The “death drive”…is a concept which can only be correctly situated at a specific moment in the drama of the Freudian discovery. Outside of that context, it becomes an empty formula.
—Jean Laplanche, “The So-Called ‘Death Drive’”
In this first chapter, I will be teasing out the basics of a metapsychological narrative first outlined by Sigmund Freud in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I have already discussed, in the introduction, the deep theoretical crisis out of which this text emerged. For my present purposes, I want simply to emphasize that the metapsychology produced there, in the background of every theoretical innovation that Freud would make for the rest of his life, is indeed a narrative. Whereas the earlier metapsychological venture of the 1910s sought to lay out a set of categories that analysts could apply schematically, in Kantian fashion, to the empirical content of their analytic encounters, the later “metanarrative” provides more of a Hegelian schema-in-motion, a set of ideas that can only be properly grasped in the story in which they unfold. The various concepts that emerge from this development (id, ego, and superego) are not simple additions to the pre-1920 analytic toolbelt but rather characters in a fundamentally new story, the central personage of which is undoubtedly the death drive.
1Before turning to the narrative itself, however, I will offer a brief conceptual history of the death drive and its unfortunately undertheorized vicissitude,
the drive to mastery.
2 Despite its recurrence throughout Freud’s work, this latter concept has failed to receive due treatment; where it has been addressed, it is more often than not assimilated to more familiar concepts like aggression. It is my aim here to demonstrate that the drive to mastery is not a footnote in the history of psychoanalytic theory but a key to understanding Freud’s later dual drive theory and, by extension, the structural model of id, ego, and superego. The death drive, on the other hand, though widely rejected by the professional analytic community, has been fruitfully developed in a number of directions. Unfortunately, this development has typically taken place
outside the narrative of which it is the critical part.
In the effort thus to re-embed the death drive in its natural habitat and unveil the importance of the drive to mastery for psychoanalytic theory,
3 I will attempt a cohesive presentation of sections 4 and 5 of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which contain what many would argue are the most ludicrous hypotheses to be found in Freud’s grand corpus. Given the fragmented and wild nature of his endeavor there, this task will require some intensive textual work. To take another early cue from Jean Laplanche, the aim of this reading will be not so much to criticize Freud, nor simply to recapitulate his views, but rather to think
alongside of him, to retrace his steps, and, if necessary, to veer slightly from his own path to inspect the conceptual surroundings.
4 My hope, by the end of this chapter, is to have elucidated the basic tension between the death drive and the drive to mastery, which, like eerily similar personalities whose opposition comprises a plot’s intrigue, form the antithetical counterpoles of the drive theory that will occupy the attention of the remaining chapters of this book.
A Brief History of Mastery and Death
In 1920 Freud shocked the bourgeoning analytic community with the introduction of the death drive (
Todestrieb),
5 the unsettling hypothesis that all living things are unconsciously driven to their own demise. This new drive theory was meant to provide a comprehensive solution to a set of conundrums that had hitherto eluded psychoanalytic explanation, most notably the “compulsion to repeat” traumatic situations and thereby retroactively attempt to gain some degree of
mastery over them.
6 New as the speculations of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle were, this concern with psychic mastery had been a mainstay of Freud’s thought throughout his career.
7 Very early on, in a paper from 1894, he suggests the importance of “mastering somatic excitation” (
Bewältigung der somatischen Sexualerregung),
8 a phrase that would repeat in a number of his most well-known essays: in “On Narcissism,” where he calls “our mental apparatus…a device for mastering excitations [
Bewältigung von Erregungen] which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects”;
9 in the case of the Wolfman, where he discourses on the failure “to master the real problems of life” (
Bewältigung der realen Probleme des Lebens);
10 and in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” where he emphasizes the importance of “mastering stimuli” (
Reizbewältigung).
11A somewhat different concern with mastery is found in
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), where Freud posits a “drive to mastery” (
Bemächtigungstrieb) associated with “masculine sexual activity” and aggressive, anal behavior.
12 It is also, curiously enough, linked to “the instinct for knowledge,” which is deemed “a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery.”
13 Between the
Three Essays and
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the phrase would appear sporadically and always in the limited sense accorded it in the
Three Essays.
14 As Kristin White explains, Freud most likely had Alfred Adler’s concept of
Machtstreben (striving for power) in mind every time he used
Bemächtigungstrieb.
