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

1. More recently, thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Roberto Esposito have drawn attention to the violence that follows from an “immunological crisis” of more basic coping responses; see Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—a Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

2. Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 150.

3. Cf. Karl Marx, Capital Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 799.

4. According to Leszek Kolakowski, “human beings are what their behavior shows them to be: they are, first and foremost, the totality of the actions whereby they reproduce their own material existence.” Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution, trans. P. S. Falla, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 1:156. What is essential about human beings, on this view, is their capacity to provide material stability for themselves with their inventive tool-making and organizational abilities—in short, their capacity to master their environment.

5. See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), 21:112–13.

6. I would hope this way of framing my project prevents it from being seen as “an expression of an orthodoxy hostile to experimentation.” Axel Honneth, “The Work of Negativity,” in Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty, Danielle Petherbridge, John Rundell, and Robert Sinnerbrink (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 128.

7. Horkheimer and Adorno were already interested in psychoanalysis by the time Fromm came to the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (Adorno wrote his 1927 Habilitationsschrift on Freud and Kant), but it was largely Fromm that set the agenda for a synthesis of psychoanalysis and social theory. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 88.

8. Erich Fromm, “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology: Notes on Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 2005), 523.

9. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 134. Horkheimer would similarly disagree with Freud’s understanding of the death drive, at the same time agreeing with the pessimism that underlay it, attacking Fromm while nonetheless retaining his beliefs; see Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 102.

10. The phrase comes from Joel Whitebook, “The Marriage of Marx and Freud: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis,” in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 74–102. Beginning perhaps with Fredric Jameson’s Late Marxism, the importance of psychoanalysis to critical theory (attributed notably by Martin Jay) has been called into question: Freud was important, of course, but his categories were never “centrally organizing” as, say, Weber’s, or Lukács’s, or Nietzsche’s were. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 26. This claim of exaggerated importance, combined with a retreat from the purportedly “patrocentric” implications of the critical theorists’ conception of the decline of the family (as articulated by Jessica Benjamin), has made for a dearth of studies devoted to the psychological component of critical theory, despite the fact that Horkheimer himself claimed that Freud’s “thought is one of the foundation stones without which our philosophy would not be what it is” (quoted in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 102). The only book-length exceptions, to my knowledge, are C. Fred Alford, Narcissism: Socrates, the Frankfurt School, and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); and Yvonne Sherrat, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). It is thus not surprising that many works addressing the connection between psyche and society make little or no mention of the Frankfurt school: see, for instance, Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud et les sciences sociales: Psychanalyse et théorie de la Culture (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993); Kanakis Leledakis, Society and Psyche: Social Theory and the Unconscious Dimension of the Social (Oxford: Berg, 1995); Neil J. Smelser, The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Fred Weinstein, Freud, Psychoanalysis, Social Theory: The Unfulfilled Promise (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001); Kelly Oliver and Steve Edwin, eds., Between the Psyche and the Social: Psychoanalytic Social Theory (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

11. Akeel Bilgrami offers a pithy critique of the “It’s too late” charge in Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 203.

12. As a representative smattering, see Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979); François Roustang, Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan (Arlington: American Psychiatric, 1986); Richard Webster, Why Freud was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1996); John Forrester, Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Frederick Crews, ed., Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (London: Penguin, 1999); and, above all, Catherine Meyer, ed., Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse (Paris: Les Arènes, 2005).

13. Hans Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 120.

14. Loewald calls it the “apparatus model” (ibid., 119).

15. Freud, Standard Edition, 2:305.

16. In what follows, I am interested less in what “really” happened than I am in two fundamentally different ways in which we can understand the Wolfman case as Freud himself describes it. It is for this reason that I do not engage Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s polyglottal reconstruction of the case, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s revelation that Pankejeff had been “anally seduced” as a child (subsequently qualified by Kurt Eissler), or the many attempts to divine the precise nature of Freud’s personal overinvestment in the case. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Ballantine, 2003), xvii; K. R. Eissler, “Comments on Erroneous Interpretations of Freud’s Seduction Theory,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 41, no. 2 (1993): 575–76; Mark Kanzer, “Further Comments on the Wolf Man: The Search for a Primal Scene,” in Freud and His Patients, ed. Mark Kanzer and Jules Glenn (New York: Jason Aronson, 1980); William Offenkrantz, “Problems of the Therapeutic Alliance: Freud and the Wolf Man,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 54 (1973): 76; Patrick J. Mahony, Cries of the Wolf Man (New York: International Universities Press, 1984), 176. I only turn to the Obholzer interviews in the third section of this introduction to argue that the complete fabrication of the primal scene does not preclude the possibility that its articulation had some therapeutic value.

17. Freud, Standard Edition, 17:67; Harold P. Blum, “The Borderline Childhood of the Wolf Man,” in Freud and His Patients, 352.

