Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism

One could say that this book is an attempt to illuminate the varied psychic and social impediments to the achievement of mastery. When we hear the word mastery, it is natural to turn to Hegel or to think of some kind of domination or subjugation, but we very often use the word in a more everyday sense to designate the acquisition of a skill, a certain deftness of practice, or even the possession of a basic grip on a difficult situation. It is the obstacles to mastery in the latter sense of the term, and thus the question of why human beings are particularly bad at just getting along, that primarily concerns me here. One might argue that it is a mistake cleanly to separate these two: the critical theorists, after all, convincingly argued that the Enlightenment quest for mastery in the second sense has dissolved into a crisis of mastery in the first.¹

Part of what I try to do in this book is to offer an explanation of this dissolution and thus to propose a theory of the relationship between these two senses of mastery. To admit, however, that they are related, even necessarily, is not to say that we should collapse the distinction: indeed, I take the question of how we work toward a stability and equanimity that allows us to get through the day (mastery₂) without going on, whether through frustration, overeagerness, or fear, then to seek the kind of excessive and controlling stability that is bought at the expense of others (mastery₁) to be a fundamental one for both psychology and social theory. To give up on this distinction—to hold, in other words, that domination is bound inextricably to the task of getting the hang of life—is to fall prey to an irremediable cynicism about the possibility of psychic and social transformation.

My interest in this problematic stems from Karl Marx, who conceives of alienation as an inversion of the human being’s natural relationship of mastery over the environment. For Marx, human beings as a species are defined by their capacity consciously to “produce their means of subsistence”;² in capitalism this capacity is turned against the being in whom it is manifest. Thus, we do not hone and perfect our capacities through work but are rather dulled and fragmented by work; we do not deploy our intellects toward the solution of our problems but submit to a scientific organization that demands conformity; we do not gain the satisfaction that follows from successfully furthering our abilities but rather stew in a general anxiety about losing our places in processes over which we have no control; we do not work in order to live better, in order to make a difficult but pliable world warm and inviting, but live merely in order to work and according to the demands of a world made icy and hostile. These are the basics of what, in Capital, is commonly called the “immiseration thesis.”³

In brief, when Marx claims that the human being is “alienated” under capitalism, he means that an animal whose essence it is to master its environment is itself mastered by its environment.⁴ What I find lacking in Marx, and also in the general tradition that carries his name, is any recognition of a part of our nature that actually works against our own mastery and thus willingly accepts this “inversion.” If, to simplify Marx’s point in The German Ideology tremendously, we are what we do, then surely some place must be made in our conception of ourselves for all the destructive behavior that serves to erode our mastery, that welcomes the destabilization wrought by capitalism, and that actively embraces, rather than passively imbibes, cultural “opiates.” On this last point the ideal, as I see it, would be to view the beliefs, activities, and organizations too casually labeled distractions not as ancillary to the capitalist mode of production, nor as bearing their own autonomous logic, but rather as speaking to something else about the human being left untheorized by Marx. This would be to recognize all those things we take to provide some relief from alienation to be not so different from less socially accepted ways of attaining that relief, detrimental to the mastery of our own lives, but nonetheless actually providing real satisfaction to some part of ourselves.

Despite knowing precious little about the “communist system” upon which he would so casually cast judgment, Sigmund Freud proposed the basics of an incisive critique of Marx’s understanding of alienation as inverted mastery: if “human nature” is not exhausted by the drive to mastery, and if, more radically, there exists an even more primordial counterforce to this drive, a drive to undo our own mastery and return to heteronomy, then Marx’s theory and its attendant vision of liberation must, at the very least, be rethought.⁵ Indeed, if something like what Freud called the “death drive” exists, capitalism could actually be said to provide a form of perverse psychic gratification in undermining the individual’s mastery. That satisfaction might be ultimately damaging to our general fulfillment, but its very existence nonetheless implies that the theory of alienation could benefit from a new proposal as to what constitutes our “nature,” one that takes into account a psychic force that works against our own mastery. The current project first took root when I realized that it was in the same text (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) in which Freud proposed the existence of this drive that two conceptions of mastery, roughly corresponding to what I have dubbed mastery₁ (in Freud, Bemächtigung) and mastery₂ (Bewältigung), became conceptually fused in his metapsychology. My intuition and hope, more or less stubbornly enacted in the pages that follow, was that a more robust understanding of how precisely we are alienated today could be formulated by working out the relations between the death drive and these two forms of mastery.⁶

