The Psyche’s Ability to Adapt: A Counter to the Death Instinct? (response article)

The discussion of the death instinct vs. the death drive in this issue of Clio’s Psyche intrigues me on a personal level as well as a professional one. In Inna Rozentsvit’s paper, she cites Sándor Ferenczi’s “The Unwelcome Child and His Death Instinct” (International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 10, 1929, 128). In his paper, Ferenczi observes that people who were unwanted in their infancy can suffer many illnesses, including life-threatening conditions. Rozentsvit writes:

So, for Ferenczi, to maintain the balance of innate love and hate—the life and death instincts—one needs to have infusions of external love, tenderness, and care, in order for the destructive death instinct not to overcome the child. Ferenczi insisted that traumatized individuals have a “diminished desire for life” (128) as a result of this imbalance between two main life forces.

Ferenczi’s paper was written when psychoanalytic theory was in its early decades. Nearly 90 years later, with theory and our knowledge of the brain and the psyche broadened, I see another possibility: some people who didn’t have enough of those infusions of love, tenderness, and care might respond in an entirely different way, one that is not a progression toward death, but one that recalls Darwin’s theories about the species adapting in order to survive.

Analysts can observe this in patients with extreme narcissistic deficits who didn’t get the attention, nurturing, and validation they needed as children. They can be self-absorbed, demanding, always needing to be the first, biggest, and best; they can be totally blind to the needs of others and impossibly demanding as long as it

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will get them the recognition and attention they crave. I see the need to fill the void of attention and care that began in their early years as akin to the biological need to eat in order to survive.

When I read Ferenczi’s paper 20 years ago during the first two months of my analytic training, it resonated with me on an emotional level. I was able to associate to the fact that it reminded me of my mother, who was a disappointment from birth because she was a girl instead of the boy my grandmother hoped would save her failing marriage. My mother was extremely narcissistic. She also seemed to always have something physically wrong with her and made frequent visits to the doctor. However, I am not certain that she was actually in poor health until her early 40s, when she did become quite ill, suffering a heart attack. She then began 30 years of making herself the center of attention in her family, demanding that her emotional needs take precedence over others, and often succeeding in having that happen.

Ferenczi might argue that my mother’s health problems, and her likely hypochondria, were the work of the death instinct; but perhaps the enormous attention she sought was the kind of adaptation that Darwin theorized animals used to survive. My mother was also the middle child, and did seem to have been overshadowed by an older sister and a younger brother. Were all those visits to the doctor an attempt to be cared for? Was being sick a way of standing out from the crowd and making herself impossible to ignore? Certainly, during the time she spent in the examination room, she was absolutely the focus, the center of attention, with the doctor and his nurse listening to her and tending to her needs, complaints, and concerns.

I have seen patients with narcissistic deficits exhibiting similar behavior. Not just hypochondriacs, but also the accident-prone. I recall a patient with narcissistic deficits who took great pleasure from continual visits to physical therapists following what seemed to be a series of minor injuries and muscle aches. This patient had been raised not to be himself, but to be the family caretaker. He won approval from his parents for not seeming to have any needs, and he learned to not only never ask for anything, but to deny the existence of his needs to himself and to others. Visits to physical therapists—as well as an analytic treatment with me—elicited many happy feelings for this man as he became the center of attention and was being cared for.

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We see similar behavior in the narcissist with poor self-esteem who continually seeks to be the center of attention and/or who denigrates others to make him/herself more important, better, bigger, and smarter. Might all these efforts not be an adaptation and survival technique? Among the lower life forms, we see a starfish losing an arm but growing it back. Go to what we consider to be the highest life form, humans, and we find a blind person who has increased senses of touch and hearing to compensate for the loss of vision. It’s not too far a leap to see the self-absorption and demanding nature of the narcissist as another means of adapting. (Of course, like many of the defenses we see in our patients, the narcissist’s adaptive behavior can be self-defeating, irritating the people around them and denying them the attention and caring they seek.)

Erich Fromm likens narcissism to a biological function in The Heart of Man (1964), saying,

from the standpoint of survival, man must attribute to himself an importance far above what he gives to anybody else. If he did not do so, from where would he take the energy and interest to defend himself against others, to work for his subsistence, to fight for his survival, to press his claims against those of others? (69)

John Bowlby, who studied Charles Darwin and authored a 1990 biography of him, saw a connection between the Darwinian theory of survival and the psyche’s ability to adapt. Bowlby wrote in Attachment and Loss: Volume II: Separation, Anxiety and Anger (1973), “If we are to understand human behavioural equipment, it is necessary to view it in the light of what we know of man’s environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (143). The ability to adapt is a method of survival, and the narcissistic defenses that the psyche develops can help a child survive an emotionally abusive or bankrupt upbringing.

Narcissists aren’t the only ones who I see as responding to psychic deficits or losses by adapting rather than submitting to a death instinct. Some types of masochists strike psychic bargains with introjects (in psychoanalysis the unconscious adoption of the ideas or attitudes of others) and with actual family, friends, bosses, co-workers, and others, hoping that their sacrifice will ensure that they won’t be abandoned or rejected. Many analysts have worked

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with patients who have been unable to achieve success; to do so would symbolically and unconsciously sever the connection with a parent who either fought against a child’s separation or was unable to achieve himself. Although the masochist’s behavior is self-defeating, it is an adaptation intended to ensure she will never be alone. Similarly, those who to varying degrees try to ease their anxiety with obsessive behavior have adapted to an uncertain, unpredictable, and possibly threatening world by trying to control it.

I am aware that these adaptive abilities in many people become extremely self-destructive, well beyond the self-defeating behavior I referred to earlier in narcissistic patients. It certainly can become destructive toward others. Arthur Leonoff, in writing about sadism in a paper called “Destruo Ergo Sum” (Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 5, 1997, 99-112), found it to be one means of trying to control or fend off death:

Faced with unarticulated primitive dread, I propose, the sadist triumphs over death by becoming its agent. Clinically, such dread can be expressed through a malignant fear of passivity, helplessness, or ego collapse, as well as in the wordless panic of nonexistence. These may be defended against through moments of sadistic triumph, which, through omnipotent control of the object, symbolically guarantee the survival of the sadist (100).

Adapting in the service of fending off death—to the species as well as the self—is why so much of the living world does what it does. Perhaps it’s even the living world’s raison d’être.

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