18. The Wolfman’s analysis ended in 1914, but the war delayed publication of case until 1918.

19. Freud, Standard Edition, 17:3.

21. Grubrich-Simitis connects the Wolfman case and the metapsychology papers in Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, “Trauma or Drive—Drive and Trauma: A Reading of Sigmund Freud’s Phylogenetic Fantasy of 1915,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 43 (1988): 13.

22. The following is a brief history of what drive substantially is, as opposed to Freud’s own history of what the drives individually are in chapter 6 of Civilization and Its Discontents (see Freud, Standard Edition, 21:117–19).

23. “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” “Repression,” “The Unconscious,” “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams,” and “Mourning and Melancholia” (all collected in the fourteenth volume of the Standard Edition). Freud would destroy the other seven papers (ibid., 14:105), though a draft of the twelfth paper (meant to conclude the book) was discovered with the Freud/Ferenczi correspondence and published as A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, ed. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, trans. Axel and Peter Hoffer (Cambridge: Belknap, 1987).

24. See Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 119–24.

25. Freud, Standard Edition, 14:118, 121.

26. Strachey generously chalks up the contradiction to an “ambiguity in the concept itself—a frontier-concept between the physical and the mental,” though it is clear from the discussion that precedes this conclusion that he thought the confusion real (ibid., 14:113).

27. Ibid., 14:136 (my emphasis).

28. Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907–1926, ed. Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L. Freud, trans. Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 228.

29. Grubrich-Simitis goes so far as to claim that “in Freud’s later friendships it is the mutuality with Ferenczi that matches the intimacy and inspiring intensity of his relationship with Fliess” (“Trauma or Drive,” 7).

30. Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, trans. Peter T. Hoffer (Cambridge: Belknap, 1996), 2:263.

34. See chapter 1 for a survey of the reception of the death drive.

35. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 119–120.

37. Ibid., 123 (my emphasis).

38. As opposed to somatic forces that do “not arise from the external world,” as he had postulated in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (Freud, Standard Edition, 14:118).

39. Freud and Abraham, A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue, 261, quoted in Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, 275.

40. William Morton Wheeler, “On Instincts,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 15 (1917): 316, quoted in Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, 4.

41. John Fletcher makes a similar point in Freud and the Scene of Trauma (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 310.

42. The claim that drives are formed in relation to the environment need not contradict Freud’s assertion that they are, once formed, “objectless”: drives might be formed in relation to objects, but they persist even when that relation changes and the original object is renounced. As Adam Phillips explains, when “Freud proposed that the object was merely ‘soldered’ on to the instinct, that our primary commitment was to our desire and not to its target,” “he was implying that we are not attached to each other in the ways we like to think.” Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78. As Phillips makes clear, he was not implying that we are simply not attached to each other.

43. Part of the reason that Freud—the late Freud, anyways—is mistakenly read as speaking of biological instincts rather than environmentally formed drives is a lack of attendance to the history I have outlined here, but the more glaring cause is the simple fact that the German term for “drive,” Trieb, is rendered by translators James and Alix Strachey in The Standard Edition as “instinct.” Contemporary psychoanalytic theorists nearly universally lament this choice and the misunderstandings it has produced, and I imagine that the revised standard edition of Freud’s works, edited by Mark Solms, will correct this mistake; but, before history buries another controversy, a limited defense of the poor Stracheys seems in order, if only because one of the most important lessons of psychoanalysis is that we should be wary of the aggressively obvious.

44. Though it is true that those structures do come to oppose the drives, they are no longer understood to be primarily opposed to them or separate from them.

45. Part of my claim here is that it is more accurate to say that psychic reality is a product of unconscious drive rather than the unconscious tout court, given that it is the drives that make the unconscious an effective force. Imagine a man who, at the age of six, lost his mother to cancer: if this man should have no memory of his mother—if, in other words, his memories of her had been banished by the guardian of consciousness to the depths of the unconscious—there is nothing about this act in itself that is cause for neurosis or unhealth. With Nietzsche’s assertion of the naturally fortifying effect of forgetfulness in mind, we might even say that this man is better off with no memory of his mother. That we repress, that there is an unconscious, in other words, could be just as much occasion for happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, and presence as it is for misery, gloominess, despair, self-hatred, and absence, or, for that matter, nothing whatsoever; cf. Friedrich Nieztsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), 58. What makes the man’s repression of the memories of his mother effective, what makes the unconscious an active force in his life, is the fact that the drives that were formed and elicited in his early relationship with his mother remain after the memories of that relationship have been repressed. It is the drives, in short, that make the descriptively unconscious dynamically unconscious.