As Marx was the soil and Freud the seed, I naturally accepted a great deal of help in cultivating my little plot from the so-called Frankfurt School. Largely under the influence of early friend and later foe Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School famously turned to psychoanalysis to supplement Marxism with a psychological analysis of the motivations behind ideological subjectification.⁷ While generally faithful to Freud in his early years, Fromm rejected outright his later metapsychology, and specifically his theory of the death drive.⁸ The “integration of psychoanalysis” that took place under his watch thus self-consciously neglected the drive theory that Freud defended from the 1920s to his death. Though Fromm’s influence on the inner circle of the Frankfurt School was to be short-lived, his understanding of the late metapsychology as essentially pessimistic and thus unserviceable in its original form remained at the core of critical theory. Thus, even Herbert Marcuse, Fromm’s greatest detractor, could only theorize that which “seems to defy any hypothesis of a non-repressive civilization” as a by-product of frustration.⁹ Like most marriages, the critical theorists’ “marriage of Marx and Freud” involved a bit of both repression and suppression.¹⁰

The stage is now more or less set: a problem of mastery in Marx, a possible solution in Freud, and a very interesting conversation by proxy unfortunately structured around the neglect of that solution. What I have just described is a simplification, of course, and what follows will, without a doubt, spill over the sides of this narrative. I nonetheless hope it is enough to entice the reader into following me through the perils of execution. I would further hope, however, that the grand “what if” question at the heart of this project finds answers, or at least echoes thereof, in the present. Of course, a great deal of time separates us from Marx and Freud, and even the Fordist-Keynesian paradigm in which the Frankfurt School operated seems somewhat distant from the present; but no energy need be spent demonstrating the continued relevance of the contradictions inherent in capitalism as described by Marx, the contradictions inherent in the psyche as described by Freud, and the strange intermingling of those contradictions as described by the critical theorists. To those who would decline engagement with my argument ahead of time, and even to those who think I was born fifty-some years too late, I am afraid any such effort would be a plunge into the void.¹¹

I will, however, attempt to do more focused justificatory work in the remainder of this introduction, specifically pertaining to the nature of psychoanalytic drive theory. It was not so long ago that discussion of these psychic forces proudly bore the label scientific. Today, however, they have been relegated to the mythological, the realm that Freud, in any case, thought was their natural home. Rather than lamenting this reversion, I take it as a positive opportunity to reassert the nature and value of drive theory free of the scientism that plagued the American psychoanalytic scene for so many years. In a sense, now that the wave of anti-Freudianism has subsided,¹² and along with it the fury at Freud’s misguided biologism, it has been given a clean slate, like so many theories that are chewed up and spit out by history. Having been placed right in that wonderful no-man’s-land between irrelevance and outmodedness, I find it an opportune time to revisit Freud’s grand mythology.

For the early Freud, drive (Trieb) is primarily somatic in origin (though it is unclear whether or not drives themselves are strictly somatic forces) and is thus not primarily a force of the psyche but rather one applied to the psyche. When impinged upon by the drives, it is the psyche’s task then to “process the incoming stimuli [and] to discharge them again in some modified form.”¹³ Since the psyche is understood here to be a kind of stimulus-processing mechanical instrument, we might call this the “mechanism model” of the psyche.¹⁴ For my present purposes, all that I wish to emphasize here is that drive, in this early model, is essentially an external and disturbing force, a source of chaos upsetting to a psychic apparatus seeking stability, order, and repose. For the most part, a healthy tension is maintained, but at those life-defining moments when Dionysus runs roughshod over Apollo, the latter draws upon its own proprietary tactic for coping with its failure: repression. By banishing the memory of its having been overcome to the unconscious, the psyche is able to return quickly to the status quo but without learning from the experience and thus to the detriment of its own health. The task of interpretation is then to name particular instances during which the psyche was unable to manage the demands placed upon it, with the aim not of quelling, or otherwise altering, the drives, but rather of bringing said failure to consciousness and thereby replacing “hysterical misery” with “common unhappiness.”¹⁵

As an example: a wealthy young Russian named Sergei Pankejeff comes to see Freud in 1910 with a variety of maladies all circulating around a state of deep depression.¹⁶ In the course of reviewing his personal history, Freud discovers conflict in virtually all of Pankejeff’s early relationships. Shortly after his birth, his mother begins to suffer from abdominal disorders and as a result has relatively little to do with his rearing (despite hanging about as a cold, distant presence). Throughout his childhood, his precocious older sister regularly seduces him into a variety of sexual practices while planting wild ideas in his head. He recalls, on one occasion, her playing with his penis while telling him by way of explanation that his Nanya (the peasant nurse who was caring for him in his mother’s absence) regularly did the same with their gardener’s genitals. As a result of these experiences, the boy takes on a passive attitude toward sexual activity—it is something done to him—and begins to distrust the sole source of maternal warmth in his life. His Nanya does her part to confirm that distrust: catching him playing with his penis in front of her, she threatens that he will get a “wound” there. Finally, and perhaps on account of all of these factors, the child develops a great attachment to his father, who is frequently away in sanatoriums and who overtly prefers his more boyish elder sister.¹⁷

