THE DEATH INSTINCT REVISITED

RICHARD D. CHESSICK, M .D., Ph.D.*

By retrieve of a fundamental problem we understand the disclosure o f those original possibilities of the problem which up to the present have lain hidden. By the elaboration of these possibilities, the problem itself is transformed and thus for the first time is conserved in its proper context. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem o f M etaphysics

All the phenomena Freud used to establish the “death instinct” have been given alternative explanations by subsequent authors (Fenichel, 1945), and Freud’s concept o f the “death instinct” is probably his least generally accepted and most controversial psy­ choanalytic idea. It has from its inception generated a substantial literature, characterized by widely differing interpretations and considerable misunderstanding. In the present paper I will attempt to retrieve what Freud was struggling to articulate through this concept, and explore whether there is anything worthwhile to sal­ vage from it in spite of the general tendency to ignore the “death instinct.” EMPEDOCLES Empedocles of Acragas, who lived from about 492 b . c . to 432 . , is described by Guthrie (1978) as a “philosopher, mystic, poet, political reformer and physician, with something of the ma­ gician about him and a corresponding touch of arrogance and showmanship” (p. 123). During his boyhood, Acragas was at the height of its fame and was ruled by a tyrant named Theron. After Theron’s death Empedocles played an important part in trans­ forming Acragas into a vigorous and prosperous democracy. He was a charismatic man who “liked to walk about with a grave expression, wearing a purple robe with a golden girdle, a Delphic b .c

♦Professor of Psychiatry, Northwestern University. Presented at the Annual Meeting o f the American Academy of Psychoanaly­ sis, May 1991. Journal o f The American Academy o f Psychoanalysis, 20(1), 3-28,1992 © 1992 The American Academy o f Psychoanalysis

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wreath, shoes of bronze, and a luxuriant growth of hair, and at­ tended by a train of boys” (p. 132). This pre-Socratic philosopher wrote two major works utterly different in character. One was given the title On Nature, which links it with the work of those who try to explain the natural world on scientific and rational grounds, while the other, called Purifica­ tions, is religious in content and purpose. Like Freud, Empedocles seemed torn between a scientific and a humanistic bent in his writings, which led to a certain ambiguity and generated difficul­ ties in interpretation. Known as a doctor and the founder of the Sicilian medical school, Empedocles believed that by a mixture of water, earth, air, and fire there came into being the shapes and colors of all mortal things. These four elemental and indestructible forms o f matter, according to Empedocles, are worked on by two god-like movers with the mythical names of Strife and Love (Empedocles some­ times called the latter Aphrodite), the powers o f repulsion and attraction. Since both are active together they represent simultane­ ous opposite tensions producing the hidden dynamic harmony in nature emphasized by the earlier pre-Socratic philosopher Heracli­ tus. Empedocles agreed with Heraclitus that only while the strug­ gle between contrary forces continues can the world of living crea­ tures exist. Freud (1937) refers to the two “powers” of Empedocles, Love and Strife, “which approximates so closely to the psycho-analytic theory of the instincts” (p. 245), but Freud did not realize that there is as much confusion and ambiguity in Empedocles’s Love and Strife as there is in Freud’s (1930) “battle of the giants,” Eros against Death. Modern readers of Empedocles tend to think of his Love and Strife as forces in the Newtonian sense, but actually they were for him not impersonal physical forces like magnetism or gravity but emotions such as love and anger. As Guthrie (1978) explains, “Empedocles has at least separated mover and moved, but we are not in the world of Descartes or Newton” (p. 157). Empedocles gets credit as the first European to introduce into science the idea of some kind of a pressure operating on matter, but what he had in mind was a sort o f emotional or psychological force, whereas for Freud Eros and Death were “instincts” or bio­ logical forces. Empedocles was the first to divide his motive princi­ ples into two contrary forces; this polarity caught Freud’s atten­ tion. Through the interaction of the opposing psychological forces anthropomorphized and named by him, Empedocles thought all

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beings came into fruition and passed away in what Freud (1937) called “a cosmic phantasy” to contrast it with “ours,” which “is content to claim biological validity” (p. 245). The ambiguity in Freud’s concepts of the life and death in­ stincts, similar to the ambiguity in the Love and Strife of Empedo­ cles, led to much of the confusion about and rejection of Freud’s final instinct theory. At times Freud describes Love (Eros) and Death as mythological conceptions or metaphysical principles, and at other times he identifies them as “instincts” rooted in biolo­ gy. Although in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he states, “What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual pre­ dilection” (p. 24), in several later publications Freud (1923, 1930, 1933b, 1937, 1940) writes of the life and death instincts as if they were established facts that seemed to him to fit well into his metapsychological formulations (Nagera, 1970). FREUD’S DESCRIPTION OF THE DEATH INSTINCT The first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle was completed in May 1919 by the 63-year-old Freud during a period of famine and deprivation. Although Austria was impoverished and ruined by World War I and its aftermath, Freud seemed to experience a resurgence of his creative powers, and from the clinical manifesta­ tions of the repetition compulsion he evolved a biological meta­ theory of the life and death instincts. The death instinct was a silent force, and biological phenomena of the most diverse sort were all explained as manifestations of its striving to restore the inorganic state from which life had emerged. Life was maintained against this force by the opposing power of Eros. The death in­ stinct was seldom invoked in a clinical context except to account for unusual states of instinctual “defusion,” when destructive ener­ gies could be observed in “pure culture” (Freud, 1923). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud delineates a certain symmetry be­ tween Eros and the death instinct but leaves the impression that the death instinct is more powerful. Freud elaborated on the death instinct in subsequent writings (1927, 1930, 1933a, 1933b, 1940), postulating the drive source of aggression to be the death instinct turned outwards. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he added the important clinical point