46. Freud, Standard Edition, 19:176.

47. Psychic reality is, unfortunately, more often than not thought to be composed simply of the complexes, fantasies, and scenes themselves (as in the Wolfman case, the conclusion of Totem and Taboo, or the whole of Moses and Monotheism). To his detractors, these essays seem typical of Freud’s delusion. His defenders, on the other hand, laud him for asserting in these instances the “reality of fiction”; see Peter Brooks, “Fictions of the Wolfman: Freud and Narrative Understanding,” Diacritics 9, no. 1 (1979): 78; Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1981), 202. Too much energy, to my mind, has been spent trying to justify or deny the reality of the fantasies Freud offers up under the name primal scene. Although I agree, for what it’s worth, that they are indeed real, what I dislike in this conversation is that it shifts emphasis away from the reality of the drives that undergird them. When the debate is over whether the Wolfman actually witnessed his parents having sex at the young age of eighteen months instead of whether the Wolfman had drives that operated without his volition or control, it is easy for the question of psychic reality to turn into a parody.

48. Freud, Standard Edition, 23:255–70.

50. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 105.

51. No doubt realization (bringing the unconscious to consciousness) also involves a kind of transformation. What I mean to emphasize here is that in the late view, analysis is less about robbing an overwhelming scene or thought of its unconscious power and more about an expansion of subjectivity.

52. I am deeply indebted here to Jonathan Lear’s argument in Love and Its Place in Nature that a psychoanalytic interpretation not only expresses “archaic mental activity” in “higher level thinking” but also transforms it. Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 7. Though Freud, in the image of a scientist discovering an independent reality, tended to present himself as “uncovering a hidden thought,” what he was actually doing in helping minds to better understand themselves was, on Lear’s account, aiding a developmental process wherein nonconceptual, “primitive mental activity” raises itself to the level of concepts and judgments in overcoming “myriad inhibiting forces, which freeze much of the mind’s activity at archaic levels” (ibid., 8). Although I obviously agree with the general spirit of this intervention, I do worry that to speak of a developmental process pushing forward toward concepts and judgments instead of objectless and conflicting drives latching on to expression is to see teleology where Freud saw contingency. I also, and much more tentatively, wonder if this understanding of interpretation does justice to the retroactivity of meaning: an interpretation might not be picking out a previously existent reality in the “scientific” way that Freud imagined, but in finding expression for a meaningless psychic undercurrent it comes to have been the case that something like the event it recounts did happen (Freud names this phenomenon with the term Nachträglichkeit). In other words, in articulating the Wolfman’s primal scene, Freud does something like “uncover a hidden thought,” even if the hidden thought did not preexist the uncovering.

53. Albeit in such a way that that which is created appears to have been there all along—such is the strange temporality of psychoanalysis.

54. Freud, Standard Edition, 17:49.

55. See, for instance, Masson’s well-known attack on Freud’s “suppression” of his early seduction hypothesis in Assault on Truth. In his theory of “general seduction,” Jean Laplanche attempts to recover the early seduction thesis, but within the psychoanalytic framework. Jean Laplanche, Nouveaux Fondements pour la psychanalyse (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1987).

56. Freud, Standard Edition, 17:60.

57. He would come to doubt this conclusion in 1919, when he convinced Pankejeff to reenter analysis on account of “a small residue of unanalyzed material.” Muriel Gardiner, ed., The Wolf-Man: With the Case of the Wolf-Man by Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 111. In Freud’s defense, Pankejeff himself always felt that he had been helped by the first four years of analysis (though he felt nearly the opposite about everything that transpired after 1919). Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani, The Freud Files: An Inquiry Into the History of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 229; James L. Rice, Freud’s Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993), 108.

58. Freud, Standard Edition, 17:70–71.

59. Karin Obholzer, The Wolf-Man: Conversations with Freud’s Patient—Sixty Years Later, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Continuum, 1982), 36.

60. That these interviews would constitute an attack on Freud and psychoanalysis was determined from the outset: Muriel Gardiner, the editor of the Wolfman’s memoirs, who had concluded in that work that “the positive results of the Wolf-Man’s analysis are impressive indeed,” had forbidden Mr. Pankejeff from conducting any interviews, thus preventing the publication of Obholzer’s book until after his death in 1979 (ibid., 22). Obholzer’s annoyance at this restriction and psychoanalytic orthodoxy more generally comes across very clearly in the interviews, but the axe grinding does not detract from a set of fascinating conversations.

61. Ibid., 172, 138; Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani, The Freud Files, 229.

62. Obholzer, The Wolf-Man, 118, 110, 104.

63. See Mahony, Cries of the Wolf Man, 150.

64. I thus find little basis for concluding either that Pankejeff was simply “one of those tragic individuals who remain forever inside a gaping wound” or that debunking the “analytic myth of his ‘cure’” reveals Freud’s total failure (ibid., 151; Frank J. Sulloway, “Exemplary Botches,” in Crews, Unauthorized Freud, 184). The former assumes an overly rosy picture of human life, and the latter does the same for the therapeutic process.

