Freud’s speculations about the death drive (Todestrieb) are no longer  accepted by most psychoanalysts. /1/ Yet, Freud’s thoughts about the death drive are worth considering from the perspective of trauma theory, since Freud regarded the inability of the traumatized to let their trauma pass into memory as the strongest evidence in favor of the death drives (he almost always used the plural). A version of the repetition compulsion, Andre Green calls the death drive the “murder of time.” Embeddedness in temporality is the mark of human existence. The murder of time is the murder of lived life.

Freud first posited the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). His English translator, James Strachey, made the mistake of translating two German words, Trieb and Instinkt, with the same term, instinct. There is no death instinct. A drive is a motivation directed by a physical need. A drive is culturally and psychologically mutable within limits. /2/

If people seek pleasure above all else, as Freud had previously assumed, why would a traumatized person hold fast to a terrible memory of trauma, repeating the experience again and again, not just in memory but in the physical sensations accompanying that memory?

Freud’s first answer was that repetition is an attempt to master an experience that was originally too immediate, too intense, or simply too difficult to bear, such as the abandonment of a child by its mother. Freud comments on his grandson’s fort/da game in which the child threw a spool of string away and then reeled it back in during his mother’s absence. Or more frequently, he just threw his toys away, as though to say, “See, I don’t need you anymore. You’re not leaving. I’m sending you away.”  

Freud seems unsatisfied with his own answer, for Freud was never comfortable with the idea of an independent instinct or drive for mastery or control (Beyond, p. 54). Not mastery but the death drive is Freud’s explanation of life beyond the pleasure principle. Trauma incites the death drive, the urge of the organism to return to an original inorganic state. One sees this in Freud’s speculation about the Nirvana principle, which he interprets as the longing for the cessation of stimulation and tension (Beyond, p. 95). We desire our own deaths, but only in our own time and in our own way. If we are fortunate, we savor the journey that takes us from nothingness to nothingness, Nirvana. Trauma may make life so unbearable that a shortcut is tempting (Beyond, pp. 61, 95). To die and so end the constant intrusion of stimuli may seem like liberation from the burden of being.

Freud believed that the psychic drives are conservative. “Their goal is the restoration of a previous state of non-tension, calm, inertia.” This is what Freud means with his remarkable statement, “the aim of life is death.” (Freud, 1920, p 224) In its original formulation, the death drive.  

Has nothing to do with aggressiveness . . . and Freud always refused to recognize the existence of a destructive autonomous energy. (Valdrè, p 24)

Why drives are conservative can be explained by considering the original German title of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Jenseits des Lustprinzips. Jenseits doesn’t mean “beyond” so much as it means the other side of pleasure, the pleasure of no tension. It is another type of pleasure, the pleasure of not having to be, to do, or respond. In the language of psychoanalysis, it is a pure narcissistic pleasure. In the language of Green and Lacan (that is, the French tradition, in which speech takes the place of experience), it is the pleasure of not having to represent oneself in language.

Continue Reading >>