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that when the death instinct emerges without any sexual purpose “in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordi­ narily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its present­ ing the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipo­ tence” (p. 121). In the same publication he switches to a different language, poetically envisioning the evolution of civilization as a result of the “battle of the giants” (p. 122), a struggle for the life of the human species between Eros and the death instinct. TVvo years later Freud (1933b) wrote, “The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnifi­ cent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly” (p. 95). But here, using the language of metapsychology, Freud specifically characterizes the death instinct as primary mas­ ochism and points out that it seems to be necessary for us to destroy some other thing or person in order not to destroy our­ selves, so as to guard against our primary impulse to self-destruc­ tion. In that same year of 1933, now 77 years old, he (1933a) wrote to Einstein depicting this impulse as an endeavor to bring every living creature to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter. In his (1940) final writing on the death instinct he proposes an additional dualism, contrasting individual death— which occurs through some portion of the death instinct remaining permanently within, until at length it succeeds in doing the indi­ vidual to death—with the death o f the species, which dies of an unsuccessful struggle against the world because it cannot adapt to external changes. The ambiguity of Freud’s concept appears in the shifting em­ phasis on different aspects of it. Primary masochism implies a fundamental aggressive drive component, with the destructiveness originally turned inwards and actively directed against the organ­ ism itself. More mysteriously, a conservative force that wishes to bring the organism to die in its own fashion implies a less directly destructive aspect; it tones down the aggressive component and envisions a sort of magnetic force, pulling the organism to a natu­ ral disintegration and death in a quieter manner, although this may be a very powerful pull indeed. Such a struggle between Eros and the death instinct can even be politicized as in Brown’s (1959) once popular attempt to view it as a “sickness” in all organic life that must be overcome through an “instinctual dialectic” (p. 83), which Brown claimed would produce a higher and happier society.

DEATH INSTINCT 7

Usually it is the primary masochism aspect that is emphasized as the source of human aggression and destructiveness. For exam­ ple, Gifford (1988) writes, In pushing his speculations about civilization and the dual instinct theory to their logical conclusion, Freud pronounced a fatal prognosis on civiliza­ tion: we were doomed either to destroy ourselves through the increased perfection of our military weaponry or to expire in the toxic byproducts of our material and cultural advances, (p. 20)

Gifford indicates how these predictions seem to be coming true today in spite o f the almost universal repudiation of Freud’s primal instinct theory, as we see ourselves ruining and plundering our environment and poisoning ourselves in a process involving oil spills, the release of industrial poisons, the melting of the polar ice cap, the thinning o f the ozone layer in the atmosphere, exploding overpopulation, and the increase in mass starvation. Nuclear war seems only a special form or mega-state o f self-poisoning, and Gifford concludes, These products o f technological progress seem obvious examples o f the death instinct, striving to return our biosphere to the lifeless elements from which it emerged. Our human follies in the political sphere, our weakness for war and violence, are even more disturbing illustrations of blind, “demonic” forces leading us to destroy ourselves, (p. 21)

One difficulty in accepting the death instinct in spite of all this may be traced to Freud’s (1915) contention that, “Our uncon­ scious, then, does not believe in its own death” (p. 296), because we cling in our unconscious to archaic beliefs in immortality and omnipotence. But recently Litman (Brooks, 1988) has disagreed with Freud’s contention, claiming it is contradicted by the dreams of suicidal patients; furthermore, at a psychoanalytic meeting on masochism, none of the presenters “conceptualized masochism as resulting from a purely instinctual need of the masochist or as a particular vicissitude of the aggressive drive” (p. 20). “COSMIC PHANTASY” OR BIOLOGY? No biological experiments or manifestations of aggression by any species or individuals could ever decisively establish or negate the concept of the death instinct, since its action is conceived o f as hidden by definition, and all we observe are possible manifesta­

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tions or derivatives of it; as such it is similar to Newton’s concept of “gravity,” which was inferred by its derivatives at the time (of course this has all changed in modem physics). The question is whether our postulation of such a concept is at all useful in explaining a variety of clinical phenomena or for any other purpose. What was Freud struggling to express through this ambiguous idea? In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud (1920) defines an instinct as “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (p. 36). After reflecting rhetorically on “the myste­ rious masochistic trends of the ego” (p. 14), he later concludes, It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey, (pp. 40-41)

A more definitive statement occurs in Section IV of Freud’s (1923) The Ego and the Id. Here he sometimes refers to the death instinct as a “class of instincts” (p. 40) that he calls “the death instincts” (p. 46), and he declares that sadism is the representative of the death instincts. He explains, “The death instincts are by their nature mute” (p. 46) and he discusses the various clinical phenomena that appear as the two classes of instincts fuse with each other or regressively defuse. In melancholia, however, “What is now holding sway in the super-ego is . . . a pure culture of the death instinct” (p. 53). Finally in A n Outline o f Psychoanalysis Freud (1940), now 84 years old, alternately uses the term “destruc­ tive instinct” and “death instinct” to refer to the same group of basic instincts in contrast to the Eros group. He adds, So long as that instinct operates internally, as a death instinct, it remains silent; it only comes to our notice when it is diverted outwards as an instinct of destruction. It seems to be essential for the preservation of the individual that this diversion should occur; the muscular apparatus serves this pur­ pose. When the super-ego is established, considerable amounts of the ag­ gressive instinct are fixated in the interior of the ego and operate there selfdestructively. (p. 150)

Here Freud’s thinking seems clear; he is thinking of the death instinct as a destructive, aggressive, sadistic assault on the organ­

