AT: Death Drive Not a Thing

AT: Death Drive Not a Thing

The death drive is real, has clinical and empirical support, applies to countries, and ends in nuclear war—we’ve also got the most qualified author

The death drive may sometimes be directed outward. If this is the case, the drive is observed as aggression or destruction. Part of the confusion surrounding Freud’s concept of the death drive may be due to the fact that he originally regarded the life and death instincts “as forces underlying the sexual and aggressive instincts.” [6] In subsequent decades, the more prevalent psychoanalytic view became one in which the dual instincts of sexuality and aggression sufficed to explain most clinical phenomena. Regardless, we need look no further than our own street corner for validation of aggression/destruction diverted into the external world.

As alluded to earlier, there is and always has been controversy around the concept of a “death drive.” [10] One eminent psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, has noted that, “The death drive runs deeply against more optimistic views of human nature, based on the assumption that if severe frustrations or trauma were absent in early development then aggression would not be a major human problem.” [11] Yet as Kernberg points out, his work over “the last 30 years has given even further evidence to the fundamental nature of deep self-destructive tendencies in human beings that clinically would support the concept of a death drive.” [12]

Kernberg has argued that the death drive is more perceptible in severe personality disorders, particularly “severe narcissistic pathology.” [13] This observation is consistent with recent suicidology research suggesting that suicide attempters diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder have suicide attempts characterized by higher lethality. [14] But while the aggressive drive is thought of as naturally present, the concept of a death drive is not invoked unless “such aggression becomes dominant… and when its main objective is… the elimination of the representations of all significant others and, in that context, the elimination of the self as well.” [15]

I shall not here attempt to resolve the long-standing controversy surrounding the death drive, as this subject could fill several texts. Instead, let us proceed for now under the assumption that humans do, in fact, possess sexual and aggressive/destructive drives which can be observed in everyday life. Next, if we are to consider this dual drive theory in more depth and, “[i]f… Freud’s conception of the two instincts is taken to its ultimate conclusion, the interaction of the life and death instincts will be seen to govern the whole of mental life.” [16] The outcome of this interaction then may be attributed to the manner in which these two instincts are balanced against one another.

3. Homeostasis: Eros & Thanatos

Nothing, whether public or private, is stable; the destinies of men, no less than those of cities, are in a whirl. Whatever structure has been reared by a long sequence of years…. an instant of time, suffices for the overthrow of empires.

– Seneca

The routinely observable process in the natural world is for biological organisms to undergo a pattern of decay, disintegration, and ultimate return to their constituent, non-living particles. Freud simply applied this scientific fact to the mind and its constituent instincts. He asserted that “instincts tend towards a return to an earlier state,” and theorized that the two basic instincts were simply two sides of the same coin. That is, they are a “pair of opposing forces – attraction and repulsion – which rule in the inorganic world.” [17] Thus, he believed an aggressive/destructive instinct could be traced back to the “original death instinct of living matter.” [18]

Eschewing any value judgments and pressing forward, Freud stressed that “[i]t is not a question of an antithesis between an optimistic and a pessimistic theory of life,” rather, it was merely an issue of biologically “concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts” which explained the “rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life.” [19] Thus, one way of conceptualizing Freud’s theory on the death instinct is to view it as part of the organism’s natural function of homeostasis.

While the libidinal instinct endeavored to “combine what exists into ever greater unities,” the destructive instinct sought to “dissolve those combinations and to destroy the structures to which they have given rise.” [20] In essence, this was a balancing act between creation and destruction, observed regularly in the natural world, where the death instinct was simply one side of the equation that acted on living matter in an effort to “return it to an inanimate state.” [21]

To clarify, Freud seemed to simply imply that all living matter inexorably “returns” to non-living matter – no great controversy here. It is in the application of this process to mental life where the controversy arises. Having already described the phenomenon in which humans pursue pleasure and avoid pain (the Pleasure Principle), he went on to explain why some individuals appeared to violate this principle. By invoking a natural homeostatic process, the pleasure principle remains intact.