65. My reluctance stems from the term’s being at the center of a now dated culture war described by Ian Hacking in The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). By social constructionism, I simply mean a mode of explaining human behavior that privileges society and culture over agency and biology. To be clear, in none of what follows do I mean to dismiss any of these modes of explanation. In a comprehensive vision of why human beings do what they do, agency, biology, and society all have a place. My point here is only to reserve a distinct space for a theory that the present moment has conspired to collapse.

67. “The term ‘theo-logy’ implies, as such, a mediation, namely, between mystery, which is theos, and the understanding, which is logos.” Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. James Luther Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), xiii.

68. Here I am following Frederick Neuhouser’s understanding of theodicy, which cannot “reconcile us to present reality—cannot guarantee that the promise of good that is hidden in the evils of our actual circumstances is or ever will be realized,” but that can still offer a kind of reconciliation: “affirmation of the world in its basic structure.” Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Recognition, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6. The questions that lead to Freud’s introduction of the death drive, like the questions of theodicy, ask about the root of human evils: Why do we irrationally aggress other beings? Why do we tend toward lifeless repetition? Why are we constantly attempting to shed our own existences? And his answer to these questions, in addition to involving the postulation of a new drive opposition, is essentially narrative.

69. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23.

72. I readily adopt Jan Goldstein’s “minimalist position toward the self” articulated in The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 2.

73. Rose, Inventing Our Selves, 6.

74. From a more methodological angle, I am, like both Theodor Adorno and Gillian Rose, skeptical of the reduction of the psychological to the sociological because it leads to “simplistic correlations between the individual and society.” Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 92. Rejecting the possibility of unifying sociology and psychology, Adorno writes: “Our psychological analyses lead us the deeper into a social sense the more they abstain from any reference to obvious and rational socio-economic factors. We will rediscover the social element at the very bottom of our psychological categories, though not by prematurely bringing into play economic and sociological surface causations where we have to deal with the unconscious, which is related to society in a much more indirect and complicated way” (quoted in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 230). In Adorno’s view, we learn more about society through psychology than we do through a sociology that cavalierly subsumes psychology; see also Theodor W. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology, Part 1,” New Left Review 1, no. 46 (November-December 1967): 74.

75. Moishe Postone, “Critique and Historical Transformation,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 3 (2004): 63.

76. Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 88.

77. Mark Poster makes this point about dependence in Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Seabury, 1978), 15.

78. I am responding here, in part, to Leonore Tiefer’s claim that sexual drives are constituted by culture: “Your orgasm is not the same as George Washington’s, premarital sex in Peru is not premarital sex in Peoria, abortion in Rome at the time of Caesar is not abortion in Rome at the time of John Paul II.” Leonore Tiefer, Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays (Boulder: Westview, 2004), 4.

79. I am in agreement with Peter Gay both that “the reputation of psychoanalysis as responsible for a static and undifferentiated model of human nature…is wholly undeserved” and that the “need for years of care and tuition…makes the modern historian, the ancient Egyptian, the Kwakiutl Indian…into cousins,” but do not believe this agreement entails an affirmation of his defense of the concept of human nature, which he finds less problematic than I. Gay, Freud for Historians, 158, 89. The universality of our “preconditions” does not entail a universality of what we are.

80. I might add, as a slightly different point against the reduction of drive to environment, that the external influence that does go into the formation of drives is typically conflictual (and I might even say inevitably conflictual), making impossible any one-to-one correspondence between interpellation and psychic structure. The experiences in response to which drives initially form—those of receiving a response to one’s vocalizations, of being held, of the vibrations of voice, etc., while certainly subject to social influence (adherence to the “cry it out” method, for instance), are not the same as those typically later (developmentally) ones that foster adjustment to the status quo—those of enforced individuation, of adherence to clock time, of the rules and norms of “good behavior,” etc. The “modern model mother” might be teaching her children the basic habits of good capitalist subjectivity, but in the care environment, established even before birth, she is also ingraining in them a model of gratification that is at odds with the cold alienation of living in a world dominated by economic rationalism. In other words, there is no contradiction between Christopher Lasch’s family as “haven in a heartless world” and Wilhelm Reich’s family as “factory of ideology”; thankfully, the family is still both; see Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Norton, 1995); Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963), 38.

81. Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 30. I thus disagree with Jaeggi that alienation critique can only be culturally specific, only an “element of the critical, evaluative self-interpretation of a modern culture that has made freedom and self-determination its core values” (ibid., 41).

82. According to Terry Eagleton, the fact that “transhistorical truths are always culturally specific, always variably instantiated, is no argument against their transhistoricality.” Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 410.

83. Freud, Standard Edition, 22:95.

84. For instance, in The Future of an Illusion, where he entertains the possibility that psychoanalysis itself is an illusion.

1. I emphasize, with Samuel Weber, the narrative aspect of the late metapsychology both to indicate that it is the plot of a story as much as the basics of a theory that is being outlined in what follows, but also because the “structural” elements of id, ego, and superego, too often described topographically or schematically simply as components of the mind, must be understood as parts of a developmental story. That Freud himself thought of the structural model as a natural outgrowth of his drive theory is to me without question: indeed, he refers to The Ego and the Id as a “sequel” and a “continuation of ‘Beyond.’” Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant, trans. Peter T. Hoffer, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap, 1996), 3:29, 84. Cf. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 138–40.

