Freud’s Death Drive

The origin of this paper is the disagreement momentarily registered on my face by Paul Elovitz’ passing comment that he did not believe in the death instinct. In our subsequent discussion, he asked me to write an article on Freud’s death instinct in relationship to the prominence of suicide in our world and suicidal terrorism. Below, I will focus on Freud’s death instinct in light of its reception in the almost 100 years since its introduction and of a scientific breakthrough in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a companion article, Elovitz will focus on his acceptance of the death instinct as an impulse rather than a genetic instinct, suicide, or suicidal terrorism, and challenge our intellectual community to apply some of Freud’s insights on suicide to our world.

Most of Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary ideas of neurological and psychological functioning of human species were accepted by his followers without the slightest doubt, and even taken literally; but some of his concepts were overtly criticized or simply neglected—even by true believers and promoters of psychoanalysis. One of these concepts is the “death instinct”—the “death drive” when translated literally from the German Todestrieb. It was first introduced by Freud in his seminal 1920 paper, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, when he wrote, “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living

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ones’” (S.E., 1920, 38).

One can argue that Freud was building on, by re-phrasing, the biblical “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” of the Book of Common Prayer based on Genesis 3:19 and Genesis 18:27 and/or confirmed the essence of Jeremiah’s (1:10) appointment to “uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow” before “build and…plant.” Still, reactions to and decisions about Freud’s proposal of the “death instinct” concept were and still are very contradictory. Some trained biologists-turned-psychoanalysts rejected the death instinct as illogical because it would not be in “benefit of the species” and because it is not a “positive” instinct (Michael Fordham in discussion with Karl Figlio; Free Associations, 1, 1988, 18). Highly respected psychoanalyst Martin Bergmann felt that it had a “traumatic impact on psychoanalytic movement because it greatly limited the belief in the curative power of our therapeutic work” (Psychoanalytic Review, 98, 2011, 684). By contrast, Karl Menninger felt that it was “one of the later flowers of the genius of Freud,” and that this mere concept had revolutionized psychoanalysis (Man Against Himself, 1938, vii).

If we read Freud’s paper carefully, we will notice that he does not place the two main drives, life (Eros) and death (Thanatos), in opposition, but rather offers an idea of some harmonious fluidity—from inanimate to organic life to death, and then the cycle continues. It is like the ancient Chinese symbol of Yin-Yang, which means the balance of opposing but complementary forces. It seems that using images helps to conceptualize this better, as it is unfortunate that some very important ideas, like the death “instinct,” are lost in translation. We can agree with Hanna Segal who had “always disagreed with the translation of Trieb as ‘instinct’ pointing out that the best translation is the French ‘pulsion.’ The nearest word in English would be ‘drive’” (“On the Clinical Usefulness of the Death Instinct,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1993, 74). In her paper, Segal uses examples from literature, the first of which is Jack London’s Martin Eden, who commits suicide by drowning, and who expresses contempt and hate towards the part of himself that clings to life. Martin experiences pain that is tearing his chest apart: “‘The hurt was not death’ was the thought that oscillated through his reeling consciousness. It was life — the pangs of life — this awful suffocating feeling. It was the last blow life could deal him” (Segal, 55).

The idea of life and death being just parts of the whole was

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not Freud’s original one. In a short footnote to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he acknowledged the contribution of Sabina Spielrein, who in 1912 wrote a quite profound but little known paper, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” (The English translation was published for the first time in 1994, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 39, 155-186). Spielrein, who treated children in her “White Nursery” in Soviet Russia and subsequently perished in the Holocaust, was marginalized by the mainstream medical and psychological world for her feminist, developmental, and eclectic approach to psychology.

Since Freud believed that “all of our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably one day be based on an organic substructure” (1914, On Narcissism, S.E., 14, 1914, 78), he tried to explain psychological/psychoanalytic phenomena by utilizing some objective biological ones. That is how he connected the very “biological” concept of the “death instinct”—or inorganic state, nirvana—to a person’s psychological and behavioral regressive tendencies and repetition compulsions.

In 1931, the League of Nations proposed an exchange of letters between intellectuals of various disciplines, which was meant for publication, on the topic of “Why War?” Albert Einstein was approached first, and he chose Freud for this task, mainly because he believed that Freud and his theories on instinctual life could shed light on “a question which seems the most insistent of all the problems civilization has to face” (Why War? The Einstein–Freud Correspondence, 1932, 2). While Freud was surprised by the invitation, knowing that Einstein did not really believe in psychoanalysis, he engaged in the discussion, and stated the following:

We assume that human instincts are of two kinds: those that conserve and unify, which we call “erotic”… or else “sexual”… and, secondly, the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts…. But we must be chary of passing overhastily to the notions of good and evil. Each of these instincts is every whit as indispensable as its opposite, and all the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition (Why War, 9).