These are the basics of the case study that Freud would publish in 1918 under the title “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,”¹⁸ known more affectionately (or cruelly) as the case of the “Wolfman,” so called on account of an anxiety dream that Pankejeff has just before his fourth birthday wherein he opens a window to find wolves sitting silently and motionlessly in a tree. There is a great deal more to this case, perhaps Freud’s most elaborate and important,¹⁹ but we can already see the basic ingredients for depression here. However, rather than chalk up his adult neurosis to this set of infantile factors (undoubtedly the most sensible route to take), Freud instead posits the existence of a repressed “primal scene” that relates to all of these factors but is, according to Freud, the real cause of Pankejeff’s illness. The infamous scene runs essentially as follows: at the ripe young age of eighteen months, Pankejeff wakes up from an afternoon nap to find his parents engaged in coitus a tergo (from behind). On Freud’s explanation, while the young boy does not know precisely what to make of this scene at first, it slowly comes to bear an overwhelming significance: as his mother grows increasingly ill, he cannot help but feel that the violent motions he had witnessed that afternoon had somehow caused her infirmity. Even more important: both as a result of being the passive object of his sister’s sexual researches and of his intense affection for his father, he comes to identify himself in his mother’s position, simultaneously wishing to occupy her role as love object while fearing the violence that this position entails, vividly demonstrated to him in the primal scene.

In “discovering” and articulating the repressed primal scene to the Wolfman, Freud understood himself to have “liberated” his patient in one particular way: having been debased by his sister and threatened by his Nanya, the boy had overcompensated for these early wrongs with an aggressive masculinity, expressed first in an early phase of cruelty (Pankejeff was, by his own admission, a sadistic child) and then later in his adolescence in an exaggerated enthusiasm for military affairs. This “masculine protest” was cover for a wish that had been engendered by the very passivity to which he was protesting: in short, to be penetrated by his father as his mother had been in the primal scene. The repression of this homosexual object cathexis was in large part responsible for the disconnect between the Wolfman’s affective life and his intelligence: his critical faculties had been impaired by his positive wish not to confront his desires, leading to a state of general depletion and indifference accented by bizarre rituals and erratic behavior within which the repressed current forced its way to the surface. In bringing the primal scene to consciousness, the Wolfman recognized that toward which his drives were propelling him and in so doing relieved himself not of the drives themselves but of the neurotic misery they were causing.

Everything I have said thus far of this case has been explained according to Freud’s early understandings of drive, psyche, and interpretation. In conjunction with later experiences that “activated” its implications,²⁰ the “primal scene” had forcefully awakened Pankejeff’s sexual and aggressive drives, and he had dealt with the overwhelming and conflicting feelings that followed by repressing it. The drives, however, remained active, leading him to a variety of activities in which could be found an unstable mixture of desire and aggression. Freud’s interpretation then named the actual moment of having been overwhelmed and, in so doing, was able to rob the primal scene of its unconscious power.

Like many readers of this case, I have always taken Freud’s interpretation to be so patently absurd that mere rejection somehow misses the mark. I thus feel comfortable in claiming that if we understand this case as the “early” Freud did, there is little reason to read it as anything more than a document of the wild ramblings that a self-appointed seer once offered to a fragile young man in need of real help. Fortunately, around the time that the Wolfman’s (first) analysis with Freud was terminating (and perhaps on account of what transpired in this wild case),²¹ the “early” understandings of the drives, the psyche, and the task of interpretation that I have just outlined all began to fall apart.²² As if in an effort to reorient himself, Freud set out, at the end of 1914, to systematize his metapsychology—his stock of theories concerning the general nature and structure of psychic life—in a twelve-chapter treatise that he hoped would be a landmark of psychology. The project never materialized, and, in the five papers that did eventually see the light of day,²³ it is easy to see why: what begin as earnest attempts to illuminate a particular pillar of psychoanalytic theory quickly introduce contradictions and tangents that find no resolution within their pages.

None of the so-called metapsychology papers demonstrates this tendency to unravel better than “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), a veritable mess that foreshadows, in marking off the limits of one line of thought, the Freudian turn to come. The paper aims to outline the basics of the aforementioned “mechanism model” of the psyche, which, as Hans Loewald aptly observes,²⁴ assumes two rigid distinctions: first, that between psyche and soma (drives impinge on the psyche from without, i.e., from the body) and, second, that between psyche-soma and world (drives arise not from the environment but only from the body). Though Freud means to uphold these two distinctions at the outset of the paper, both very quickly deteriorate. Shortly after defining drive as a “stimulus applied to the mind,” he claims that a drive “appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism.”²⁵ One must immediately wonder: is drive the stimulus or is it the psychic representative of the stimulus (or does it only “appear to us” as a psychic representative)? And how would we know the difference? As James Strachey hints already in his introduction to the piece, the definition of drive here seems to undo the psyche-soma relation it is meant to explain.²⁶ Similarly, as important as the distinction between stimuli arising from internal and external worlds is at the beginning of the paper, the external world is soon claimed to be thoroughly imbued with internal conflicts: “At the very beginning,” Freud speculates, “it seems the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical.”²⁷ How exactly are we to differentiate external and internal stimuli in this situation?