2. Paul Ricoeur hints at this idea of a “nonpathological aspect of the death instinct” in the form of “mastery over the negative,” but does not develop the thought. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 286.

3. I thus disagree with Peter Gay that, with the introduction of the death drive, “the desire for mastery, along with other candidates for the status of a primitive drive with which Freud had experimented over the years, now fade into relative insignificance.” Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 401.

4. Dominique Scarfone, Jean Laplanche (Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1997), 56.

5. Precursors, both avowed and unavowed by Freud, nonetheless abound: the fragments of Empedocles on love and strife, Aristophanes’ myth from Plato’s Symposium, Friedrich Hufeland’s On Sympathy, F. W. J. Schelling’s Ages of the World, Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Gustav Fechner’s psycho-physics, Sándor Ferenczi’s biological work, Wilhelm Stekel’s invocation of Thanatos in 1909, Sabina Spielrein’s “Destruction as a Cause of Coming Into Being.” Most of these predecessors are discussed in Todd Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 13–88; see also George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 306–19. Sarah Kofman explores the Empedocles connection in Freud and Fiction, trans. Sarah Wykes (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 21–52. Peter Sloterdijk does the same for Hufeland in Bubbles, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 239–51. The import of Schelling’s work for psychoanalysis is drawn out by Slavoj Žižek in The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996), 13–91. John Kerr debunks the Spielrein influence in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Back Again: Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein,” in Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals, ed. Paul E. Stepansky, 3 vols. (Hillsdale: Analytic, 1988), 3:39. Though he is usually not mentioned as a precursor, Jung expresses the idea that “death is no external enemy, but a deep personal longing for quiet and for the profound peace of non-existence” in Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1917), 390. Henri Ellenberger trots out more obscure predecessors, including the German Romantics Von Schubert and Novalis, the Russian psychiatrist Tokarsky, and the Russian zoologist Metchnikoff in The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 514.

6. Importantly, the repetition compulsion is tied directly to the drive to mastery and only indirectly to the death drive. Paul Denis offers a more in-depth history of the term Bemächtigung in Freud in “Emprise et théorie des pulsions,” Revue Française de Psychanalyse 56, no. 5 (1992): 1299–312. However, whereas Denis sees a slow abandonment of the term after the Three Essays, I see instead a decisive conceptual transformation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (ibid., 1312).

7. Overreacting to Ives Hendrick’s “glorification of repressive productivity,” Marcuse argues that “the assumption of a special ‘mastery instinct’…destroys the entire structure and dynamic of the ‘mental apparatus’ which Freud has built.” Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 219. As I will demonstrate here, mastery was a preoccupation of Freud’s throughout his career.

8. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), 3:111; Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch Geordnet, 18 vols. (London: Imago, 1991), 1:337.

9. Freud, Standard Edition, 14:85; Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 10:151.

10. Freud, Standard Edition, 17:54; Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 12:82.

11. Freud, Standard Edition, 14:120.

14. In his article on Jensen’s Gradiva (1907), in “The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis” (1913), and in the Introductory Lectures (1916) (ibid., 9:88; ibid., 12:322 and 324; ibid., 16:327–28). The term Bemächtigungsdranges (urge for mastery) appears in “Triebe und Triebschicksale” (Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 10:231).

15. Kristin White, “Notes on ‘Bemächtigungstrieb’ and Strachey’s Translation as ‘Instinct for Mastery,’” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 91, no. 4 (May 2010): 813.

16. The game wherein he threw a “wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it” “over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it” (an action accompanied by an expression that Freud takes to “represent the German word ‘fort’ [‘gone’]),” and then “pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]” (Freud, Standard Edition, 18:14–15). Freud understands the game as a symbolic expression of “the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation…which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting” (ibid., 18:15).

18. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 13:36. I believe that Leo Bersani’s interpretation of the compulsion to repeat as a “permanent tendency on the part of the ego to resexualize its structure,” to open itself to the “shattering effects of sexuality,” collapses the distinction that Freud was attempting to make between the compulsion to repeat and the death drive, the latter being at the root of the former but nonetheless a wholly separate phenomenon. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 61, 63. Bersani might accept this charge, it being evidence that he resists Freud’s “project of domesticating and rationalizing” his own discoveries; but to follow him down this path, one would have to be certain that domestication is the only thing that Freud is up to in his late work, and of this, I am thoroughly unconvinced (ibid., 102).

19. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973), 218.