As we see here, Freud views the erotic/libidinal/sexual/constructive/“love” instinct, drive, or force as important as the ag-

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gressive/destructive/“death” instinct/hate “phenomena of life.” Another interesting point should not be neglected: Freud warns us not to use the higher philosophical and intellectual constructs of “good and evil,” mostly because the life and death instincts are innate—basic to every human being, good or evil. Drives are not the philosophical constructs that some people perceive them as.

As a clinician, Freud explained his drive theory in clinical terms. In a discussion of the superego of a melancholic, he wrote, “what is now holding sway in the superego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time” (The Ego and the Id, 1923, 54-55). Freud did not perceive his idea of the death instinct as dogma, but just as a working theory, a hypothesis. He wrote, “The pleasure principle seems directly to subserve the death instincts.… At this point innumerable other questions arise to which no answer can be given. We must be patient and wait for other means and opportunities for investigation” (Quoted by Robert Riggall, in a review of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Psychoanalytic Review, 1924, 11, 66.)

The idea of death “instinct,” or drive, was further used by those who had accepted it, as each such person looked at it through the prism of their mind’s structure and personal and clinical experiences. That is why Melanie Klein viewed the death instinct as the infant suffering from anxiety, fear, and experiences of birth trauma, hunger, and frustration, to which the rudimentary, underdeveloped ego of the infant responds by using fantasies of splitting and projection. Sandor Ferenczi took the idea of the death drive to the developmental and traumatic point that “the child has to be induced, by means of an immense expenditure of love, tenderness, and care, to forgive his parents for having brought him into the world without any intentions on his part; otherwise the destructive instincts begin to stir immediately” (“Unwelcome Child and His Death Instinct,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 10, 1929, 128). 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.

In Man Against Himself, Karl Menninger makes the best argument for the impact of the death instinct for clinical practice.

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 Reviewing the history of humanity, religion, and mythology very eloquently, and showing that the concept of death is something irrevocable, something we are born with, Menninger paints for the reader a multi-layered canvas of the destructive death drive coming into being of any individual via some major or minor, acute or chronic disease or symptomatology. Menninger highlights one’s aggression as being a main component of the death drive. He postulates that aggression can be revealed through an actual act of suicide; some forms of “chronic suicide” such as asceticism, taboos, martyrdoms, alcohol addiction, neurotic invalidism, and others, and so-called “focal” suicides such as self-mutilation, purposeful accidents, and frigidity or impotence. Irreversible organic disease was considered by Menninger, Georg Groddeck, Samuel Jelliffe, and others as a sign of self-destruction. In Groddeck’s words, the organ neurosis is when “one is lived by the It” (The Book of the It, 1979 [1923], 2). In Jelliffe’s terms, it is when “behavior patterns eat their way into structure and cannot be recalled” (quoted by K. Menninger, 1940, in a review of Man Against Himself, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 91, 1, 117).

Yet many psychoanalysts, clinicians, and theorists did not and do not feel comfortable with the whole general idea of the death instinct, and they would like to modify it or discard it completely. For example, Donald Winnicott admitted that “it would give [him] happiness if [he] could relieve Freud of the burden of carrying it forever on his Atlas shoulders” (“The use of an object in the context of Moses and Monotheism,” 1969, 242). Susan Kavaler-Adler proposes abandoning the “Kleinian” death instinct metapsychology, as she explains that by holding on to a split-off aggressive side of her mother, which is hidden behind a defensive idealization, Klein was holding on to her death instinct metapsychology, at the expense of more developmental understanding of trauma (Klein-Winnicott Dialectic: New Transformative Metapsychology and Interactive Clinical Theory, 2014).

Without knowing about Freud’s “death instinct” and his propositions of its psychological counterparts, I became acquainted with it while doing research during my neurology residency in 1992 at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. At the time, my colleagues were intrigued and fascinated by the rediscovery of the process of apoptosis—programmed cell death—that exists in any multi-cellular organism. It sounds similar to Freud’s idea of life and death instincts being in balance; otherwise, one encounters severe

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consequences. It is as if Freud’s death instinct is very much alive, as it operates even on a cellular and molecular level of being!

Freud the visionary once wrote that the cellular and neuronal processes need “to be regarded as unconscious (unbewusst) and… to be inferred like other natural things” (Project for a Scientific Psychology, S.E., 1895/1950, 1, 308). Although Freud had abandoned his Project for a Scientific Psychology, most likely for the very pragmatic reasons of not jeopardizing the validity of his intellectual child—psychoanalysis—because he did not have the full armamentarium of modern MRIs, PET scans, and electronic microscopes, he believed that “psychology… shall be a natural science” (Project, 295). He also believed that “all of our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably one day be based on an organic substructure” (On Narcissism, S.E., 14, 1914, 78). It is very possible that within our lifetime science will prove him right. We just need to be curious, to keep our minds open, and to learn from each other, so the confusion of tongues does not throw us back a century again.

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