Not six months after completing “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud would complain to Karl Abraham that it and its eleven companion pieces were little more than “war-time atrocities.”²⁸ No one could have thought more differently of these papers than Freud’s enthusiastic Hungarian colleague and perhaps his most active wartime correspondent, Sándor Ferenczi,²⁹ who would tell “the Professor” of his metapsychology papers in general that “only now does one comprehend the structure of the psychic apparatus.”³⁰ Of the many lessons Ferenczi would learn in reading through the drafts of the metapsychology papers, he expressed particular appreciation for one in a letter from February 1915: in brief, “that the terms pro- and introjection should be taken cum grano salis.”³¹ Three years later, in February 1918, he would reiterate that the developments of the metapsychology papers have made it “necessary to revise the concept of introjection on the basis of the new findings.”³² What Ferenczi claims to have “learned” from Freud in both instances—though it is unclear who was teaching whom—was that the psyche is not so much a receiver and manager of external stimuli as it is the product of a “constant, oscillating process” of projection and introjection.³³

Five years after the completion of “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud would emerge from the morass of the Great War with Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), announcing in its very title a revolution of no small scale: whereas human beings had previously been understood as oriented fundamentally toward the pursuit of pleasure, Freud asserts in this text that that pursuit is conditioned by a more primary drive of all organic matter toward self-destruction. It is easy to see in this proposal of a “death drive” a product of its times: the problem of death had, after all, become the central preoccupation of all European thinkers, and Freud’s beloved daughter Sophie had died shortly before the text’s publication.³⁴ Much more interesting, to my mind, than the external factors involved in the genesis of the theory are the internal ones: metapsychology clearly ran aground with the collapse of the distinctions between psyche, soma, and world (uncomfortably on display in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”), and the floundering, unsystematic nature of everything Freud published during the war attests to a full-fledged theoretical crisis to complement the personal and social crises he was undergoing.

The overcoming of this theoretical crisis in Beyond involved a decisive abandonment of the smoking wreck produced by “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” and the formulation of a radically new psychic architecture that Loewald calls the “organism” model of the psyche. In this new model the human being is understood as “embedded in its environment in such a way that it is in living contact and interchange with it; it modulates and influences the environment by its own activity, and its activity is modulated and influenced by the environment.”³⁵ Whereas the world had no sway over the drives in the early model, it is thus afforded no such strict externality after 1920. Similarly, whereas the drives were before understood to be external forces disruptive to an apparatus seeking repose, in this new model the drives themselves seek the quietude that was previously the aim of the psyche (Freud now claims that the aim of all drive is to reestablish a previous state). As Loewald summarizes, “the gain, from the present point of view, was that instincts and the psyche were no longer at loggerheads with each other, as they had been when…seen as disturbing an apparatus that wanted to be unstimulated.”³⁶ In short, the drives become “forces within the psychic organization and not stimuli which operate on the system from without.”³⁷ Under the influence of the organism analogy, Freud is thus compelled to arrive at a different conclusion than the one he sought in 1915: namely, that drives are psychic forces shaped in relation to the environment.³⁸

With this new understanding of drive in mind, it only makes sense that Freud would become a fervent supporter of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, hopeful that psychoanalysis might eventually explain his theory of biological adaptation. In a letter to Abraham, he expressed his desire “to put Lamarck entirely on our ground and to show that the ‘necessity’ that according to him creates and transforms organs is nothing but the power of unconscious ideas over one’s own body.”³⁹ His ambition to ground psychoanalysis in the biology of his day might be a retrospective embarrassment, given the discrediting of Lamarck’s “soft inheritance” theory, but the introduction of the organism model to drive theory is a case of new wine bursting old wineskins. For if drives are acquired in the early stages of life in relation to the environment, how can they be solely our “inheritance from the animal world”?⁴⁰ The environment in which the human organism comes to maturity is, after all, a distinctively human one, shaped by forces that have as much to do with culture and society as they do biology. The basic insight that drives are formed in relation to the environment need not be implicated in Freud’s misguided biologism, and one might even say that his turn to an explicitly biological metaphor paradoxically and definitively differentiates drive theory from biology.⁴¹

Although Freud would spend the rest of his life grappling with the implications of this new “organism” model of the psyche, he unfortunately did little in the way of indicating how it required a new conception not simply of what the drives are but rather of what drive itself is. Once again, we may follow Loewald’s lead in articulating the consequences of Freud’s “late” views. According to Loewald, drive, in the late model, is indeterminate at first and comes only to acquire aim and force in the complex interchanges of early life, i.e., in relation to the environment. We are held, caressed, cooed at, coddled, fed at the breast, or in close bodily contact and we can also be neglected and cared for in an impersonal way. Later we are encouraged, corralled, admonished, disciplined, screamed at, etc. It is in these experiences that drives are not elicited but formed—we learn what it is to love, to master, to aggress ⁴²—and their formation coincides with the development of psychic life itself.⁴³