20. Ibid. Jacques Derrida, in his reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Post Card, also connects Bewältigung and Bemächtigung but imagines them both to denote a “violent exercise of power.” Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 404. As I have shown here, Freud never uses the term Bewältigung to mean anything like a “violent exercise of power,” and one can only assume that this misrecognition is a function of “reading Freud with one hand” and Hegel with the other (ibid., 394). A profound dexterity, to be sure, that I will not attempt to master here.

21. Freud himself, however, never seems to have used the phrase Bewältigungstrieb; Ives Hendrick incorrectly claims that he does in “The Discussion of the ‘Instinct to Master,’” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 12 (1943): 563. The passage that he refers to uses the term Bemächtigungstrieb. Siegfried Bernfeld might be the first person to use the phrase in Psychologie des Säuglings (Vienna: Springer, 1925), 207.

22. This translation is further justified by Freud’s own policy of switching back and forth between the two words around the time of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: for instance, in The Ego and the Id, when he discusses mastery of the Oedipus complex (Bewältigung des eigentlichen Ödipuskomplexes and das Ich des Ödipuskomplexes bemächtigt). Freud, Gesammelte Werke, 13:264–65.

23. Freud, Standard Edition, 19:163. Paul-Laurent Assoun compares Freud’s Bemächtigungstrieb (translated as “drive to expropriate”) and Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht in Freud and Nietzsche, trans. Richard L. Collier (London: Continuum, 2002), 152–55.

24. The uses of mastery in Civilization and Its Discontents, “Why War?”, and the New Introductory Lectures continue to suffer from a lack of terminological clarity.

25. To my knowledge, the only authors who have attempted to pick up this thread are Ives Hendrick and Paul Denis. In “Work and the Pleasure Principle” Hendrick offers a useful definition of mastery, in the sense of Bewältigung, as aiming “to control or alter a piece of the environment, an ego-alien situation, by the skillful use of perceptual, intellectual, and motor techniques in order to control or alter a piece of the environment.” Ives Hendrick, “Work and the Pleasure Principle,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 12 (1943): 314. Though I am obviously in agreement with Hendrick about the importance of the drive to mastery, I concur with Marcuse’s assessment that his “work principle” glorifies “repressive productivity as human self-realization” (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 219). In “Emprise et théorie des pulsions” Denis proposes an elaborate and comprehensive reconstruction of psychoanalytic metapsychology centering on a notion of drive as having two distinct vectors, one of mastery, the other of satisfaction (Denis, “Emprise et théorie des pulsions,” 1318). Unfortunately, rather than attempt to work out his theory in relation to the Eros/death drive dualism, Denis aims to “remove the ambiguities of the concept of mastery” by “dissociating it from any reference to the death drive” (ibid., 1316). Roger Dorey also focuses on the term mastery, making important connections between Bemächtigung and Bewältigung in their relation to Todestrieb, but prefers to speak of a “relationship of mastery” instead of a “drive to mastery,” distinguishing his own work from that of Denis precisely on this point. Roger Dorey, “The Relationship of Mastery,” trans. Philip Slotkin, International Review of Psychoanalysis 13 (1986): 323–32; Roger Dorey, “Le désir d’emprise,” Revue Française de Psychanalyse 56, no. 5 (1992): 1426.

26. Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 97.

27. Freud, Standard Edition, 21:119.

28. See Sándor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (London: Karnac, 1989).

29. Franz Alexander flirted with the existence of the death drive, but would later decide it better to speak of a “disintegration of mature behavior into its elementary parts.” Franz Alexander, “The Need for Punishment and the Death-Instinct,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 10 (1929): 256–69; Franz Alexander, Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1963), 75. Ernest Jones also claims that Max Eitingon was a supporter of the death drive theory. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols.(London: Hogarth, 1957), 3:298.

30. Gay, Freud, 552.

31. Fritz Wittels, Sigmund Freud: His Personality, His Teaching, and His School (London: Allen and Unwin, 1924), 251; Gay, Freud, 395.

32. Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1946), 60.

33. Heinz Hartmann, “Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Instinctual Drives,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 17 (1948): 370.

34. Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, ed. Mary Higgins and Chester Raphael (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 90.

35. To name just a few others: in a suggestive response to Civilization and Its Discontents, Karen Horney felt “obliged to reject the thesis of the death instinct and an innate destructive instinct, as well as the thesis of an innate evil in man.” Karen Horney, “Der Kampf in Der Kultur [Culture and Aggression]: Einige Gedanken und Bedenken zu Freud’s Todestrieb Und Destruktionstrieb,” trans. Bella S. Van Bark, American Journal of Psychoanalysis 20 (1960): 136; Erich Fromm argued that while the death drive “takes into consideration the full weight of destructive tendencies,” it “fails to take into account sufficiently of the fact that the amount of destructiveness varies enormously among individuals and social groups.” Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, 1969), 180–81; Donald Winnicott found “the term ‘death’ instinct unacceptable in describing the root of destructiveness.” Donald Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 41 (1960): 591; and, finally, Heinz Kohut thought that the “concepts of Eros and Thanatos do not belong to a psychological theory.” Heinz Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis—an Examination of the Relationship Between Mode of Observation and Theory,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 (1959): 478.