15 Adler was an important but threatening interlocutor of Freud’s throughout the 1900s, but rather angrily broke with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1911. It would thus make sense that Freud employed the term sparingly and to restricted effect.
Nothing in the pre-1920 appearances of the term
Bemächtigungstrieb thus prepares us for the significance it acquires in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud explains the efforts of his grandson’s
Fort/Da game
16 in terms of an “instinct for mastery [
Bemächtigungstrieb] that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not.”
17 No longer a simple “component instinct” as it was in the
Three Essays,
Bemächtigungstrieb is now put forth as counterevidence to Freud’s belief, held for some thirty years, that all life is governed by the pleasure principle. In addition, it is made responsible for the compulsion to repeat in that it is what causes us to return to traumatic scenes and retroactively “master or bind its excitations” (
die Erregung zu bewältigen oder zu binden).
18 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis help us make sense of this surprising conceptual transformation: during the war years, they argue, Freud came to realize that the “mastery of the object” characteristic of aggressive behavior “goes hand in hand with the binding together” of distressing stimuli.
19 In other words, the problematics of
Bewältigung and
Bemächtigung slowly began to fuse in Freud’s mind, and by
Beyond the Pleasure Principle “no strict distinction is drawn between the two terms.”
20 We can thus only make sense of Freud’s explanation of the
Fort/Da game if we understand
Bemächtigungstrieb to mean, for the first time,
Bewältigungstrieb.
21 For all of their supposed translation sins, it seems then that the Stracheys were quite justified in rendering both
Bemächtigung and
Bewältigung as “mastery.”
22Aside from
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the most striking usage of the drive to mastery comes in “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (1924), where the term is further equated with “the destructive instinct” (
Destruktionstrieb) and, strikingly, “the will to power” (
Wille zur Macht).
23 Freud is clearly struggling with the terminology here, as he even goes so far as to equate the destructive and the death drives (
Todes- oder Destruktionstrieb).
24 Should we then, by the transitive property, take
Bemächtigungstrieb to mean
Todestrieb? As I intend to show in what follows, reconstructing Freud’s metapsychological narrative in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle reveals more terminological distinction between these concepts than he offers in “The Economic Problem of Masochism.” Intimately connected as the two drives in fact are, the relationship is much more complicated than one of identity.
* * *
After Freud, not much is made of
Bemächtigungstrieb;25 but while his thoughts on psychic mastery withered from neglect, the theory of the death drive ironically caused a great disturbance within the psychoanalytic community and was the subject of much, albeit predominantly negative, discussion.
26 At first, Freud himself only ambivalently proposed the idea, but it eventually “acquired such a power” over him that he could “no longer think in any other way.”
27 Freud’s followers, despite their general obsequiousness, were not so charmed: indeed, as Freud’s enthusiasm waxed, theirs waned. With the exception of Sándor Ferenczi, whose elaborate extensions of psychoanalytic metapsychology worried even Freud himself,
28 none in Freud’s inner circle came to accept the death drive.
29 Despite epistolary pleas for their relevance to psychoanalytic theory, Ernest Jones and Oskar Pfister both sadly reported to Freud in 1930 that they simply could not endorse his views on the matter.
30 Many of the continental emigrants felt similarly and did not pass up the opportunity to say so. Fritz Wittels suggested that the wild speculations in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle followed upon the death of Freud’s daughter, Sophie Halberstadt, an accusation that Freud was quick to deny.
31 Otto Fenichel contended in typically reasoned fashion that the clinical facts “do not necessitate the assumption of a genuine self-destructive instinct.”
32 As de facto leader of the school of ego psychology, Heinz Hartmann sought to develop the structural theory while “omitting Freud’s other, mainly biologically oriented set of hypotheses of the ‘life’ and ‘death’ instincts.”
33 Wilhelm Reich, one of the earliest opponents of the death drive, claimed simply that “‘Death’ was right. ‘Instinct’ was wrong.”
34 One could go on like this for quite some time: the number of theorists who have entertained the death drive only to curtly dismiss it is rather astounding.
35The only psychoanalytic theorists who have affirmed the death drive, at least in some part, have generally belonged to one of two psychoanalytic “schools”: Kleinian or Lacanian.
36 Hoping to draw more attention to the aggressive impulses she had discovered in her work with children, Melanie Klein was an early endorser of the concept of the death drive.