This new conception of drive thus goes hand in hand with a new conception of the psyche: instead of being opposed to the disturbing force of the drives, the psyche is now understood to be more primarily composed of the drives and the structures to which they give rise in their conflict.⁴⁴ We want to love that which we also want to aggress, to master that which we also want to reject, to be hurt by that which we want to hurt, and all of these conflicts engender the basic structures that are responsible for the existence of that special domain that Freud calls “psychical reality.”⁴⁵ In a late paper, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (1924), Freud offers the following formulation of oedipal conflict: “If the satisfaction of love in the field of the Oedipus Complex is to cost the child his penis, a conflict is bound to arise between his narcissistic interest in that part of his body and the libidinal cathexis of his parental objects. In this conflict, the first of these forces normally triumphs: the child’s ego turns away from the Oedipus complex.”⁴⁶ Behind the specific gendering of the conflict, one can see clearly here that the Oedipus complex, at bottom, is one of conflict between generally self-interested forces—narcissistic or ego drives—and sexual ones. The Oedipus complex is thus such a major developmental hurdle because in it the satisfaction of one of our primary drives imperils the satisfaction of another, and the same is true for every single one of the complexes, fantasies, and scenes of which “psychical reality” is composed.⁴⁷

What, then, of interpretation? In the early conception, interpretation a) names an actual occurrence in the patient’s history b) with the aim not of affecting the drives but simply of bringing the unconscious to consciousness. In the late paper “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), Freud would upset both components of this view of interpretation. First, he admits that an interpretation is only “real” in the context of an analytic relationship: in other words, that the reality of what is uncovered in analysis is determined by its impact on the therapeutic process.⁴⁸ He might have also said that since psychic reality is a product of conflict between the drives it need not have any actual reality in order to affect the course of our lives. Second, he talks about the constructions of interpretation “stirring to activity” the “‘upward drive’ of the repressed” (der “Auftrieb” des Verdrängten).⁴⁹ I take this to mean that interpretation does not simply uncover repressed material, leaving the drives unaltered, but rather that the drives are constantly reaching “upward” and latching on to constructions in order to find gratification in new forms of expression. When they find this new expression, the drives do not lessen or disappear in their force, but they do take on a new form, one that opens them, in Loewald’s words, “to the dynamics of personal motivation.”⁵⁰ This is to say that interpretations can facilitate not only realization (from hysterical misery to common unhappiness) but also transformation (from impersonal drive to personal motivation).⁵¹ In this new view, the task of the psychoanalyst is not, like the scientist’s, to discover an already existing unconscious occurrence but rather, more like the artist’s, to take an unfinished kind of mental life that is incessantly reaching upward, clamoring for expression, and to give it form (or at least, a better form).⁵² Psychoanalysis, in this view, is about not finding but creating reality.⁵³

It is possible now to redescribe the case of the Wolfman with these new conceptions of drive, psyche, and interpretation in tow. It is not, as before, that Pankejeff’s early experiences awakened his already existent sexual and aggressive drives but rather that he learned—in the seduction by his sister, in the distance of his mother, in the threats of his Nanya, in the lack of his father’s affection—how to love and aggress in these interactions. It is the drives that were formed during these early years that were then responsible for his childhood “naughtiness” and later neurosis. Perhaps even more important: when Freud articulates the fantastic “primal scene” to Pankejeff, its efficaciousness lies in the fact not that it actually happened but rather that it makes sense of the conflict between two desires: on the one hand, to be a strong male, an aim threatened by many of his early experiences and yet also encouraged by social pressure, and, on the other, to be the object of his father’s love and attention, even (and, seemingly, especially) if this meant being penetrated and hurt by him.

Freud devotes the entirety of section 5 of “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” to wondering himself about the nature of the primal scene, admitting that the particular construction under examination there—witnessing coitus a tergo at eighteen months—seems rather far-fetched. He ultimately comes down in favor, provisionally, of the actual occurrence of the scene, but he also asserts that, even if it were a fantasy, “the carrying-out of analysis would not in the first instance be altered in any respect.”⁵⁴ Much has been written about Freud’s abandonment, in 1897, of the so-called seduction thesis—the view that all neurotic conflict can be traced back to actual instances of sexual abuse—for a theory that put fantasy center stage, and one might wonder if he does not return, in 1918, to his early view in asserting the actual occurrence of the coitus a tergo scene.⁵⁵ What the discussion of the reality of the primal scene in the Wolfman case makes clear, however, is that this problem—whether or not the constructions proffered in analysis actually occurred or not—no longer mattered for Freud: quite contentedly, he ends “the discussion of the reality of the primal scene with a non liquet.”⁵⁶ It is not clear, and it does not need to be clear, as the legitimacy of the constructions of analysis does not stem from their historical actuality.

