drawn her own blood. She acknowledged that technically she was committing a crime, but she thought it was a small crime to steal a needle from the ER. “It was really neat watching the blood coming out with my pulse. A lot of blood was coming out. Just like when you donate blood. I was mesmerized, like with cutting. It didn’t hurt. I got a bit wierded out. And scared. I freaked out and went to bed. I didn’t desire self-injury; I was just medically curious. It felt really weird, all the blood coming out. It transported me back to all the cutting times. If I ever wanted to kill myself again I would do this and not stop. Watch it as it goes down the sink.”
I started to freak out too. I said, “It’s interesting how you both value and devalue your body. You’re so interested in it, and how it functions, and yet tossing it down the sink like it was useless.”
She said, “That makes sense, but I wasn’t devaluing it. I was in awe. Look how alive I am. It just pumps away. I imagined how my heart was working. I was in awe. Also in awe of how easy it would be to just go down the drain. Now I feel guilty about stealing the needle. Not particularly bad. I don’t feel bad about when I stole razor blades. I’ve always been fascinated by this. It’s so cool to get to know your body.”
I said, “You’re taking a huge risk.” (I was thinking of the risk to her physical safety.)
She heard my comment as referring to the needle she had taken. She responded, “I don’t think anyone could find out.” As she talked more about the experience she said, “It’s odd, this fascination I have with my body and anatomical makeup. It was so cool. I started thinking it was weird to be so fascinated and be sticking needles up your arm. Now I’m worried. I feel bad about taking the needle. But my parents take stuff from work all the time. Okay, so I won’t do that anymore. My curiosity is sated.”
A Freudian Reading of the Case: Sarah Ackerman
Before developing the idea of a death instinct, Freud had long understood a range of obstacles to the success of analytic practice. He conceived of secondary gain, where the benefits of being ill might outweigh the profits to be had in recovering. He had theorized how erotic satisfactions were bound up in his patients’ symptoms, such that their pleasurable dynamics made them hard to part with. However, only with the death instinct could Freud give a full account of the negative therapeutic reaction. In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud suggested that the death instinct is not just the cause of resistance in treatment, but that it is the originary cause of conflict in the mind. Here Freud makes the case for clinical situations in which “the treatment inhibit[s] itself” The treatment may fail “as a result of its—partial—success” (1937, p. 217). The very progress of a treatment is experienced by the ego as a danger to be fought against. These resistances for Freud are distinct from libidinal instincts. Rather, they embody the death instinct, “a force which is defending itself by every possible means against recovery and which is absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering” (p. 242). “One portion of this force has been recognized by us, undoubtedly with justice, as the sense of guilt and need for punishment, and has been localized by us in the ego’s relation to the superego. But this is only the portion of it which is, as it were, psychically bound by the super-ego and thus becomes recognizable; other quotas of the same force, whether bound or free, may be at work in other, unspecified places” (1937, pp. 242–243).
As a founding cause of conflict in the mind, and ultimately as a catalyst of resistance both to the derivatives of the id and to the whole new experience of analysis, the death instinct is the limiting force in what change is possible in each analysis.
Let’s look at what Mark and his patient Stella can teach us about the clinical manifestations of the death instinct. I would begin by looking for the death drive within the manifestations of Stella’s superego, and, indeed, there we see the harsh and punitive qualities that align with Freud’s description of the melancholic superego as a “pure culture of the death instinct.” Stella experiences “chronic self-hatred and self-injury,” “a severe depression with intense suicidal distress.” She describes herself as “greedy and manipulative” and notes that she cannot find any worth inside herself. As Mark notes, “Her physical body was the battleground where she focused her self-attack.” She finds relief by cutting her arms, but now “the cutting was becoming deeper and deeper.” I would also wonder if Stella’s body piercings, physical awkwardness, and obesity are outward emblems of her internal sense of being a monster, inviting others to hate her as she felt her nanny and parents had hated her.
We can certainly observe elements of secondary gain within Stella’s symptom configuration. Stella admits to feeling special for being ill, suicidal, or broken. As Stella describes, “It used to be that when I started to feel suicidal I would go and tell someone to make them worried and they would do something to help me to prove that they loved me. But they couldn’t prove they loved me enough to make it go away.”