37 As many commentators have noted, however, Klein herself never really dealt with the death drive as it was described by Freud: her interest from the beginning was in aggression and destruction, concepts that she equated with
Todestrieb.
38 Although Freud most certainly gave his adherents ample reason to relate the concepts of death drive, drive to mastery, and aggression beginning around 1923, the exact relation between these terms was never made clear. As Jean Laplanche argues, “Freud understands his death drive
retrospectively as an aggressive drive;”
39 that is, in its initial formulation in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle the death drive was most certainly not conceived as aggression.
40 Only later did Freud come to associate these terms. Although Klein did a great deal to advance and complicate Freudian theory, in taking this association, in rather uncomplicated fashion, to be equation, I do not believe she did any service to the concept of the death drive.
Indeed, one might argue that her work actually
prevented any real discussion of the death drive in the English literature. In the early 1940s Klein and her followers were locked in an acrimonious debate with Anna Freud and other “orthodox” members of the British Psychoanalytic Society.
41 When the animosity passed and Kleinians began more freely to mingle in the so-called psychoanalytic mainstream, British and American analysts were also confronting the need to make sense of the metapsychology that undergirded the structural model of id, ego, and superego. In the simplest terms, their solution went something like this: “Freud had
actually been struggling with the stark fact of aggression for some time, but in order to make himself seem different from Adler, he formulated the problem in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle in alien terms. Recognizing as we do the distorting nature of Freud’s ambition, we can dispose of his theoretical idiosyncrasies and focus on what we analysts all recognize to be of clinical importance: aggression.” The fact that it was the controversial figure of Melanie Klein who most powerfully made the equation “death drive = aggression” led the psychoanalytic community to feel that it had made great progress in mending an internal conflict when it finally accepted aggressive drives alongside libidinal ones. The self-congratulation that followed virtually buried the concepts of the death drive and the drive to mastery under the weight of good will amidst the English-speaking psychoanalytic world.
Not everyone, however, fell victim to this conceptual “evolution”: in France, free from the adaptive ideals in emigrant lands and under the spell of Jacques Lacan, the death drive was explored in all its enigmatic impenetrability. While there is a strain of the Lacanian appropriation that links the themes of death and aggression through the lens of the Hegelian “struggle unto death,”
42 Lacan employed the death drive in many different contexts toward many different ends, recognizing, at every turn, the real difficulty of understanding Freud’s hypothesis.
43 This experimental approach of his theoretical encounters solidified into a generally centrifugal tendency in the works of his heirs, loyal or otherwise: the death drive became “unbound” (
deliée) libido (Laplanche),
44 a “counter-evolutionary movement of disorganization” (Marty),
45 a “desire of non-desire” (Aulagnier),
46 semiotic
chora (Kristeva),
47 an ever failing attack on primary narcissism (Leclaire),
48 negative narcissism (Green),
49 or else, even more radically,
différance vis à vis the pleasure principle (Derrida),
50 an archiviolithic force (Derrida again),
51 body without organs (Deleuze),
52 “‘undead’ eternal life itself” (Žižek).
53 Without taking away from the inevitability of differential play, one wonders, given the theoretical implications of the present topic, about this desire to send the death drive out in ever new directions without first interrogating its source.
54The absent center around which these various forms of reception relate is a serious confrontation with the death drive that does not reduce it to aggression and remains within Freud’s conceptual space in an attempt to see what this notion undoes and redoes. This project is no different from the one Freud himself undertook after 1920.
Life After Death: Freud’s Account of the Origins of Life in Sections 4 and 5 of
Beyond the Pleasure PrincipleIn this section I intend to follow the death drive in the metapsychological narrative of which it is the primary character and without which its significance cannot be fully appreciated. The death drive was a comprehensive solution to a fundamental problem for Freud, a thread that tied together seemingly disparate phenomena into a cohesive theoretical whole. What were those phenomena? How did it function as a solution?
Sections 1–3 of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle introduce difficulties that challenge the dominance of the pleasure principle, including war neurosis and the repetitive nature of children’s play (the
Fort/Da game). The first appearance of the term
death instinct comes at the beginning of section 6. Sections 4 and 5, which link the straightforward clinical observations of 1–3 to the introduction of the death drive in 6, are, for lack of better description, quite strange. They are an admittedly speculative attempt to account for the relation between the compulsion to repeat and the pleasure principle in a mythological narration of the genesis of life or, in Freud’s terms, the emergence of the organic from the inorganic.