How? By observing that some individuals may become fixed in an emotional state so painful, that “escape” into death is preferable, as it means no more pain. The immensity of pain weighing in on the side of continued life can only be balanced by the finality of the weight in direct opposition: non-life. This is simply an early metaphor for describing what more recent social science has confirmed. For example, the “escape theory” of suicide has been used to explain the suicidal individual’s motivation to escape from aversive (excessively painful) self-awareness. [22] When the drive to avoid painful emotions becomes strong enough, there is a significantly increased risk of distorted judgment that may lead to suicide and/or self-destructive behaviors.

Returning to Kernberg, he singles out specific, severe “personality disorders” when pointing out the relevance of a death drive. [23] Further, he notes that the death drive is not invoked unless aggression becomes “dominant,” and produces the desire to eliminate the self and/or others. Yet I would like to broaden this hypothesis with the observation of a simple fact: aggression has been dominant throughout the entire history of Homo sapiens for many thousands of years. Indeed, we all “belong to the human race that killed over one hundred million members of its own species in the twentieth century alone.” [24]

The death drive is real—critics misunderstand the meaning of death and ignore evidence to the contrary

MILLS 2006 (Jon, Psy.D., Ph.D., ABPP, “Reflections on the Death Drive,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 23:2, http://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles2/Freud%20on%20Todestrieb.pdf)

The force of the negative is so prevalent in psychoanalytic practice that it becomes perplexing why the death drive would remain a questionable tenet among psychoanalysts today. From a phenomenological standpoint, it is impossible to negate the force and salience of the negative. The world evening news is about nothing but death, destruction, chaos, conflict, tragedy, and human agony. Even advocates who champion a pure trauma model of self-destruction or externalized negativity in the service of explaining human aggressivity must contend with inherently destructive organizing elements that imperil the organism from within. Even medical science is perplexed with the internally derived forces that deleteriously ebb the healthy organism from life, adaptation, and survival based upon attacks by its own immune system or endogenous constitution (e.g., cancer, AIDS, ALS). Consider the paradoxical processes of how sleep is both regressive yet restorative, and particularly how going to sleep is associated with wanting to return to a previously aborted state of peace, tranquility, or oceanic “quiescence”—perhaps a wish for a tensionless state, perhaps a return to the womb. Excessive sleep is also one of the most salient symptoms of clinical depression and the will toward death. Furthermore, it would be inconceivable to argue that mankind’s externalized aggression is not inherently self-destructive for the simple fact that it generates more retaliatory hate, aggression, and mayhem that threatens world accord and the progression of civil societies. Given the global ubiquity of war, genocide, and geopolitical atrocities, in all likelihood we as a human race will die by actions brought about by our own hands rather than the impersonal forces of nature. Homo homini lupus—“Man is a wolf to man.” 2

Contemporary psychoanalysis seems to be uninterested in Freud’s classic texts on the primacy of death, to the point that they are dismissed outright without even being read simply because credible authorities in the field say so. Here I have in mind the whole relational school’s anti-drive theory campaign. In my opinion, proponents against the death drive simply do not grasp the inherent complexity, non-concretization, anti-reductionism, and non-linearity of what Freud has to offer us. Critics claim that the death drive defies evolutionary biology, therefore it must be bogus. But this criticism is merely begging the question of what we mean by death. And more specifically, what we mean by the function of death in psychic reality. To be even more precise, how death is organized as unconscious experience. Just because a species is organically impelled to thrive does not mean it is devoid of destructive principles derived from within its own constitution that imperil its existence and proliferation. A logical claim can be advanced that life is only possible through the force of the negative that brings about higher developmental achievements through the destruction of the old. This is the positive significance of the negative, an artifact of psychic reality that derives its source from internal negation and anguish while at the same time transcending its descent into psychic pain. Psychoanalysts are often confused by viewing death as merely a physical end-state or the termination of life, when it may be memorialized in the psyche as a primary ontological principle that informs the trajectory of all psychic activity. Death has multiple facets of interpretation and meaning within conscious experience that are radically opposed to the logic of negativity that infiltrates unconscious semiotics. What I hope to impress upon the reader is that death is an ontological category for unconscious experience that can never elude psychic existence; for what we know or profess to know epistemically as mediated inner experience is always predicated on our feltrelation to death, that is, to the primordial force of repetitive negation, conflict, and destruction that alerts us to being and life, a dialectic that is ontologically inseparable and mutually implicative. What we call a life force, drive, urge, or impetus is intimately conjoined with its opposition, that is, its negation, termination, or lack. Here life = death: being and nothing are the same.