As we see, though, the secondary gain from Stella’s symptoms has eroded, and the picture has spiraled such that now her attention-seeking itself is grounds for self-hatred; she feels she is alienating others with her needs. The repetition compulsion, I would argue, is rearing its head. After theorizing the death instinct, Freud reframed the repetition compulsion as an alloy of Thanatos and Eros that carries within it the temptation that staying the course, perpetuating our symptoms, would be the most natural turn of events. “The adult’s ego, with its increased strength, continues to defend itself against dangers which no longer exist in reality; indeed, it finds itself compelled to seek out those situations in reality which can serve as an approximate substitute for the original danger, so as to be able to justify, in relation to them, its maintaining its habitual modes of reaction” (1937, p. 238). As Freud sees it, our defenses alienate us from the world around us and weaken our egos as we seek to find our traumatic pasts in the present. “Recovery itself [is] a new danger” (p. 238).
We can witness Stella enacting this entire scene as she recruits others into familiar roles. The Christian community had felt like a new, loving object, but it has become persecuting and hateful, blaming her for not praying enough. Stella’s experience of these shaming peers feeds her own self-loathing. In particular, she seems to despise her needy feelings, which, I would argue, she experiences as a greedy, parasitic monster inside of her. We could see this monster as a representative of Stella’s purely libidinal drives. But I would argue that it is also helpful to see it as a repetitive, driven, zombie-monster that is chewing up everything in sight with an aim of reducing it to compost.
The clinical picture that emerges is a highly conflictual one in which part of what Stella loves about herself, and which makes her feel special, is also what she hates in herself, which makes her want to die. She feels special as a result of “being part of [the religious] community” but also feels worthless because after all they “have to like her.” She comes to feel that her sense of belonging itself is a danger, too much of a good thing. She cannot live up to her narcissistic ideal and so she wishes to destroy herself. As she says, “There’s always someone better.”
But what to me is the hallmark of the death instinct in clinical work is the way the attack on the self morphs into a vicious attack on the treatment. As Freud puts it, “we see that there is a resistance against the uncovering of resistances, and the defensive mechanisms really do deserve the name which we gave them originally, before they had been more closely examined. They are resistances not only to the making conscious of contents of the id, but also to the analysis as a whole, and thus to recovery” (1937, p. 239). These resistances are clear manifestations of the death instinct, the primal urge to return to homeostasis, to avoid any change at all costs. This force is locked and loaded to resist recovery, and it fuels an utter war against analysis.
We don’t see this attack on the treatment too clearly in Mark’s brief account, but there are signs of it. Before seeing Mark, Stella experienced therapy as “shaming, reminding her that she had a problem, that she was not really in control of how she felt, and that she was angry.” It felt as if therapy were the dangerous, destructive force. Early on, Mark astutely picks up that it would be fruitless to encourage Stella to change. “I did not suggest that she change her desire to hurt herself or die. In fact, I would recognize that trying to change had been very difficult, despite her best intentions.” But all the same, Mark reports feeling unrecognized, kept at arm’s length, minimized, and maybe even devalued. Stella wants to attribute the changes she experiences to fate or chance. At other times, she seems to attack Mark for having reduced her to being “ordinary.” As Mark writes, “Stella seemed to be responding to doing better by wanting to cut off the treatment. She could rationalize that this was a response to the gains she had made but it was also clearly an attack on the treatment, which, as she put it, was making her feel ordinary, less special.”
Mark’s interpretation is that Stella’s attack on the treatment is an identification with her parents and nanny, her way of being dismissive of herself. But Freud would point to a broader, more cosmic, force at play. Beyond an internalization of her parents’ hateful and neglectful treatment, Stella is possessed by a deep urge to self-destruct, to destroy all that she builds. These feelings have an engine that extends beyond her early object relations and exceeds her early identifications. It fuels Stella’s knee-jerk repudiation of Mark and his interventions.
This cosmic force is in clear view in the complex scene with which Mark ends his vignette. As Stella is captivated by drawing her own blood, we witness the blurring of self-love and self-loathing. Stella shifts between excitement, awe, power, and fascination and an awareness that all of this feels weird, freaky, and scary. The scene is mesmerizing. It seems to feel beyond her control. She is on autopilot. Stella’s internal zombie has emerged to suck herself dry, dumping out all of her blood, all of her need—down the sink. This is for Stella a kind of uncanny, thanatic fantasy and we can feel the allure the ecstasy of oblivion held for her. It is clear in this session that Mark’s words are beyond Stella. She cannot take in his concern for her bodily safety and instead hears him as pure superego, threatening repercussions for stealing. I would imagine that it might be helpful for Mark to hold on to this story as the therapy continues—it emblematizes Stella’s love-hate relationship with her body and her ruthless desire to dump herself, and Mark, and the therapy, out.