DEATH INSTINCT 9

ism, which may be diverted outward or stored in the superego. The silent conservative pull towards the inorganic state is de-emphasized. Yet Freud in this work also writes, The core o f our being, then, is formed by the obscure id, which has no direct communication with the »eternal world and is accessible even to our own knowledge only through the medium o f another agency. Within this id the organic instincts operate, which are themselves compounded of fusions o f two primal forces (Eros and destructiveness) in varying proportions. (p. 197)

Here two mythological, mysterious, primal forces again appear, which, when fused in various degrees, make up the biological in­ stincts. Similarly, in Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud (1937) denotes the “instinct of aggression or of destruction accord­ ing to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death instinct of living matter” (p. 243). The 81-year-old Freud in this paper cites Empedocles and refers to Eros and the death instinct as “primal instincts,” leaving it ambiguous as to whether and how the primal instincts or forces generate secondary instincts or deriva­ tives, and implying some sort of hierarchy of instincts or forces. This ambiguity pervades Freud’s thinking, as evidenced in his (1933a) letter to Einstein where he writes, “The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special organs, it is directed outwards, onto objects” (p. 211). In Freud’s letter the death instinct is conceived of as striving to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter, and he adds that some portion of the death instinct, even when part of it is turned outward and made into the destructive instinct, “remains operative within the organ­ ism” (Freud’s italics). Here Freud again refers to his theory of primal instincts as “a kind of mythology” (p. 211). As Jones (1957) points out, “These principles or instincts, were by now assuming something of a transcendental significance” (p. 275) for Freud after he put them forth. Indeed, Freud’s (1937) contrast between the “cosmic phantasy” of Empedocles and his own theory claiming “biological validity” mentioned above seems to collapse. This became an important source of error. The concept of pri­ mal instincts can only be adduced in a theoretical context since it is a metaphysical or transcendental concept; when concretized it be­ comes unfortunately akin to “vitalism” in biology (Gedo, 1986). No evidence of a clinical or empirical nature could serve to either decisively establish or disprove the existence of such primal in­

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stincts, which are of a different epistemological order. Some writ­ ers have even suggested that the sudden death of Freud’s daughter, the onset of his cancer, and the death of his favorite grandson were sources for Freud’s preoccupation with the death instinct, but it has been established that Beyond the Pleasure Principle was draft­ ed in 1919, several months before the first of these events and 4 years before the other two of them (Jones, 1957; Gay, 1988). Still Gay (p. 395) points out that the term “death drive” entered his correspondence a week after the death o f his daughter. Surely these events influenced Freud’s elevation of the death instinct to a primal force, and his coming to regard it as a “fact.” It is often overlooked that the theory of the primal instincts, as Bibring (1941) explains, was founded upon an essentially changed concept of instinct: According to it, instinct was not a tension of energy which impinged upon the mental sphere, which arose from an organic source and which aimed at removing a state of excitation in the organ from which it originated. It was a directive or directed “something” which guided the life processes in a certain direction. The accent was no longer upon the production of energy but only upon the function of determining a direction, (p. 128)

What results is an ambiguous and vague concept o f “the death instincts which seek to cancel out tensions, the instincts of destruc­ tion at work within, aggressiveness directed outwards, the trend toward a state of rest (the Nirvana principle) and the inclination to suffer” (pp. 129-130) all forming a related group in contrast to the life instincts. By the death instinct concept Freud was trying to link together the tendency toward the reduction of tension within the organism; masochistic and sadistic clinical phenomena; the repetition com­ pulsion; the conservative trend toward a state of rest, sleep, and death; the amazing inclination for suffering and self-destruction seen in severe melancholias; and perhaps his own personal agonies (cancer and the loss o f his loved ones). It was conceived during the European self-destructive horror of World War I and its aftermath that brought 19th-century optimism to an end as Nietzsche pre­ dicted. In fact there is a distinct echo o f Nietzsche to be found in Freud’s (1919) paper on “The ‘Uncanny,’” published in the year he drafted Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he refers to “the constant recurrence o f the same thing” (p. 234) and the “daemonic character” (p. 238) of certain aspects of the mind.

DEATH INSTINCT 11

BIOLOGY OR LINGUISTICS? Gay (1988) reports that Freud’s notion of the death drive struck Jones “as a leap from the reality o f aggressiveness to an unwarrant­ ed generalization” (p. 552). But Melanie Klein (1933) argued, “The repeated attempts that have been made to improve humanity—in particular to make it more peaceable—have failed, because no­ body has understood the full depth and vigor o f the instincts of aggression innate in each individual” (p. 257). For Klein the “in­ stincts of aggression” meant the death drive in all its primal Freud­ ian force, and one cannot blame Klein for adopting this uncom­ promising point of view since Freud at times spoke of it in the same way. However, Grosskurth (1986) points out that Klein used the concept in strictly psychological terms, referring to constella­ tions o f mental impulses such as destruction by incorporation, without understanding the biological aspects of “instinct” that Freud had in mind. This represented a major shift in the concept. Hartmann (1964) and the ego psychologists, in contrast to Klein, chose to do without Freud’s hypotheses of the life and death in­ stincts and set the precedent for most U.S. psychoanalysts. Freud’s depiction of the death instinct as “primary masochism” led to the intrapsychic concretization of it by the Kleinians, al­ though this is not what Freud had clearly in his mind by the concept; the concretization of an occult or metaphysical or even cryptic biological “instinctual” force, whatever it may be, is a dan­ gerous epistemological error. The inclination to do so is under­ standable for, as the prominent Kleinian Segal (1988) points out, the single Hiroshima bomb killed 140,000 people, a figure that does not include the many thousands who died from its after­ effects, and today each major city in the northern hemisphere is targeted by the equivalent of 2,000 Hiroshima bombs. Segal argues that the lure of death in the final Armageddon so emphasized and longed for by 35 million “born-again Christians” in the United States almost nakedly reveals the death instinct, in which universal death is seen as universal salvation and a prelude to eternal bliss— the Nirvana aspect of the death instinct. She points out how close this is to actualizing what she calls “the world of the schizophren­ ic” (p. 43). Segal delineates two aspects of the death instinct as described by Freud, the passive aspect or Nirvana principle, which rejects all disturbance and idealizes death as rest or freedom from disturb­ ance, and the destructive aspect, which desires sadistic violence to