What interpretation did for Pankejeff was thus not to name the actual moment of being overwhelmed but rather to articulate a scene that would give expression to his drives in their conflict. Freud admittedly thought that he had “cured” Pankejeff in 1914,⁵⁷ but makes a much more modest claim in the case history itself: quite simply, to have liberated “his shackled homosexuality” and thereby to have freed his “intellectual activity” from impairment.⁵⁸ It is thus not that Pankejeff came to realize the truth of the repressed scene but rather that a portion of his drives found expression in Freud’s articulation and in so doing enlivened his secondary process. Put more subjectively, instead of greeting Freud’s construct with the realization “Oh, that happened,” we can think of Pankejeff as instead hearing Freud articulate this wild speculation, and even while finding it to be utter speculation, feeling something like, “Here is something that hits upon the nature of my drives.” What Freud gave Pankejeff, in short, was not the truth but a fantasy within which drive met thought.

In 1973, almost sixty years after the Wolfman had finished his first treatment with Freud, the journalist Karin Obholzer found and interviewed Pankejeff, who told her, among other things, that the primal scene as Freud described it was quite “improbable because in Russia [his birthplace], children sleep in the nanny’s bedroom, not in their parents.”⁵⁹ Pankejeff offers many other recollections that impugn Freud or other analysts in some respect and conceives of himself as quite critical of psychoanalysis,⁶⁰ but his condemnation is by no means consistent: though he claims at one point to be “in the same state as when [he] first came to Freud,” at others he expresses a belief in the idea “that improvement can be made by transference” and a real appreciation for his initial analysis.⁶¹ One gets the impression throughout of a still compulsive, depressed, guilt-ridden, and frustrating person—he finds it quite normal to pay women for sex, he is obsessed with the behavior of “sluts,” he cannot see how his taking of mistresses during his marriage had anything to do with his wife’s suicide⁶²—but also one who had managed to eke out a tolerable existence in spite of his childhood difficulties—the seduction by his sister, his distance from his mother, and the disappointment of his father are all confirmed in these interviews—and adulthood tragedies.⁶³ He is able to discuss homosexuality (in an admittedly defensive and distancing manner), takes an active interest in painting and literature, and cannot help but speak about his life in psychoanalytic terms, even while taking objection to many of them.

It would be quite impossible to argue, based upon these interviews, or even his own memoirs, that the Wolfman’s analysis had been anything resembling a success, though I am not certain that either point definitively to its failure.⁶⁴ My discussion of Freud’s changing views of drive, psyche, and interpretation in the previous two sections cannot help decide the matter either way, but it can help us establish what we would need to affirm if we were to consider his analysis meaningful: namely, not that the primal scene articulated by Freud was any “more than a construct,” but rather that a previously unreflective person burdened by his own lack of satisfaction became a slightly more reflective and slightly less unsatisfied one in finding something in Freud’s discourse onto which his drives found occasion to latch.

When it comes to explaining why human beings do what they do, two options are readily available to us: a subjective explanation (as found in statements like “she chose to do that,” “you must take responsibility for your action,” etc.) and an objective one (“he has a chemical imbalance,” “it’s all determined by genes,” etc.). What I will reluctantly call “social constructionism” has problematized both these kinds of explanation.⁶⁵ In this view, the best way to explain an individual’s choice to do X is to look neither to agency nor to brain chemistry but rather to the individual’s social, cultural, political, and economic milieu. The subjective explanation, for the social constructionist, typically does not account for the preconditions of the subject’s supposed “state of freedom”: as Durkheim said, the subject is a social product and not an ontological substratum. The objective explanation, by contrast, lends itself to a rigid fatalism in mistaking social constructions for objective facts.⁶⁶ When we see that “undesirable” human behavior is not hard-wired, we can go about changing the social conditions in which that behavior emerges.

Drive theory, in fact, shares a great deal with this mode of explanation, spurning both rigidified subjectivism and objectivism. Unlike the “subjective” explanation, drive theory does not assume total, conscious, volitional activity. And unlike the “objective” explanation, drive theory does not assume nonconscious passivity: our actions are more than the precipitates of our genetic makeup. Although it is never possible to be in complete control or understanding of either drives or social conditions, it is possible to better control and understand them. Drive theory is also similar to social constructionism in being primarily narrative: since drives are acquired during the early stages of life, there is a story to how they are formed, and that story is just as essential to drive theory as the drives are in themselves. Freedom is. Determinism is. But social formations and psychic drives come to be, and they can also be differently. One could say that both theories are kinds of theodicy, both in the etymological sense of an attempt to do justice (dike) to the mystery (theos) of human being,⁶⁷ but also in the more common sense of a narration that makes sense of various evils in the world without demolishing its affirmability and our capacity to enact change within it.⁶⁸