Freud argues that analytic treatment depends upon the libido “taming” the death instinct, but there is always a risk that the original conflict will return in full force. Thus, Freud argues, “analysis, in claiming to cure neuroses by ensuring control over instinct, is always right in theory but not always right in practice” (1937, p. 229).
A Kleinian Approach to the Case: Lynne Zeavin
Although this is a difficult patient with chronic self-hatred and suicidality, the therapy seems to proceed well, with the patient feeling “better.” As I listened to the session material, I wondered how Stella’s internal life was playing out in the treatment. Where was her anxiety and the hatred and despair with which she lives? The patient, seemingly grateful and compliant, was organizing her therapist, keeping him in just the right proximity from her, giving him just enough of a feeling of being helpful, without actually being able to touch her. Throughout it seemed to me that Mark felt he had to be very, very careful.
We can think of that carefulness as good technique, a sensitive and well-attuned therapist working with a fragile and volatile patient. I am also thinking that this very carefulness suggests the patient’s impact and hold on the therapist and the therapeutic process. Might Mark’s carefulness reflect an aspect of the patient’s inner world and what she was subtly communicating to him—perhaps projecting into him—that kept him exactly where she needed him to be?
Stella’s relationship with herself is a split one. On one side we see tremendous self-loathing and specialness that seem to coalesce around an identification with her bad objects. On the other side, her need, longing, vulnerability, and helplessness are reviled and split off. There is a feeling of superiority (her specialness) that is in conflict with her deep desire for approval and recognition. Though she is desperate, her specialness requires that she do without any real help from her object. Omnipotent control and a cruel and harsh superego dominate and overwhelm the Stella that needs. Thus, she is the source of both her own life and her own death. Her suicidal wish seems to be the mirror image of her objects’ (her nanny’s, her mother’s) hateful wishes toward her. Her wish to kill herself is at one with her wish to destroy her object and her object’s link with her, and it expresses her identification with an internal murderous figure. Her wish to kill off a part of herself, accompanied as it is by something like awe, conveys a satisfaction of watching oneself be destroyed while keeping the object in a helpless state, defeated and unable to reach her. (It is this helplessness of the dependent part of the self that is rejected and then projected—which aligns with the helplessness Mark comes to feel in the transference/countertransference.)
In response to the disregulation of Stella’s suicidality, Mark becomes logical, explanatory, reasonable, and sane, hoping to neither intrude nor disrupt Stella’s fragile ecosystem, nor to evoke her paranoid feeling about him. I quite agree with not interpreting Stella’s intention or her motive—with a patient so prone to persecutory guilt, she might not be able to hear such an interpretation as anything but blame. I did wonder whether it might have helped were Mark to have named her suspicion or fear about his wishes to get closer to her. In the countertransference, was there ever a sense of a frustrated wish, and would it then have made sense to interpret her feeling of needing to keep him at a distance or to have discussed her sense that he felt helpless to reach her? “I tried to be an active participant in the therapy, to help her to describe her experience in words by commenting on the aggression and sadism that had not been acknowledged. My activeness was also a response to my sense of being unrecognized by Stella—I felt either idealized or avoided.”
In situating himself as her ally but not addressing this lack of recognition, Mark perhaps feels it right to skirt the violence of her unconscious fantasy life and the hostility latent in her internal objects. In taking a more reassuring stance, we can wonder if inadvertently Mark conveys that he cannot tolerate Stella’s hostility and her hatred. Reassurance so often inadvertently communicates the opposite of containment.
The workings of annihilation and persecutory anxieties generated by the death instinct run through this material. Stella’s self-loathing bubbles over into persecutory guilt, now felt as coming at her from the outside. Of persecutory guilt, Sodre (2015) writes: “The dead object, in phantasy murdered by one’s death wishes, comes back to haunt the mind in a tormenting way. In such states of persecution the ego resorts to extremely drastic defensive measures, which in severely pathological states, can lead to effectively destroying a part of the self or one’s mind” (p. 37).