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the self and others. She claims, “Since Freud’s time, with our access to larger numbers of more disturbed patients and improve­ ments in technique, we have been able to detect the operation of the death instinct clinically” (p. 51), and she presents a case history that she says illustrates how the various fundamentalist apoca­ lyptic movements now so popular in the Western (and Moslem) world closely embody the unalloyed operation of the death in­ stinct, appealing not only to our destructiveness but to our longing for eternal peace: “First we project our destructiveness into others; then we wish to annihilate them without guilt because they contain all the evil and destructiveness; following that, we shall attain Nirvana, eternal peace, union with God” (p. 53). Thus in the “holy war” we have the romanticization and idealization of death and destruction just as in the Middle Ages Eros was idealized, romanti­ cized, and “purified” of sexuality. In an earlier paper Segal (1983) claims that narcissism, defined by Kleinians as “narcissistic object relations and internal structures which are destructive and self destructive” (p. 272), arises from and defends against envy and the death instinct. This view has a central role in determining the analyst’s interpretation in the treat­ ment of narcissistic conditions and is directly opposed to Kohut’s self psychology (Bacal and Newman, 1990). So the acceptance or rejection of the death instinct, and one’s very definition and con­ ception of it, is not merely a theoretical or philosophical matter. In spite of the epistemological fallacy of trying to demonstrate the death instinct by clinical material, it is hard to argue with what seems to be our endless history o f human narcissism, aggression, destruction, and sadism. All philosophy and psychology in the 21st century will be affected by the Holocaust and Hiroshima and will be required to explain how these mega-disasters came about. T\vo fundamental questions are involved. The first o f these asks whether massive aggression in all its forms represents any “drive” at all. For example, self psychologists view aggression as a frag­ mentation product of a disintegrating sense o f self (Kohut, 1977, 1984). The second question is whether or not the source of aggres­ sion, even granting that it is from a “drive” or drives, is some sort of primary masochism. Both of these issues remain hotly debated, and it is difficult to see what kind of evidence would convince one as to which answer is correct. Perhaps the temperament or person­ ality of the analyst, or identification with his or her train­ ing analyst, is involved. Federn (1932) translates Freud to acidly remark. ‘Those who love fairy-tales do not like it when

DEATH INSTINCT 13

people speak of the innate tendencies in mankind towards the ‘evil’, towards aggression, destruction and, in addition, cruelty” (p. 136).* Conviction seems to rest on an examination o f the two alleged classes of clinical derivatives of the death instinct, human aggression directed outward, and, as in the case of the melancho­ lias, inward; all of which may or may not be conceived o f as involving narcissistic structures. Because these derivatives are certainly very striking, massive, and extreme, it is hard to imagine them always as by-products of the fragmentation of the self rather than from some sort of power­ ful basic “drive.” But this does not have to be understood as a biological drive. For example, an alternative to biology has been proposed by Lacan, who attempts to remove the death instinct from its biological roots and yet preserve the concept as metapsy­ chology and not a cosmic phantasy. For Lacan (1977), the mirror stage and then the entrance into the symbolic order—the social and cultural realization of hu­ mans—have the effect of alienating the human from what Lacan considers universally to be the human’s basically fragmented sub­ jectivity. It is here that Lacanians derive the source of human aggression. For Lacanians (Lacan, 1977; Lemaire, 1977; Muller and Richardson, 1982), aggression and the death instinct are re­ moved from Freud’s biological substrate and thought to arise from the human developmental process of becoming, which begins al­ ready in the “mirror stage” as a narcissistic identification with one’s mirror image. This false identification is an original “split” that alienates the person from his or her true chaotic amorphous subjectivity by adopting a false whole self representation of the “I” seen in the mirror double. For Lacan (1977, Ch. 2), the alienation in the mirror stage of the ego or “I” from the subject always has as its corollary the sacrifice of the “truth” of the self. The inevitably progressive discordance between the false ego and the true chaotic being of the subject constitutes a primal self-destruction. The orig­ inal splitting in the mirror stage means that, for the human, “at every moment he constitutes his world by his suicide, and the psychological experience of which Freud had the audacity to for­ mulate, however paradoxical its expression in biological terms, as the ‘death instinct’” (p. 28). Lacan follows Freud in viewing this as the root of masochism, sadism, and war. Muller and Richardson (1982) point out that Lacan turns not to - T h is is translated differently by Strachey (Freud, 1930, p. 120).