55 I will begin this reading in section 5 and work my way back to section 4, as section 5 contains the most explicit description of the genesis of life.
Freud has no doubt that “‘inanimate things existed before living ones,’” and so the biogonic problem, for him, is one of the emergence of organic matter from the inorganic.
56 Yet the specifics of its genesis form something like the “navel” of this particular dream: “the attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception” (38). Although the genesis of life itself is unfathomable, one can speculate that its first attempts were brief, given that the tension which “arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. It was still an easy matter at that time for a living substance to die; the course of its life was probably only a brief one, whose direction was determined by the chemical structure of the young life” (38).
Though Freud does not call it by its name, this passage is the first introduction of the death drive, which is described here as resulting from the organism’s endeavor to cancel out what it sees as a tension that disturbs an inanimate repose. A question immediately arises: given that all factors determining the course of this hapless first organism point to its absorption back into the inorganic, how is it that death could be anything
other than an “easy matter?” That is, how do we get development? Freud admits that “for a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till
decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated
détours before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life” (38–39, my emphasis).
How is one to understand these “decisive external influences?” Are they equally unfathomable as the forces that brought about the organic in the first place? This statement is all the more puzzling given what follows: two possible explanations of the development of life from this primitive state based upon internal influences. First, Freud follows an “extreme” line of thought and imagines the self-preservative instincts to be “component instincts whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death” (39). In other words, the death drive is already a kind of self-preservative drive insofar as it assures that the organism wards “off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself” (39). Freud summarizes this first hypothesis with the conclusion that the “guardians of life” were originally “the myrmidons of death” (39). Although this possibility is immediately rejected, an element of truth is buried in this first “extreme view,” which I will return to shortly.
The second hypothesis, which is promptly affirmed, is that certain “germ-cells” of primitive organisms “retain the original structure of living matter and, after a certain time, with their full complement of inherited and freshly acquired instinctual dispositions, separate themselves from the organism as a whole” (40). “The instincts which watch over the destinies of these elementary organisms that survive the whole individual” are deemed “the true life instincts” (40). This second hypothesis has the benefit of positing
real countervailing forces to the death drive, as opposed to the first, which simply blurs the line between them. But the
existence of these “germ-cells” still cannot be accounted for: in the first stirrings of life, Freud has only posited a drive to return to the inorganic. How is it that there was time for “germ-cells” to develop in such a hostile atmosphere? Even were this second hypothesis acceptable, Freud would still lack an explanation as to how the organism survives long enough for it to have any investment in procreation. Thus, if his genetic story is going to make sense beyond its humble beginnings, he must have recourse to something besides the “germ-cell” to explain the generation of instinctual conflict.
57And in fact, near the beginning of section 4, he has already explained how
death itself can lead to life: Freud here worries that a “living organism in its most simplified possible form” “would be killed by the stimulation emanating from”…“an external world charged with the most powerful energies”…“if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli.”
58 Note the inverted problematic: whereas in section 5 he was concerned with how an organism could survive in the face of the death drive, here he is positing a hostile external world against which the organism defends itself. Why does this organism devote its energy to developing a protective shield, given that its only impulse is to die? In other words, how does Freud get from brief eruptions of life with little interest in remaining alive to a situation where life is actually defending itself from the external world? He explains as follows:
[The organism] acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface
ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity; and these layers can devote themselves, behind the protective shield, to the reception of the amounts of stimulus which have been allowed through it.
By its death [
Absterben],
the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate—unless, that is to say, stimuli reach it which are so strong that they break through the protective shield [
Reizschutz].
59A solution as elegant as it is strange: in
partly attaining the aim of the death drive, the organism inadvertently
protects itself through the construction of a “dead” psychic
Reizschutz.
60 In the words of Benno Rosenberg, we are confronted here with the “surprising possibility of diverting a part of the death drive and using it to defend against the death drive.”
61 Without recourse to any other principle, then, Freud has found a reason why life might be preserved in an organism that has no intention to live. His statement that the guardians of life were originally the myrmidons of death is thus not unfounded: by fortuitous cosmic accident, the sole drive manifested in the first organism happened also to be, when only partially gratified in a very particular way, its own opposition.