Unfortunately, and perhaps since Michel Foucault’s rise to patristic status in the humanities, drive theory has been edged out of contemporaneity by social constructionism. Psychological theories, in this view, are but reflections of larger discursive shifts in power relations, themselves to be explained through historicization and contextualization. The critique is both historical and substantive: on the one hand, the claim is that only at a particular historical moment—for Nikolas Rose, “one that emerges only in the nineteenth century”—and “in a limited and localized geographical space” is human being understood “in terms of individuals who are selves, each equipped with an inner domain, a ‘psychology,’ which is structured by the interaction between a particular biographical experience and certain general laws or processes of the human animal.”⁶⁹ If drive theory has any purchase, in this view, it can only be one with limited temporal and geographical scope. On the other hand, the critique is that the object of psychology itself does not exist: there is no “unified psychological domain,” only “culturally diverse linguistic practices, beliefs, and conventions.”⁷⁰ Quite simply, there is no “unified self” because human beings are “heterogeneous and situationally produced.”⁷¹

I have done some work to address this latter claim in the previous sections—for the late Freud, at least, drives ought to be understood as formed in relation to the environment and in conflict in such a way as to preclude the possibility of a “unified self”—and I will also deal with the historical specificity of the psyche beginning in chapter 4. No doubt, however, the critique goes deeper: in this view, it is wrong to speak of “drives” for the same reason it is wrong to speak of “selves” or “subjects,” as if there are anything like universals when it comes to the myriad ways in which human beings conceive of their interiority (if, indeed, they do such a thing at all).⁷² In different cultures and at different times, across lines of gender, race, socioeconomic status, etc., people are formed in a multitude of ways. Furthermore, where universals are invoked, one typically finds them in “continually repeated, motivated, and gendered act[s] of symbolic violence.”⁷³

While I agree with the critique that a particular discourse dominant in the modern West that pretends to universality has been oppressive, imposing, and simply inaccurate, I worry in two particular ways—one historically specific, the other more global and transhistorical—that the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater here (somewhat literally in this case).⁷⁴ First, while advanced capitalist society might be able to accommodate a wide range of subjectivities, it nonetheless must re-ensure that “living labour remains integral to the process of production of society as a whole” and thus produce subjects that abide by its “abstract form of social domination.”⁷⁵ Insofar as this is true, it is premature to abandon talk of “subjects” with certain constant features, especially when it is in the interest of capitalism that its subjects see diversity and newness instead of a relentless reproduction of the same. In any event, when I turn to the language of “subject” in chapters 4 and 5 I mean it in this particular sense.

Second, I am in basic agreement with Peter Gay that “all humans share some inescapable universal preconditions”—in particular, bodies of certain kinds and a complete dependence on caretakers in early life—that dictate that they cannot be formed in just any way.⁷⁶ What mouths and their various acts are to human beings differs in various places and times, but that we have mouths, mouths that can do a limited number of things and that must ingest food, does not, and this fact provides a constraint on the range of meanings mouths can have for human beings. Even more important: what care is can be radically different in different societies,⁷⁷ but that human beings enter life completely dependent on the responses of other human beings (and for a fairly lengthy amount of time in comparison to other animals) is invariable.⁷⁸

To be clear, I am not saying that there is some timeless bedrock of human nature that culture merely surrounds, but simply that there are a few important things about how we come to exist that pose particular problems for us and constrain the range of our possibilities.⁷⁹ Even though drives are formed in relation to the environment, from the existence of the “universal preconditions” of which Gay speaks it follows that there will be certain drives that all human beings share; but how these particular drives are formed—and, in turn, how they impact our lives and thus what they mean to us—as well as the vicissitudes available for their expression vary markedly in different societies and at different times.⁸⁰ I would thus agree with the claim that the “basic presuppositions of human life…imply very little when it comes to evaluating how humans, in relation to issues beyond mere survival, lead their lives,” but would stress that we should nonetheless be extremely attentive to and unapologetic about what little they do imply.⁸¹ If, thus, I dare to interpret the “death drive” in a transhistorical and universalist way, it is because I believe that all infants seek to maintain what I will call, in the first chapter, the “tension-within” position; but neither how this position is maintained, and thus what the death drive is for any particular individual, nor the modes of its expression are constant in the same way (the kind of death drive gratification I describe in chapter 4, for instance, is unique to the era of the culture industry).⁸² The same basic argument goes for the drive to mastery and aggressivity.