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Empedocles but to Heidegger (1962) in order to elucidate the death instinct. Lacan employs Heidegger’s notion o f the finite aspect of human existence built into Dasein. This limit defines the existence of humans from the child’s Erst separation from the mother, the rupture of a bond leaving a void and an insatiable desire to return. The death instinct is this void in the subject, an “active void” (Lemaire, 1977, p. 167) that is denied by assuming a false coher­ ence in the mirror stage in which the ego forms, and by naming this ego the “I” upon entering into the symbolic order. But the void and the chaos of the subject remain behind all this and generate a tension between integration and disintegration. Thus there is a “beyond” the ego, which involves a compulsion to return to some­ thing that has been excluded by the developed “I” of the subject or has never entered into it. This “beyond” or “other” is the principle that Freud called the death instinct. No biological “instincts” are necessary to explain this as it is an inevitable consequence of the development of humans, of temporality, a fundamental aspect of Dasein according to Heidegger (1962). Lacan claims humans devote themselves to their own death, consummating this death in the very movement whereby they seek to insert themselves in the social world, a path forced by the sym­ bolic and cultural order on the developing child. Even before birth, maintains Lacan, the human individual is caught up in and com­ pletely assimilated into a causal chain of which he or she can never be more than an effect. However, I do not think that Lacan’s concept of a false ego forming in the mirror stage has clinical validity, and I believe his use of Freud’s agency “ego” is a misread­ ing of Freud’s (1923) structural theory deliberately produced in order to negate it and justify a return to the topographic theory. Roudinesco (1990) points out that Lacan “introduced a separation, which does not exist in Freud, between the ego and the I \je], between an imaginary ego and si subject o f the unconscious” (p. 301). This cleaving of the Freudian Ich in the French language into an ego (m oi) and an I (je), first suggested by the grammarian Pichon in 1926, is impossible in German. The basic question is whether there is an innate tendency in both the individual and in the species toward a gradual return to the inorganic state. Such manifestations as the Holocaust, the “killing fields,” and so forth, could be related to such a tendency on a species level, and the relationship to death observed in melanchol­ ics, suicidal patients, and in normal aging may yield information on whether this “pulsion,” as Lacan calls it, or instinct, as Freud

DEATH INSTINCT 15

calls it, might operate in a hidden manner behind all organic phe­ nomena. MELANCHOLIA, SUICIDE, AND OTHER MANIFESTATIONS One cannot lightly ignore the death instinct. In 1864 John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote that the human race is implicated “in some terrible aboriginal calamity” and he wondered if humanity was be­ ing brought into order only for the purpose of eventually being destroyed (Kerr, 1989). Federn (1932) gives Alexander the credit for being the first psychoanalyst who perceived the usefulness and im­ portance of the concept of the death instinct. Following Freud (1923), Federn (1932) claims that in the most serious forms of mel­ ancholia one can see the death instinct “unveiled and unmixed” (p. 139). He maintains that only one who has gone through severe melancholia can know what it is like to have the death instinct show itself purely: “It means complete cessation of the rest of mental life, being numbed in the death feeling which extends to the mental and physical sense of the [sic] own ego and thereby makes melancholic hypochondriasis unlike any other” (p. 140). Perhaps it takes the talent of a novelist to articulate the appear­ ance of the pure death instinct that Federn talks about. Styron (1990) describes his climactic night o f “despair beyond despair,” a devastating descent into depression, in an autobiographical mono­ graph which reads as if he is acquainted with Federn’s (1932) state­ ment, “The aim of every manifestation of the death-instinct is only pain” (p. 142). Styron (1990) suggests that grave depression is so mysteriously painful and elusive that it is close to being beyond description. He mentions William James’s statement that the pain of depression is a positive and active anguish and he adds, ‘T or myself, the pain is most closely connected to drowning or suffoca­ tion—but even these images are off the mark” (p. 17). He contin­ ues, “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne” (p. 33). Styron was 60 when severe depression struck him for the first time and it was probably precipitated by his sudden abstinence from alcohol. When his melancholia was at its worst he writes, “Death, as I have said, was now a daily presence, blowing over me in cold gusts” (p. 50). Although Styron offers a number of hints

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that could be gathered into a dynamic formulation to explain his depression, for our purposes it is his death-drive imagery that is important. He briefly reviews this unforgettable imagery from fa­ mous literature and films (pp. 81-83), and concludes about the horror of severe melancholia that it “is a simulacrum o f all the evil of our world: o f our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history” (pp. 83-84). Menninger was one of the few psychoanalysts who accepted Freud’s concept and his (1938) book outlines a whole variety of conditions of self-destructive behavior that he considered convinc­ ing for his acceptance. It remains one of the best collections of clinical material that may be extrapolated or inferred as derivatives of the death instinct. Thbachnick (1976) accumulated similar clini­ cal vignettes to those of Menninger, but concludes that although his research on “accidents” supports the concept of a “death trend,” this is not identical to Freud’s description of a death in­ stinct. He argues that, “The death trend is a phenomenological construct, as contrasted with Freud’s death instinct which is a motivational one” (p. 61), in objecting to the teleological implica­ tions of Freud’s death instinct. Such studies of case material were initiated by Freud (1924) in “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Here Freud argues that when “the libido” diverts the death instinct outward it “is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power” (p. 163), another echo of Nietzsche. He postulates that a portion of the death instinct remains libidinally bound within the organism, and so “tamed” constitutes “erotogenic masochism” (p. 164). This paper was criticized by Foxe (1943), whose argument, common to most arguments against “evidence” for the death in­ stinct, is that the phenomena can be explained satisfactorily with the use of psychoanalytic concepts that do not require the postula­ tion of a secret death-instinct force at work. Even the concept of “death” in “death instinct” has come under attack in the literature (Levin, 1951), since the term is used differently in different cultures or situations and signifies a variety of phenomena. Lowental (1979) reports that his consultations with dying pa­ tients have convinced him “that the death-instinct does exist, in concealment from childhood” (p. 35). In his experience the process of dying brings about a mental regression whereby the death in­ stinct is eventually uncovered and discharged. Yet Lifton (1979) in