36. There have, of course, been many rogue analytic writers who have attempted to salvage the death drive in some form, Karl Menninger perhaps being among the most prominent of them; see Man Against Himself (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938). A wide-ranging bibliography can be found at “Death Drive,” Psychology Wiki, http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Death_drive.

37. Although it was undoubtedly part of Klein’s intention to have gained legitimacy in relating her theories to those of Freud, this endorsement only indicated her lack of scientific rigor to many analysts, resulting in the initial marginalization of her “school” from the Anglo-American “mainstream.”

38. I am following many commentators here, including Hanna Segal, who argues that Klein was first interested in aggressive impulses in children and only later came to associate these impulses with Freud’s death drive, which she employed as synonymous with aggression. Hanna Segal, Melanie Klein (New York: Penguin, 1979), 57. Todd Dufresne similarly argues that Klein was interested in “not so much the death drive itself, but its representative, the destructive impulse, Destruktionstrieb” (Dufresne, Tales from the Freudian Crypt, 69). Michael Eigen also finds the essentials of Klein’s interest in the death drive in her discussion of a “primary anxiety of being annihilated by a destructive force within.” Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 5; see Michael Eigen, Psychic Deadness (London: Karnac, 2004), 28.

39. Jean Laplanche, “The So-Called ‘Death Drive,’” in The Death Drive: New Life for a Dead Subject?, ed. Rob Weatherill (London: Rebus, 1999), 45 (my emphasis).

40. The obvious reason for this change of heart would be outside pressure from his colleagues to abandon his speculative hypothesis, but I do not think that the elder Freud was that susceptible to external forces, especially where it concerned his major theoretical structures. The better explanation, to my mind, is that Freud offered only partially formed reflections in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that he himself did not know what to make of, and then, by working through the “economic problems” involved in his proposal as well as introducing the structural model into psychoanalysis, came to interpret his reflections as essentially related to aggression.

41. Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner, eds., The Freud-Klein Controversies, 1941–45 (London: Routledge, 1992).

42. Lacan was one of the illustrious figures in attendance at Alexandre Kojève’s celebrated lectures on Hegel, which stressed the importance of the “master/slave” dialectic for understanding Hegel’s Phenomenology.

43. It is noteworthy that none of the participants in undoubtedly the most important colloquium ever convened on the topic of the death drive make any specific links between the death drive and primary aggressivity. Jean-François Rabain, “Compte rendu du colloque sur la pulsion de mort,” Revue Française de Psychanalyse 53, no. 2 (1989): 767.

44. Jean Laplanche, “La pulsion de mort dans la théorie de la pulsion sexuelle,” in La Pulsion de Mort (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 17.

45. Pierre Marty, Les mouvements individuels de vie et de mort: Essay d’économie psychosomatique (Paris: Payot, 1976), 120.

46. Piera Aulagnier, The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement, trans. Alan Sheridan (Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2001), 20.

47. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 241.

48. Serge Leclaire, A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive, trans. Marie-Claude Hays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 32–33.

49. André Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Free Association Books, 2001), 222.

50. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 150.

51. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10.

52. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 329.

53. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 62.

54. Weber makes a similar argument against the Lacanian and Deleuzean appropriations of the death drive in The Legend of Freud, 121–22.

55. By “organic” and “inorganic,” Freud means roughly “living” and “not-living.” For attempts to translate Freud’s theory into contemporary biological terms, see Rob Weatherill, The Sovereignty of Death (London: Rebus, 1998), chapter 5, and Thomas Hoffman, “Revival of the Death Instinct: A View from Contemporary Biology,” Neuropsychoanalysis 6 (2004): 63–75.

56. Freud, Standard Edition, 18:38.

57. As Weber argues, without this addition (a Da! to complement his original Fort!), Freud’s story could not have gotten off the ground: “Life, and with it the speculative theory of the death drive, would have imploded by virtue of its very immanence and intensity. It would have vanished into its nucleus. And nothing would ever have happened” (Weber, The Legend of Freud, 138).

58. Freud, Standard Edition, 18:26–27.

59. Ibid., 18:27 (my emphasis). In The Post Card Derrida erroneously claims that there is no mention of death in the text until Freud defines the term instinct: “Dead silence about death. It has not yet been mentioned. Almost half the book” (Derrida, The Post Card, 353). Freud’s definition of an instinct comes on page 36 of the Standard Edition text. The passage given here is on page 27. Before an objection can be lodged, the discussion quickly turns to Heidegger and Freud on death (ibid., 358). Two hands!