Even if the death drive is totally wrong it’s a useful heuristic to describe the observed conflation of pleasure and destruction

MILLS 2006 (Jon, Psy.D., Ph.D., ABPP, “Reflections on the Death Drive,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 23:2, http://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles2/Freud%20on%20Todestrieb.pdf)

Even if critics find the death drive theoretically untenable, I still believe it is a useful clinical heuristic that guides therapeutic practice. What we as analysts face everyday is the inherent self-destructiveness of patients who can neither find amity nor reprieve from psychic conflict and the repetitions that fuel their suffering. These inherent capacities for selfdestruction are not merely located from external sources, for they are both interiorized and internalized, thus becoming the organizing death-principles at work on myriad levels of unconscious experience. Inherent capacities for self-destruction take many circuitous and compromised paths, what the modern conflict theorists would ascribe to symptom formation, addictions, self-victimization, pernicious patterns of recurrence, and harmful behaviors that hasten physical deterioration or health. All of these tragedies may be further compounded by external trauma and affliction—what Freud first identified in his trauma model of hysteria, but it does not necessarily negate the presence of internally derived deleterious aggressions turned on the self. We see it everyday in the consulting room. From oppressive guilt, disabling shame, explosive rage, contagious hate, self-loathing, and unbearable symptomatic agony, there is a perverse appeal to suffering, to embrace our masochistic jouissance—our ecstasy in pain; whether this be an addict’s craving for a bottle or a drag off a cigarette, there is an inherent destructiveness imbued in the very act of the pursuit of pleasure. All aspects of the progression of civilization and its decay are the determinate teleological fulfillment of death-work.

AT: Perm

The permutation is impossible. Our alternative relies on admitting the failure of utopianism—to combine that with utopianism is to eliminate the radical potential of the alternative.

Stavrakakis 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 116-117). DJ

Since, however, Lacanian political theory aims at bringing to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. Is it really possible and consistent to point to the lack in the Other and, at the same time, to attempt to fill it in a quasi-utopian move? Such a question can also be posed in ethical or even strategic terms. It could be argued of course that Homer’s vision of a psychoanalytic politics does not foreclose the recognition of the impossibility of the social but that in his schema this recognition, and the promise to eliminate it (as part of a quasi-utopian regulative principle) go side by side; that in fact this political promise is legitimised by the conclusions of psychoanalytic political theory. But this coexistence is nothing new. This recognition of the ‘impossibility of society’, of an antagonism that cross-cuts the social field, constitutes the starting point for almost every political ideology. Only if presented against the background of this ‘disorder’ the final harmonious ‘order’ promised by a utopian fantasy acquires hegemonic force. The problem is that all this schema is based on the elimination of the first moment, of the recognition of impossibility. The centrality of political dislocation is always repressed in favour of the second moment, the utopian promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing only if presented as the final solution to the problem that constitutes its starting point. In that sense, the moment of impossibility is only acknowledged in order to be eliminated. In Marx, for instance, the constitutivity of class struggle is recognised only to be eliminated in the future communist society. Thus, when Homer says that he wants to repeat Marx’s error today he is simply acknowledging that his psychoanalytic politics is nothing but traditional fantasmatic politics articulated with the use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary.

We cannot both accept that utopianism is impossible and endorse it. The crisis highlighted by the affirmative is an opportunity to reject the fantasmic ideal of harmony.

Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 109-110). DJ

What is at stake in the Lacanian conception of fantasy is, as we have already pointed out, enjoyment (jouissance). If the effects of the normative idealist or Enlightenment-style critique of racism are severely limited, if this critique is not enough (Lipowatz, 1995a:213), this is because, to use one of Sloterdijk’s formulations, it ‘has remained more naive than the consciousness it wanted to expose’ (Sloterdijk, 1988:3). In its rationality it has exhausted itself. In other words, it didn’t take into account that what is at stake here is not rational argumentation but the organisation and administration of enjoyment: The impotence of the attitude of traditional Enlightenment is best exemplified by the anti-racist who, at the level of rational argumentation, produces a series of convincing reasons against the racist Other, but is nonetheless clearly fascinated by the object of his critique—and consequently, all his defence disintegrates in the moment of real crisis (when ‘the fatherland is in danger’ for example). (Sloterdijk, 1988:3) Thus, the question of la traversée du fantasme, that is to say ‘of how to gain the minimum of distance from the fantasmatic frame that organises our enjoyment, of how to suspend its efficiency, is crucial not only for the concept of the psychoanalytic cure and its conclusion: today, in our era of renewed racist tensions, of universalised anti-Semitism, it is perhaps the foremost political question’ (Žižek, 1996a:117–18). In light of this, traversing the fantasy of utopian thought seems to be one of the most important political tasks of our age. The current crisis of utopia is not cause for concern but for celebration. But then why is the politics of today a politics of aporia? There can be only one plausible explanation: just because, in the ethical sphere, the fantasmatic ideal of harmony is still dominant. If we are situated today in a terrain of aporia and frustration it is because we still fantasise something that is increasingly revealed as impossible and catastrophic. Accepting this ultimate impossibility seems to be the only way out of this troubling state.

The permutation fails—the alternative depends upon maintaining distance from the fantasmic politics of utopia.

Stavrakakis, 99 (Yannis, Lacan and the Political, Visiting Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex, pages 118-119) DJ

In fact, articulating Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the irrelevance of Lacanian theory for radical politics since this articulation presupposes the repression of all the political insights implicit in Lacan’s reading and highlighted in this book. The alleged irrelevance of Lacan for radical politics is also the argument put forward by Collier in a recent article in Radical Philosophy. Collier’s argument is that since it is capitalism that shatters our wholeness and disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia; obviously, capitalism occupies the structural position of the antichrist in this sort of leftist preaching), then Lacan’s theory is, in fact, normalising capitalist damage, precisely because alienation is so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate it (‘Lacan is deeply pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as possible goals’, my emphasis).19 Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical politics. Something not entirely surprising since, according to Collier, psychological theory in general has no political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: ‘Let us go to Freud and Klein for our psychotherapy [Lacan is of course excluded] and to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get our lines crossed’ (Collier, 1998:41–3). Surprisingly enough this is almost identical with Homer’s conclusion: Lacanian theory is OK as an analytical tool but let us go back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism! It is clear that from a Lacanian point of view it is necessary to resist all such ‘reoccupations’ of traditional fantasmatic politics. At least this is the strategy that Lacan follows on similar occasions. Faced with the alienating dimension of every identification, Lacan locates the end of analysis beyond identification. Since utopian or quasi-utopian constructions function through identification it is legitimate, I think, to draw the analogies with the social field. If analysis resists the ‘reoccupation’ of the traditional strategy of identification—although it recognises its crucial, but alienating, role in the formation of subjectivity—why should psychoanalytic politics, after unmasking the crucial but alienating character of traditional, fantasmatic, identificatory politics, ‘reoccupy’ their ground? This rationale underlying the Lacanian position is not far away from what Beardsworth articulates as a political reading of Derrida. For Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to implicate itself in traditional politics, in the ‘local sense of politics’ in Beardsworth’s terminology: In its affirmative refusal to advocate a politics, deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all political projects fail. Since the projection of any decision has ethical implications, deconstruction in fact generalizes what is meant by the political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes a radical ‘critique’ of institutions. (Beardsworth, 1996:19) Similarly, the radicality and political importance of the Lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its distance from fantasmatic politics, from politics in the traditional sense; which is not the same as saying that psychoanalysis is apolitical: in fact, it becomes political precisely by being critical of traditional politics, exactly because, as argued in the previous chapter, the political is located beyond the utopian or quasi-utopian sedimentations of political reality.

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