62But something is not right about this picture: if the organism seeks a return to the inorganic, what exactly is so threatening about the external world that it needs to build a protective shield? Why would it not welcome death? Freud has described the mechanism for the construction of the protective shield but not the reason for it. Another question: if the organism’s environment is inorganic matter, as Freud says it is, how does it distinguish the inorganic shield from the inorganic external world? In other words, what is the difference between dying and dying to protect oneself? If the organism is to have reason to construct a protective shield, the external world somehow must become charged with energies in a way that both transforms a longed-for origin into a hostile threat and that differentiates it from the organism’s protective outer layer.
Once again, Freud addresses this precise problem when he turns his attention to a particular way in which the fledgling organism deals with an overabundance of stimuli: “There is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defense against them. This is the origin of
projection.”
63 Is “projection,” like the “germ-cell,” yet another incomprehensible addition to Freud’s story? Where does projection come from in an organism made up only of death drive?
I am tempted here to tackle this problem in a Kleinian fashion by seeing projection as implied in a
position, as a concomitant of a certain orientation to the world, rather than as a psychic mechanism. Freud’s account can be reasonably reconstructed in light of this understanding of projection as follows: in the beginning stages of its differentiation from the inorganic, the organism is not yet truly an “inside” distinct from an inorganic “outside.” The tension constitutive of the death drive is thus both a tension
within and a tension
between: from one angle, the organic is a tension
within a larger inorganic system. From another, there is a tension
between organic and inorganic. These two views are both technically accurate, though they result in two very different relationships: in the first the inorganic is the tensionless home of the organic. In the second the inorganic is a hostile threat. This situation, where the very same force can be seen as both one of homecoming and one of destruction, is characterized by a
primal ambivalence.
Projection, in this view, is the assumption of what I will call the “tension-between” position,
64 which would be of no particular importance in comparison to the “tension-within” position were it not for its effect of making the world something against which to develop a protective shield; that is, of making the world into an
external world. The tension-between position thus has
performative effects: when the questionably exterior is treated as definitively exterior, further differentiation via the development of the protective shield results. In other words, an inorganic/organic “inside” is recognized as an inorganic “outside” in contrast to an organic “inside,” and this act itself leads to the increasing individuation of the organism. Projection, at this stage, is not the transposition of inside into outside but the simultaneous invention of both inside and outside.
Whether projection is a concomitant of a position or a psychic mechanism, as Freud most probably thought of it, its introduction at this point in the story casts doubt on the nature of the “decisive external influences” that were credited with the death drive’s detours:
how is it possible now to maintain the externality of the external?65 In the paragraph that immediately follows the one in which he describes the origin of projection, Freud defines “as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield.”
66 If this reading has so far been accurate, when the organism turns its energy to the problem of mastering this great amount of stimulus that breaks in as a result of trauma, it turns the death drive as reinforcer of the protective shield against the death drive “projected” as exterior threat. The death drive in its former capacity as protective shield builder is what “binds” the free-flowing energy that rushes through the traumatic breach by means of “anticathexis” into a dead, cortical layer; in other words, in this role, it operates as the
drive to mastery.
67 In turning against itself in this way, the death drive (what might be called a drive to “self”-mastery, i.e., mastery of the tension of organic matter) is redirected outward into a drive to “other”-mastery (mastery of the tension caused by “external” impingement).
68One can glimpse here the importance of distinguishing between aggression and the drive to mastery: for Freud, the death drive is not sent outward into the world when it is deflected. Its destructiveness is still pointed at the self when it is exteriorized. In other words, “I want to annihilate myself” does not become “I want to annihilate others,” but rather “Others are trying to annihilate me” and “I want to protect myself against others” (and this dual movement is itself the invention of both “I” and “other” in this formulation).
69 Admittedly, Freud himself does later speak of the externalization of the death drive into a sadistic drive: “Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death instinct which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the object?”
70 This is commonly taken to mean that the death drive is an inward-pointing sadism, thus paving the way for the general equation of death drive and aggression.
What, however, is the “narcissistic libido” in this sentence?
71 Just before this passage, Freud writes: “the ego is the true and original reservoir of libido…; it is only from that reservoir that libido is extended on to objects.” Libido that returns to cathect the ego itself is “described as ‘narcissistic.’”