In sum then, drives are formed in relation to the environment, but they are not just formed in any old thing: they appear in mammals with mouths, anuses, and genitals (not to mention opposable thumbs and large brains) that would, without fail, die upon birth were it not for an extended period of infancy in which they are absolutely dependent on their caretakers. What a strange and complex situation! No wonder, then, that “we are never sure that we are seeing [drives] clearly”: it is impossible to know with exact precision how the infinite number of bodily, familial, and social factors combine in early life to form our unconscious motivational forces, but “we cannot for a moment disregard” these “mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness,” without abandoning depth psychology.⁸³ In one of those curious assertions that sowed the seeds of its own destruction (like so many of his defenses in his later years),⁸⁴ Freud offered a very precise articulation of the stakes and difficulties of this endeavor.

I hope that the preceding defense of drive theory in general serves as a line of entry for a reconsideration of Freud’s own drive theory, and in particular his strange proposal that all living things are driven to return to the inanimate ooze from which they sprang; in short, that “the aim of all life is death.” In chapter 1 I turn directly to sections 4 and 5 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the wild “speculative” sections in which Freud constructs a grand narrative about the origins of life on earth as a curious and, most commentators would add, confused way of making sense of the novel clinical problems he had introduced in the first three sections, problems generally relating to what he calls the repetition compulsion. Through a close reading of these two sections, I recount Freud’s understanding of how the first fledgling eruptions of life, interested only in reimmersing themselves in the primordial soup, refashion themselves into living organisms fighting against a “hostile environment” for their continued existence; that is, how the death drive becomes its own counterdrive, a drive to mastery.

This unfortunately undertheorized drive to mastery (Bemächtigungstrieb) is at the heart of my reinterpretation of Freudian drive theory and the key, in my view, to understanding the better-known instinctual antagonism of the late metapsychology: before the great struggle between Eros and Thanatos, there was a much more complicated self-subversion of the death drive resulting in the drive to mastery. At least as Freud describes it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the death drive is a drive to eliminate any self/other distinction, to cast off difference and be reimmersed in the environment. The drive to mastery, by contrast, is a drive to build and reinforce the living organism’s protective structures. Whereas one aims to destroy the organism, the other aims to protect it; one seeks to stop the process of individuation, one to promote it. This is the basic form of ambivalence and the crux of this underexplored drive theory.

As biology, of course, Freud’s mythological venture hardly holds water; as a theory of psychic development, however, it is perhaps more serviceable. In a creative interpretation of Haeckel’s law, Loewald faithfully translates Freudian phylogeny into developmental ontogeny: thus, instead of a living organism, Loewald imagines an infant turning an urge to return to the care structure characteristic of the pre- and neonatal state into one for increased autonomy and mastery, into a drive to cope with the stark fact of separation that all human beings must endure. In chapter 2 I introduce Loewald’s psychoanalytic vision through the lens of Freudian metapsychology with the hope of asserting the continued worth of this drive theory when rescued from biological anachronism.

No one has done more to keep the death drive in conceptual circulation than Jacques Lacan, who invokes Freud’s theory at many different times in his oeuvre to a variety of effects. In chapter 3 I choose to focus on his treatment of the death drive through the notion of “specular aggressivity.” By reading gestalt theory into The Project for a Scientific Psychology in Seminar II, Lacan comes to argue that the infant’s aggressive struggle with a specular other is the primary motor of psychic development and that this seems to make sense of “the enigmatic signification” Freud expressed in the term death drive. What gets elided in this reading, I argue, is Freud’s concern in these texts with psychic mastery, which is hastily translated into aggressivity. A critique of Lacan on this particular point proves to be a ripe occasion to formulate a new theory of aggressivity and thereby to clarify the distinctions between the concepts of death drive, drive to mastery, and aggressivity, which are often conflated in psychoanalytic theory.

In the last two chapters I employ the drive theory developed in the first three to sort out the critical theorists’ appropriation of psychoanalysis. Chapter 4 examines Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s claim that late capitalism engenders a “new anthropological type” resulting from a dissolution of the psychic tension that held together the bourgeois subject theorized by Freud. In order to analyze this new type, they employ the structural model of id, ego, and superego while thoroughly neglecting the drive theory that undergirded it. By reworking their articulation of this psychic transformation with a stronger metapsychological foundation, it is possible more clearly to specify the nature of the drive gratification provided by the culture industry and how that gratification works on the psyche.

In chapter 5 I look at this same process of psychic change from a slightly different angle. Throughout his work Marcuse flirted with the idea that technological progress provides an avenue for the sublimation of our aggressive and destructive tendencies toward social ends. Through a symptomatic reading of Marcuse’s repeated rejections of this hypothesis, I attempt to salvage the idea of “aggressive sublimation” and to spell out its implications for thinking about psychic life under late capitalism. As the commodification of culture and aggressive instrumentalism settle into a comfortable obviousness, it is necessary to renew our efforts to understand the nature of the desire and satisfaction promised by cultural consumption and technological innovation. These last two chapters are written with this aim in mind: to break the spell of the array of programs and gadgets that are constantly being paraded in front of us by coming to a greater understanding of the drive fulfillment provided therein.