Sodre describes the modes in which an internal damaged object is felt to cause terrible suffering, partly because one projects one’s hatred into this object, now felt to be terribly damaged. The superego therefore is felt to be on the side of the damaged object and as such torments the ego that now feels unloved and undeserving of love. “Hatred of the object and of the superego leads to an increase of guilt and persecution, as the more attacked the object is the more evil the ego feels itself to be and the more hated by the superego, which has now become a pure culture of the death instinct” (p. 37).
We can also reflect further on the effect of the group on Stella’s mind. First, we hear of the Christian youth group that seems to function as an idealized but stabilizing presence in her mind, a kind of group-think, that relieves her of her own mind and functioning. This works for a time, until the group makes a demand of her—pray harder—and she leaves in wretched disappointment. I thought here of Rosenfeld (1971), who describes how sometimes in narcissism there is an “idealisation of the ‘bad’ parts of the self, often represented as a gang, which are turned to as a source of superior strength and become mobilised in an organised attack against the dependent part of self and its sane object relations. Such narcissistic organisations create a split in the self and keep the sane self stunted in its development—which can be in the service of the death drive” (p. 174).
This is what Stella lived out in her therapy with Mark.
When Stella steals the needle to draw her own blood, we get the death drive in action. There is a felt need to know and to have the satisfaction of seeing herself being drained of life. Perhaps there is also satisfaction in draining the life of her treatment, just at a point when they might be getting somewhere. Her therapist has hopes for her, which she succeeds—in this instant—in dashing. In the stunning material about the blood-drawing, blood-letting, Stella cannot hear her therapist’s words except as a superego condemnation, one ego-destructive superego to another.
Of such a superego Bion (1962) writes: “It is an envious assertion of moral superiority without any morals. In short it is the envious stripping or denuding of all good and is itself destined to continue the process of stripping until there is hardly more than an empty superiority-inferiority that in turn degenerates into nullity” (p. 97).
Bion’s claim is that this pathological superego comes about through failures of communication between mother and infant, failures that are experienced as attacks on linking by the mother who is unavailable to her child’s communication, or from the infant who withholds or turns away from the mother’s efforts to reach her. In this way a superego that “destroys a link is formed and internalized.” O’Shaughnessy (1999) notes that “the abnormal superego arises from the earliest dissociations and its dangerous aim is to attack the link with the object, and it is the link with the object upon which the safety of the ego depends” (p. 179).
Of course, how Mark intervenes here will be of the utmost importance. Though we do not hear the end of this clinical tale, if Mark can provide containment and understanding without being too threatened or too condemning, there is a chance that this moment brings the possibility of continuity, of renewed engagement and life.
A Lacanian Approach to the Case: Derek Hook
Extending the question asked earlier, in the section on Lacanian conceptualizations of the death drive—“What is being done by the doing of the death drive?”—we could ask of the case of Stella: How might apparent instances of the death drive be operative here? In other words, we might ask of Stella’s various self-harming acts, to what ends are they being performed? One answer is that they are a prospective means of identification. A further question emerges: are we witnessing identification by way of the death drive? Is there evidence enough to indicate an identification with a sadistic early caregiver who was there for Stella when her mother and father weren’t? We might consider whether such an identification took the form of the repetition of damaging acts previously directed toward her.
One is reminded in this respect of Freud’s notion of hysterical identification (1921). The taking on of a particular behavioral trait in such circumstances is not the result of any liking for the person from whom the trait is borrowed; the taking on of such a trait functions rather to put the subject in the position of the person from whom it is derived. In this case, an hysterical identification of this sort would have ensured that Stella would assume an active and agentic role rather than being stuck in a subservient role. There would also have been a further emotional and libidinal gain in Stella’s perpetuation of such sadistic acts. Their reenactment may well have extended and repeated the expression of a type of affective intensity between Stella and her nanny. This would, admittedly, have been a sadistic rather than a loving intensity. Perhaps even a hateful expressive act would have been preferred by Stella to the alternative of being neglected, ignored, devalued, minimized, in the way Mark himself was made to feel through the course of the treatment. To continue enacting upon herself some of the sadistic treatment that she had received may have also served as a kind of oblique communication to her parents of what she had suffered due in part to their apparent indifference.