DEATH INSTINCT 17

his studies of death and the concept of immortality comes to an opposite conclusion, maintaining that Freud’s dualism of primal instincts is a vast oversimplification. Some clinical authors show a curious ambivalence toward the death instinct. For example Galdston (1955), while insisting that the death instinct as Freud conceived it cannot be validated in experience, also writes, “One can perceive an aversion to living, a pure and simple unwillingness to live, one that is not reactive but rather an initial manifestation in some schizophrenics, and in some organically sick persons, notably infants and young children” (p. 132). Ostow (1958) attempts to fit Freud’s death instinct into a general theory of animal instincts and suggests that the metabolic degrada­ tion that Freud called the death tendency in all living tissue is countered and partially canceled by the predatory activity o f the animal: “Tb avoid being consumed by his own metabolism the animal consumes other living creatures. Note that what is de­ flected outwards is not simply a destructive tendency, but specifi­ cally a predatory tendency” (p. 15). Ostow views narcissistic regres­ sion, with its loss of mutuality and reinforcement of separation, as itself an expression of the death instinct, thus in a way agreeing with Segal but not using Kleinian hypotheses. This also resembles Lacan’s grounding of the death instinct in an “active void” in every human. Predatory activity and narcissism arise in an attempt to deal with this void, which however should be distinguished from the “empty depleted self’ of the self psychologists; the latter is not universal but represents a failure o f phase-appropriate selfobject experiences (Chessick, 1985). Flugel (1953) tries to fit Freud’s death-instinct theory with cur­ rent views of homeostasis. For Flugel although “it is hard to find psychological evidence for the existence of an impulse towards death” (p. 71), and the identification o f the death instinct as a source of aggression is contradicted by “the facts pointing to the connection of aggression with frustration” (p. 72), still the tenden­ cy to stability, peace, and especially “death in old age may corre­ spond to a late-maturing instinct” (p. 71). Flugel’s struggle to clari­ fy the many aspects of the death instinct shows how difficult it is to give such a concept “biological validity,” as Freud would have it. Indeed, Fairbairn (1943), Guntrip (1968), and many others (Bacal and Newman, 1990) view aggression as always secondary to frustration and not requiring any biological instinct to explain it. Fairbairn claims that what Freud describes as death instincts “are

18 CHESSICK

for the most part masochistic relationships with internalized bad objects. A sadistic relationship with a bad object which is internal­ ized would also present the appearance of a death instinct” (p. 123). Fairbaim’s entire approach does away with the notions of instincts and drives and tries to replace them with internalized object representations and their associated affects, and Kemberg (1977) more recently adopts and develops this view. Aggression could spring from constitutional, biochemical, or genetic factors in the central nervous system, and a variety of clinical studies and debates on sources of aggression not utilizing the death instinct have appeared (Bornstein, 1982; Silver, 1982). For example, Stechler (1987) and Stechler and Halton (1987) claim that assertion in infancy is constructive, intelligence-building, and associated with euphoria. They contrast this with aggression, which is self-protective, reactive, and associated with fear and an­ ger. Aggression, they say, represents the reactive wish to destroy danger and appears in the second half o f the first year. When the parents view the normal infant’s assertion as aggression and thus thwart it, this constitutes a narcissistic wound and engenders more aggression. OTHER ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST THE CONCEPT Fayek (1980) is convinced that the death instinct “is an integral part of the dialectical development o f Freud’s thinking” (p. 456) and cannot be discarded without tearing up the foundation o f our interpretation of defenses and transference phenomena. In opposi­ tion Cohen (1980) argues that Freud’s theory o f the repetition compulsion is simply complicated by his reliance on a death in­ stinct “which has been justly rejected by most subsequent analysts on theoretical grounds” (p. 429). Rothstein and Sarnoff (Rothstein, 1982) engage in a similar debate about the origins of the repetition compulsion. Fayek (1981) maintains that Freud’s expla­ nation of narcissism cannot be understood if it is detached from the concept o f death instinct “without rendering the issues of meaning and interpretation irrelevant to the psychoanalytic act” (p. 321). This is so, he says, because the narcissistic relationship is based on wishes impossible to satisfy “and consequently it symbol­ izes death of the world or the self” 321). Eissler (1971, 1975) also defends Freud’s notion o f the death instinct, claiming no better theory has been devised that fits so well

DEATH INSTINCT 19

with the rest of Freud’s discoveries and theories; to reject it leaves an impossible paradox in psychoanalytic metapsychology as Freud (1920) himself pointed out. The death instinct theory, says Kohut (1984), “cannot be removed from the magnificent edifice of Freud’s theoretical system without seriously changing its cohesion and internal consistency” (pp. 35-36). Gifford (1988) outlines the massive death and destruction of large portions of humanity that have characterized the 20th century and is strongly influenced by the historical recurrences over the last 50 years, to agree with Freud’s notion of the “demonic powers” of the repetition compul­ sion. He agrees with Eissler’s argument that Freud was a reluctant pessimist who was compelled by his clinical observations to form gloom predictions about the future of civilization and even about the possible end of human life on earth. Authors generally agree (Saul, 1958) that the two major objec­ tions to the death instinct are that it is an unnecessary idea and that it cannot be directly observed clinically; “and further, that the concept is philosophical rather than clinical” (p. 323). Saul (1958) tries to find support for it in the second law o f thermodynamics, an attempt appearing in the literature from time to time but which depends on a questionable application of that law from physics to biology. Katan (1966) points out that Freud’s death instinct is a biological concept and should not be confused with the Nirvana principle. The latter represents a regressive tendency to return to the state assumed to exist at the beginning of life and is a concept that can be applied to a number of clinical phenomena such as sleep and psychotic development, “whereas the death instinct has a completely different goal, namely, to undo the source of life” (p. 101). We now know (Lichtenberg, 1983) that the infant does not simply tend toward the lowest possible excitation, as the Nirvana principle would have it, but that the infant seeks stimulation. Freud’s (1924) use of the Nirvana principle to express the trend of the death instinct and his teleology implied in the death instinct are not compatible with modern biology. Freud’s metapsychology can­ not be grounded in biological evidence, which does not make it invalid but does separate it from traditional natural sciences. WHAT WAS FREUD STRUGGLING TO ARTICULATE? Schur (1972) makes a number of interpretations of Freud’s psy­ chological state at the time he conceived of the death instinct and