72 Since the psychic structure of the ego must have some degree of existence if it is to be both a reservoir for and object of this energy, the very existence of narcissistic libido assumes a certain development of the psychic
Reizschutz and thus that the drive to mastery has already been at work before the narcissistic libido manages to convert the death drive into sadism. This difference between aggression and the drive to mastery will be more fully explored in
chapter 3.
In addition to differentiating mastery and aggression, Freud also makes it clear that mastery is more than mere defensiveness: before the development of the psychic stimulus-barrier, the organism is overwhelmed by the environment and thus does not
relate to it as an external entity. It is only with the development of protective structure that a “favourable” condition is created “for the reception of stimuli.”
73 In other words, although the drive to mastery emerges initially as a protective drive in relation to a hostile environment, it is also the condition of the possibility of receptivity to the outer world (and, in theory, it continues to be so after the “paranoid” relation to the world is overcome). As will become clearer in the next chapter, I believe that Freud’s
Reizschutz is best understood not only as a protective “carapace or armor” but
also as a “matrix or medium” that allows “for a greater mobility and circulation of psychic energies.”
74Freud’s
picture of the beginning of life can now be completed: the protective shield, the external threats, and the drive to mastery that deals with those threats can all in some way be related back to the death drive, the concept that allows him to unite the diverse set of phenomena he introduced in sections 1–3 of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, just as the theory of the primal horde allowed him to explain a diverse set of anthropological data in
Totem and Taboo. To recap the story:
1. “By the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception,” the organic emerges from the inorganic.
2. The first instinct, the death drive, arises from the tension inherent in organic matter and the desired return to the “zero-level” of the inanimate.
3. By a certain partial and focused gratification of the death drive, the primitive organism is able to form a protective and receptive outer layer (Reizschutz).
4. The organism exists in a state of primal ambivalence in relation to the inorganic: on the one hand, it is a tension within a larger inorganic whole. On the other, there is a tension between it and the inorganic. The assumption of the latter position is called projection.
5. Only with projection is the mechanism for the formation of a protective shield engaged against decisive “external” influences; this causes the organism to devote a great amount of energy to the task of “mastering stimuli” and to further developing its structure of “bound energy,” which serves to protect the organism with increasing strength.
“
Mastery of and through death”: this, in short, is the way one gets to a Nietzschean will for ever greater forms of life from a simple living vesicle that has no other wish than that it die.
75Primal Repression, or Tying off a Loose End in “The Economic Problem of Masochism”
At one point in Freud’s description of his living vesicle, he writes that excitations “give rise to feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series”: these feelings are said to index “what is happening in the interior” of the organism, which has hitherto been described solely in terms of death drive.
76 In an important follow-up paper to
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud directly confronts this “economic problem” introduced by his new dual drive theory: if the death drive aims toward a reduction of tensions to a zero level, how is it that it differs from the pleasure principle, which had been previously defined in precisely the same terms? As Laplanche notes, the “principle of neuronic inertia” that Freud had posited in the
Project for a Scientific Psychology, which asserted the tendency of neurones “to a
complete discharge, to
inertia, to a
zero level,” went through three stages: “first, at this initial stage, under the name of the principle of neuronic inertia; soon thereafter under the term of ‘pleasure principle’; finally as the Nirvana principle or the principle of the death instinct.”
77Given this conceptual confusion, Freud admits that his first impulse was to conflate the two:
We have unhesitatingly identified the pleasure-unpleasure principle with this Nirvana principle…. The Nirvana principle (and the pleasure principle which is supposedly identical with it) would be entirely in the service of the death instincts, whose aim is to conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic state, and it would have the function of giving warnings against the demands of the life instincts—the libido—which try to disturb the intended course of life. But such a view cannot be correct.
78Such a view cannot be correct because it would mean that the principle Freud had previously posited as governing all life would now be in the service of death; in this case the pleasure principle would not truly have a “beyond.” He thus revises his conception of the pleasure principle, arguing that it deals not in “quantitative” reduction like the death drive but with some “qualitative characteristic” the nature and genesis of which he admits no knowledge.
79 But “however this may be, we must perceive that the Nirvana principle, belonging as it does to the death instinct, has undergone a modification in living organisms through which it has become the pleasure principle.”