We might consider also the role of a melancholic identification with a loved and yet also hated object—the mother perhaps or, for that matter, the father. As we know from Freud, once such a hated figure has been internalized, it can be punished and destroyed via the subject’s own ego. The signature of melancholia is often the conviction of one’s own worthlessness, and one is reminded in this respect of Stella’s comment “I can’t feel any worth inside me.” The severity of the melancholic superego often means that charitable work, or doing good for others (perhaps being part of a Christian fellowship), valuing others more than oneself, might coexist quite compatibly alongside self-damaging activities. Such had been the case with the melancholic patient mentioned earlier. It is in melancholia, after all, that, as Freud maintains, we confront “a pure culture of the death drive” (1923, p. 53).
A possible clue to the identification with the parents might be found in the apparent narcissism underlying certain assertions Stella makes. We know that both parents were highly successful in their careers, and we know that Stella very much wanted to be the center of attention, to be the best at something in college, to feel unique, and that when this didn’t happen she felt extremely depressed. To damage herself in such situations, or to feel suicidal, might also be a way of expressing, in displaced form, a type of aggressivity originally aimed at one or both of the figures in her life who presumably often were the center of attention, the best at something, made to feel unique.
We might also speculate on the type of creation that comes into play in Stella’s most destructive moments or, more directly, the type of individuation that comes with cutting or drawing blood. Perhaps, to use Leader’s suggestive phrase (2020), self-harm and an assertion of subjectivity share the same space here? The factor of creation—and for that matter, of a fearful kind of agency—also seems apparent in the episode of her drawing her own blood. “I wasn’t devaluing it,” she says of her body, before insisting—and here we are reminded of the life-in-excess-of-life dimension of the death drive—“Look how alive I am. . . .”
Let us stay with the theme of the agency embodied in the death drive. It seems apparent that this idea was implicitly respected by Mark in his remark that he “did not suggest that she change her desire to hurt herself or die.” In fact, to have insisted on such a change—to prohibit this agency—would presumably have been a far more dangerous course of action. Maybe, as in another body-battleground condition, anorexia, this was the only place where a type of meaningful agency could be experienced. Paradoxically, it is sometimes only the death drive or, more precisely, the agency of the death drive, that keeps a suicidal person alive. This was, once again, the case with the patient mentioned earlier: to express suicidality, to indulge in reveries concerning his own death, to enter into a sphere of potentially self-harming acts—these are precisely what made his life bearable.
In bringing this section to a close, it is helpful to anticipate and correct a possible misinterpretation. It is true that, from a Lacanian standpoint, one can critique the death drive as a substantial entity (that is, as content rather than form) and as a type of ready-to-hand, all-purpose explanation for violent and destructive acts. None of this is to suggest that the death drive is an expendable concept.
To be sure, the death drive is an absolutely essential psychoanalytic concept. It points to the inevitable knotting of libido and suffering, to the repetitive and compulsive enjoyment incurred by self-damaging acts incurred in the course of the drive’s operation. It is not the only psychoanalytic concept to stress this unexpected proximity between arousal and destruction. We might cite here Freud’s idea of primary masochism; the sadism of the superego; the ambivalence underlying libidinal attachments; the traumatic potentiality of sexuality and the drive, etc. The death drive in this sense is omnipresent, even if it doesn’t always go by this name, and even if ultimately it is more a form than a substance.
Freud (1920) is undoubtedly right to underscore the factor of the death drive, not because the death drive is, to put it in colloquial terms, “its own thing,” that is, a metaphysical or teleological principle. An idea that might be wrong at the level of grand overarching theory can still be absolutely pertinent when it comes to focusing our attention on a recurring form in clinical phenomena. Freud is right to emphasize the pervasive role of the death drive—and here the diversity of examples he provides in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) is itself surely significant—because it never has been separate from all that we recognize as life, life in all its bodily intensities, its incessant repetitions, its harmful arousals, and its never-ending aggressions.
Concluding Remarks: David Lichtenstein
The psychoanalytic conception of drive (or instinct, as Strachey rendered it) is inherently ambiguous. Freud established this ambiguity by defining the psychoanalytic Trieb as on the frontier of body and mind. The psychoanalytic drive is neither solely physical nor entirely psychic but somehow both. The paradoxical idea that the drive is both material and symbolic is one of the core principles and conceptual challenges of psychoanalytic thinking.