20 CHESSICK

argues that Freud arrived at it “because conceptualizing the wish to die in biological terms enabled him to deal better with his own fear of death” (p. 373). Another attempt to analyze Freud’s psyche in order to explain his concept of the death instinct is by Hamilton (1976), who claims that early trauma left Freud “with a residue of excessive guilt and fear o f the omnipotence of thought, especially death wishes” (p. 163), which he argues can be traced in Freud’s work culminating in his introduction of the death instinct in Be­ yond the Pleasure Principle. Stolorow and Atwood (1979) at­ tribute Freud’s postulation of hostility as an internal biological necessity based on the death instinct to “his wish to absolve his mother” (p. 67). I doubt if efforts to understand the death instinct through inter­ pretations of the psyche of Freud when he conceived it will throw much light on the concept. However, Laplanche (1976) emphasizes the suddenness with which the concept of death made an impor­ tant entry in 1920 on “the Freudian scene,” as he puts it. It emerges at- the center of the system “as one of the two fundamental forces—and perhaps even as the only primordial force—in the heart of the psyche, of living beings, and of matter itself’ (p. 5). Laplanche correctly refers to an important philosophical current running from the stoics through Montaigne and reaching a modern version in Heidegger, in which the human being is viewed primarily as being-toward-death. Freud’s notion of the death instinct fits quite well with this trend, although it is not clear whether he was aware of it. Compton (1981), in reviewing the development of Freud’s theo­ ries of the instinctual drives, claims that concepts such as “aggres­ sion” and “libido” became detached from their early metapsychological “moorings,” and as such are problematic. Freud’s entire drive theory is at present in considerable disarray. This is not sur­ prising since, as Ruttenberg (1982) explains, “Freud moved freely from one sort of discourse to another, from neurology to psychol­ ogy, from psychology to biology, from conscious to unconscious, but also from individual to communal, from nature to art, myth to reality, and from discursive argumentation to the processes it is about” (pp. 12-13). The ambiguity involved in such a var­ iety of discourse is inevitable. Brenner (1982) suggests that questions about the source of the libidinal and aggressive drives cannot be answered because there is little evidence that either drive has a source: “What we know favors the idea that there are many determining factors for each rather than a single source. Both drives, like all other psychological phenomena, are an aspect of

DEATH INSTINCT 21

cerebral functioning, and it is impossible to say more than that” (p. 172). Lowental (1983) attempts to save the concept of the death in­ stinct by separating it from the aggressive aspects and making it one of the motivations that human beings have for death. This would seem to be a vast change in Freud’s conception of the death instinct, which is closely connected with collective violence and individual aggression and allegedly gives these behaviors their bas­ ic energy (Botstein, 1984). In a later paper Lowental (1986) refines his ideas, viewing the death drive as a continuum with an autode­ structive aspect at one end and a component of yearning for non­ existence at the other. He still attempts to disconnect the link between the death drive and aggression, and emphasizes the vari­ ous nondestructive components of the death drive. Symington (1986) similarly argues that Melanie Klein’s formula­ tion of the death instinct is not in the spirit of Freud’s death drive because she added a destructive drive to it, which she and her followers named the death drive, but Freud’s death drive preserves the organism against assaults upon its existence from outside. He writes, For Freud, as we saw, the aim is to preserve the organism so that it will return to inanimate existence according to its own internal processes of dissolution. Although there is an aggressive component in Freud’s death drive that wards off external dangers, its aim is to bring the organism back into the inorganic state, (p. 132)

Because of the ambiguity of the concept, it seems that Lowental does have a point in attempting to separate out the destructive or aggressive aspects of the death drive from the aspects that urge the human to die only in its own fashion and return to nonbeing. A de­ emphasis of the aggressive or sadistic aspects of the death drive that are so prominent in Kleinian theory might lead to a better understanding of the extreme pain experienced in situations of grave melancholia, situations that cannot be explained by Freud’s (1917) psychodynamics involving the internalized lost object. It should be remembered that in “Mourning and Melancholia” he proposes to discuss only one subgroup of depressions, recognizing that there are more archaic or primordial depressions that perhaps bring one closer to the painful experience o f the pure death in­ stinct. He writes, Our material, apart from such impressions as are open to every observer, is

22 CHESSICK limited to a small number of cases whose psychogenic nature was indisput­ able. We shall, therefore, from the outset, drop all claim to general validity for our conclusions, and we shall console ourselves by reflecting that, with the means of investigation at our disposal to-day, we could hardly discover anything that was not typical, if not of a whole class of disorders, at least of a small group of them. (p. 243)

Is it possible that if we put aside the aggressive or destructive component of Freud’s death instinct and conceive of it in pure operation in cases of profound, perhaps organically based, melan­ cholia, we will indeed have stumbled upon the border between the psychological and the somatic in its most primordial form? Grotstein (1990) reminds us of the experiential term “black hole” which is frequently mentioned by patients suffering from primitive men­ tal disturbances and intended to convey a sense of a catastrophic discontinuity of self, of falling over the abyss into the void. Grotstein believes that this “black hole” phenomenon represents, in its greatest and most profound meaning, the death instinct. As he puts it in Lacanian terminology, “The death instinct is its signifier and the ‘black hole’ is its profoundest signified” (p. 404). Is there a species derivative of the death instinct in the fact that “we are living through a protracted crisis of Western society and culture” (Castoriadis, 1989)? To this crisis belongs the proclama­ tion not only by Heidegger (1962) but by others of the end of philosophy, and the whole array o f deconstructionist and postmo­ dernist rhetoric. In characterizing the accelerating decay Casto­ riadis writes, “Freedom is threatened not only by totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, but also, in a more hidden but no less deep fashion, by the waning of conflict and critique, the spreading of amnesia and irrelevance, the growing inability to put into question the present and existing institutions” (p. 3). Sunic (1989) points out that for Spengler and recent cultural pessimists, “The sense of decadence is inherently combined with a revulsion against moder­ nity and an abhorrence of rampant economic greed. As recent history has shown, the political manifestation o f such revulsion may lead to . . . glorification o f the will-to-power and the nostal­ gia o f death” (p. 62). Philosophers and poets such as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger envision the erasure of humans as the opening of a void, a collapse o f all the meanings o f our history back into the nothingness from which they sprang. Sartre main­ tains that humans carry within themselves the seeds o f their own annihilation (Caws, 1979). This, I believe, is the continental philo-