80It is interesting to note that both the pleasure principle and the drive to mastery, the two basic requirements of life, one demanding satisfaction and nourishment, the other building the young organism’s strength so as to put it in a better position to provide satisfaction and nourishment for itself, are in this view redirections and modifications of the death drive. It is tempting to view this process of redirection in terms of
repression, which Freud had understood, from his earliest writings on the subject, as involving a split between an idea and its corresponding affect, the redirection of that affective force, and a distortion of the original idea. Freud was constantly searching for new ways to name this split (neurone/charge, idea/affect, word/thing), this difference between some kind of structure and its associated force. Since in the beginning stages of life the zero principle of the death drive is transformed into the pleasure principle and its associated entropic force is split up into a hostile exterior force and the drive to mastery, I propose to dub the event that gives rise to the drive to mastery and the pleasure principle
primal repression. Freud introduces this term in his metapsychological paper “Repression,” though he provides it with very little content other than to say that it is the primal event upon which all subsequent repression is modeled.
81 Given its foundational role in the development of life, this event is most certainly the first instance of the distortion of an instinctual representative and the redirection of its force. This picture is consistent with Freud’s argument that all development takes place as a result of instinctual repression.
82Curiously enough, it is
Eros that is said to accomplish this task of redirection. What modifies the Nirvana principle of the death drive into the pleasure principle? “It can only be the life instinct, the libido, which has thus, alongside of the death instinct, seized upon a share in the regulation of the processes of life.”
83 Later in the same paper, Freud tells us that Eros has another task: that of “diverting [the death drive] to a great extent outwards…towards objects in the external world.”
84 Although in both cases Freud attributes a positive agency to Eros, it is not clear that he is justified in doing so: the drive to mastery, at least, being a self-subversion of the death drive, is generated without any outside help, and it is reasonable to assume that the pleasure principle comes into existence in the same movement. If this is true, then Eros is not the
motor of primal repression but rather its
after-effect,
85 a force that
will have been only when a life-conducive organization (mastery + pleasure) gains enough stability to create a new kind of conflict with the death drive.
86 I will take up this idea in more detail in the next chapter.
* * *
Returning once again to the text of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
87 my reading of Freud’s “metanarrative” there elucidated an instinctual opposition between a drive toward self/other confusion (the death drive) and one toward self/other differentiation (the drive to mastery). The former, at least in its original state, is exhausted by the simple aim of casting off differentiation and returning to the repose of the “inorganic” environment, in which the organism wishes to be like “water in water,” to use Georges Bataille’s words.
88 The drive to mastery, on the other hand, is a more complicated character. For the moment, I will sum up its basic characteristics in five points.
1. The drive to mastery provides protection for the organism by reinforcing its stimulus barrier (
Reizschutz) when it is threatened, by harnessing “free” energy into a “bound” shield, and this protective structure creates a “favourable” condition “for the reception of stimuli.”
892. It is directed against “exterior threats” that, at a more fundamental level, are neither truly exterior nor threats; which is to say a) that the drive to mastery is itself the cause of differentiation, the separation of inside and outside, and b) that these threats are repressed objects of longing. Developmentally, this would mean that living beings must turn their reality into a threat for the purpose of individuation while at the same time maintaining a libidinal attachment.
3. Although the transition from the tension-within to the tension-between position involves something of a misrecognition, it is a necessary one: without turning its reality into a “hostile exterior,” the organism has no counterforce against which to mobilize its own forces of development.
4. The protective shield formed by the drive to mastery is a “dead” cortical layer covering over an “organic” kernel, but, again, a kind of death that is necessary for the propagation of life. Long after Freudian drive theory would be rejected as bad biologism, Roberto Esposito would express this same idea while introducing his concept of “immunitary process”: “unable to directly achieve its objective, it is forced to pursue it from the inside out. In so doing, it retains its objective in the horizon of meaning of its opposite: it can prolong life, but only by continuously giving it a taste of death.”
905. Due to the primal ambivalence of the organism, the
Reizschutz can be neither too “thin” nor too “thick”: on the one hand, the organism cannot survive without some form of protection. On the other, it cannot become too insulated from the external world.
91 The cultivation of death in life thus easily lapses into death itself. The organism thus must both have constant contact with its environment (else it slide definitively into the tension-between position) and at the same time be able to ward off engulfment (else it remain too comfortable in the tension-within position).