The discussion that has been presented here addresses that conceptual challenge in perhaps its most difficult form, namely, that of the death drive, the aspect of the psychoanalytic drive that aims toward the cessation of life, including that of the subject of the drive itself. In Freud’s introduction of the concept in 1920, he grapples notoriously with the physical/symbolic dialectic as encountered in the death drive. It is introduced as both a force of nature and indeed of the cosmos itself and also as a distinctly human expression of the psychic dimensions of trauma and the struggle for agency and symbolic expression.
In all of its connotations, physical, organic, or symbolic, the concept of drive signifies action. Whether it is the drive energy described by Newton’s Laws of Motion where an action has an equal and opposite reaction, a “psychic life force” as in the German romantic tradition so important to Freud, or an expression of symbolization as in Freud’s idea of a psychic representative that measures a demand for work (1915), Trieb is action and agency. As evidenced by the rich discussion among the psychoanalysts represented here, there is much important work to be done in the framework of psychoanalysis to clarify the mechanisms of human drive and agency.
The material process of psychoanalytic treatment invites that work. What is the drive energy, the force of agency, that moves the work and causes the events? Stella tells her analyst, Mark Goldblatt, that she stole a needle from the ER after getting a blood test and then later used it at home to draw her own blood. What drives that act? She also speaks of the reaction she had watching the blood drain out, imagining killing herself that way. She then tells of the fear she had in reaction to this initial fascination. Finally she speaks of the reaction she has to her analyst’s reaction to her tale. A series of actions and reactions, no doubt. How do we conceive of the energy that drives them?
The three analysts’ discussion of this clinical event are equivocal on this question reflecting the inherent ambiguity of the psychoanalytic drive. Sarah Ackerman asserts that the “cosmic force is in clear view in the complex scene.” Yet she also explains the event as an expression of a “thanatic fantasy” and Stella’s “ruthless desire to dump herself.” Thus, a mediating fantasy/desire is posited, as it were, between the force and the event, a fantasy that Ackerman shows is linked in turn to psychic structure. Lynne Zeavin also addresses both the efficient cause as drive and the mediating fantasy that drives the act in turn. Regarding the former, she remarks, “we get the death drive in action . . . a felt need to (see) herself drained of life.” However, she proposes, in addition, that “there is also satisfaction in draining the life of her treatment.” The event in question is not only a reaction to a force, the work of thanatic drive energy, but also a symbolized act, a metaphoric expression of the fantasy to destroy the analysis, an action in vivo that is an expression of the relation to internal objects. Derek Hook enlarges on this equivocal character of the psychic reaction to drive energy by suggesting that the self-destruction in Stella’s experience is also an occasion of “creation and, for that matter, of a fearful kind of agency.” It is mediated not only by structure and fantasy but also by desire. For Hook, drive itself is characterized by this ambiguous force of creative destruction. Each of the analysts’ comments on the clinical material evinces the mediation of the material and symbolic frames.
Freud famously referred to drive as the “psychical representative of stimuli” not simply the stimuli as such. For Freud, then, drive mediates physical urges as a representative of those forces, and indeed it is this mediation or representation that the analysts commenting here note in their application of the death drive as an explanatory principle.
Human agency must be a mediation of the physical and the symbolic. We are embodied beings who live as human only insofar as we live in culture and language. Thanatos, the death drive or death instinct, remains a necessary concept in psychoanalysis as long as we recognize that self-destruction, oblivion, and creation ex nihilo are fundamental expressions of that complex mediated human agency.
Footnotes
Sarah Ackerman, Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; Chair, Committee on Confidentiality, International Psychoanalytic Association; Co-chair, Psychoanalysis Study Group, an interdisciplinary faculty study group sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College. Lynne Zeavin, Training and Supervising Analyst, and Chair of Curriculum, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Derek Hook, Professor of Psychology and clinical supervisor, Duquesne University. David Lichtenstein, faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, IPTAR, the CUNY Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology, and New School University. Mark Goldblatt, faculty, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry (part-time), Harvard Medical School; founding member, Boston Suicide Study Group.
Panel presented at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, June 2022.
1
Adapted from material previously published in “Hostility and Suicide: The Experience of Aggression from Within and Without.” In Relating to Self-Harm and Suicide: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Practice, Theory, and Prevention, ed. S. Briggs, A. Lemma, and W. Crouch. Routledge, 2008, pp. 95–108.