DEATH INSTINCT 23

sophical articulation o f Freud’s death instinct as it manifests itself in our postmodern era. What is the ground o f this ubiquitous hidden tension between Love and Strife, Eros and the death in­ stinct, Being and Nothingness? SUMMARY AND RETRIEVE The death instinct is an ambiguous concept that we can never exactly clarify. It has no biological validity in the natural-science sense, and it is not on a level with scientific concepts such as “entropy” or “homeostasis” that are mathematically definable. It cannot be proved or disproved by argument or experiment. There are at least two aspects of common experience that sug­ gest it may have some validity, serving as presumptive evidence for it. The first of these is a set of phenomena that may be termed mega-states o f aggression turned outward, for example, in the Holocaust, holy wars, or Hiroshima, and mega-states of aggres­ sion turned inward, as experienced in grave cases of melancholia and in other profoundly pathological states characterized by unen­ durable personal pain that may even lead to suicide. Two “pure” primordial drives historically appear under all circumstances in mega-states, the sexual drive or Eros which, as Schopenhauer (1970) stressed, engenders mindless perpetual reproduction, and the death instinct which engenders endless misery, pain, and de­ struction. The other set of phenomena that suggests the validity of the death-instinct concept is manifest in human decay and longing for death. One may observe the inevitable waning of liveliness, the tendency to sleep and to vegetate fighting against Eros until a critical level is reached. This critical level is crossed in different people at different ages as they sink into a passive, unreflecting state or become “couch potatoes.” For example, it was not crossed by Freud until the very end of his life when he finally had had enough, and asked for morphine in order to die; in abandoned or underprivileged children, who are starved physically and/or emo­ tionally, the critical level is often reached soon after birth, and in a sense the child is in a dying state thereafter (Grotstein, 1982). Understanding this concept is extremely important, in my clinical experience, in the analysis of older patients. Many of them sense the struggle between Eros and death inside themselves and can even articulate it in one fashion or another. Perhaps genetic factors

24 CHESSICK

in the aging process are involved in determining the individual’s rate of decay, but socioeconomic circumstances are a vital factor, for without an empathic matrix psychological death occurs and biological decay accelerates. The importance of,our negation or dark side, an abyss first gazed into by Nietzsche, was already expressed in the work of Hegel, and is fundamental to postmodern and current continental philosophy. Hegel (1812) recognized that we had to define all as­ pects of reason, health, sanity, and civilization by the Other, the boundary or dark or antithetic area that contains the irrational, the sick, the barbaric, the Nothingness that delineates Being. For Hegel, to be determinate is to contain one’s negation within one­ self. So, explains Thylor (1977), “the very determination which reality must have in order to be tends to annul it” (p. 238). Foucault (1973) utilized this when he described the human as a “transcendental/empirical doublet.” As I (Chessick, 1985, 1992) have discussed elsewhere, one of the aspects of the human as a “transcendental/empirical doublet” is what Foucault calls the “cogito/unthought.” Although we humans have the potential for lucid thought, we are always surrounded by unfathomable limits that we can never fully understand. As Foucault puts it, the human wanders in distress and there is no such thing as complete knowl­ edge or final truth; the human is always limited and dominated by the conditions of life, history, and language. One can never reach this “Other,” or dark side, or get clear about it; nevertheless it is always there with us. It delineates our finitude, our horizons, and our limits, establishing the fundamen­ tal polarity and dualism in all life that Freud intuitively insisted was present, a dualism he maintained from the very start to the finish of his career. We may choose to ignore or disavow the dark side of human existence, but the major thrust of discoveries in philosophy and psychoanalysis as well as our history in the 20th century have demonstrated that ignoring it or “turning a blind eye” (Steiner, 1985) will not make it go away. Hölderlin (Hegel’s close friend), Nietszche, and Heidegger in various poetic articulations emphasized this as chaotic nothingness, an active void or abyss always threatening to overwhelm us. Their descriptions are based on Hegel’s (1812) epochal conception that “something through its own nature relates itself to the other . . . its being-within-self in­ cludes the negation within it, by means of which alone it now has its affirmative determinate being” (p. 125). Out of the horrifying mega-state of destruction of World War I

DEATH INSTINCT 25

came Spengler’s pessimism and Freud’s attempt to signify this void or negation, his concept of the death instinct. It was based on his intuitive conviction o f the Hegelian polarity of evolving life, and represented his final effort to unify or ground the ubiquitous neu­ rotic repetition compulsion, our historically repetitive species and individual common experiences such as massive aggression and grave melancholia, and perhaps his personal agonies over the death o f his loved ones, the collapse of his country, and the course of his ultimately ineradicable malignancy. The fact that the death instinct cannot in principle be quantified or validated by empirical study does not mean that it is a useless concept or has no vital role in understanding the foundation and horizons of human life and human struggle: He was quite comfortable. But mainly he was off the ground. That was the danger, what a man had to watch against: once you laid flat on the ground, right away the earth started to draw you back down into it. The very moment you were born out of your mother’s body, the power and drag of the earth was already at work on you. . . . And you knew it too. William Faulkner, The Mansion

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