60. Reiz, as James Strachey notes in Civilization and Its Discontents, “means ‘stimulus’ as well as ‘charm’ or ‘attraction’” (Freud, Standard Edition, 21:83). What Freud is proposing, then, with this remarkable phrase, is that life itself depends on building a shield against that which the living being finds attractive, that by which the living being is charmed; to live, in other words, one must be protected from that toward which one is attracted, which is also to say that one must be protected from oneself.

61. Benno Rosenberg, Masochisme mortifère et masochisme gardien de la vie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), 157.

62. Weber describes this process as a kind of self “scorching” (Weber, The Legend of Freud, 142).

63. Freud, Standard Edition, 18:29.

64. Though I take the “tension-between” position to be roughly equivalent to Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position (save for the fact that in the tension-between position, aggressive imposition is met not with aggression but the drive to mastery [see n69]), the “tension-within” position finds a similar correlate not in the depressive position but rather in what Thomas Ogden calls the “autistic-contiguous” position, which he imagines to be “before” yet constitutive of the “experience of bounded surfaces.” Thomas Ogden, Subjects of Analysis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), 36.

65. Marcuse notices this same confusion of internal and external in Freud, but comes to conclude that it is the external influences that take priority (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 136–37). It is the externality of the external, however, that is called into question by Freud’s narrative; see Jacqueline Rose, Why War?—Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 94.

66. Freud, Standard Edition, 18:29.

67. Ibid., 18:30. Without distinguishing between the death drive and the drive to mastery, Pentti Ikonen and Eero Rechardt are forced to posit a “paradoxical double function of the death drive.” Pentti Ikonen and Eero Rechardt, Thanatos, Shame, and Other Essays: On the Psychology of Destructiveness (London: Karnac, 2010), 100. While I am generally in sympathy with their “view that psychoanalytic aggression theory should not be limited to relate only to aggressive and destructive behaviour…but should be restored to its original scope, so as to make it again a theory of the death drive,” I find that their own theory blurs rather than clarifies the distinctions between binding, mastery, aggression, etc. and disagree with their normative definition of the death drive as a “striving towards a state of peace,” preferring to reserve the term peace for the postoedipal mimesis discussed in chapter 4 (ibid., 94).

68. Adrian Johnston presents a convincing case that all drives should be understood on the model of the death drive, i.e., as inherently split, “designed to sabotage themselves.” Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 183. Though I agree that the death drive should indeed be conceived of as self-subverting, I would stress its specificity (that it is not simply a feature of drive in general) and that its being “self-defeating” is in fact life-promoting (ibid., 151). I would further take issue with his notion of inherent conflict: as I have articulated the developmental logic here, the death drive must necessarily come into conflict with itself, but this is something different than saying that it is inherently conflictual. In positing a “temporal conflict” internal to drive itself, Johnston avoids the actual sequence within which drive turns against itself and, for this reason, can only chalk up Freud’s articulation of the reasons for the organism’s “prolonging its own life” to confusion (ibid., 146, 127). The inclination to posit an “essential affinity of every drive with the zone of death” comes from Lacan, who, like Johnston after him, attempts doggedly to square the pre- and post-1920 conceptions of drive, a task that I have explicitly renounced in the introduction. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 199; Johnston, Time Driven, 175.

69. Klein proposes this idea in “On the Development of Mental Functioning,” but considers aggression rather than simple mastery to be the response to aggressive imposition: “Part of the death instinct is projected into the object, the object thereby becoming a persecutor; while that part of the death instinct which is retained in the ego causes aggression to be turned against that persecutory object” (Klein, Envy and Gratitude, 238). Rosenberg claims that the death drive is that which is primordially “expulsed-projected” in Masochisme mortifère, 156.

70. Freud, Standard Edition, 18:54.

71. See the discussion of libido in the next section.

72. Freud, Standard Edition, 18:51–52.

74. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 317.

75. Dorey, “The Relationship of Mastery,” 329.

76. Freud, Standard Edition, 18:29.

77. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 57.

78. Freud, Standard Edition, 19:159–60. Freud had attempted to solve some of these issues in The Ego and the Id, though there he still equated the constancy principle with the pleasure principle. “The Economic Problem of Masochism” represents a decisive step forward in the acceptance of his new dual instinct theory insofar as he abandons the conception of pleasure that he had maintained for at least thirty years. For this reason, I believe it is somewhat misleading to speak of the “pleasure principle” after “The Economic Problem of Masochism.”

80. Ibid. Given what has been demonstrated thus far, I find Catherine Malabou’s claim that there is ultimately no beyond of the pleasure principle in Freud (a point she uses to justify the claim that her “new wounded” cannot be understood within the confines of psychoanalytic theory) to be false. Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 214.

81. Freud, Standard Edition, 14:148.

82. In the well-known joke about the broken kettle, A. defends himself against B.’s charges with the following: “First, I never borrowed a kettle from B. at all; secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him; and thirdly, I gave him back the kettle undamaged” (ibid., 8:62). Of course, any one of A.’s defenses would have worked on its own, but taken together they belie their own intent. The pleasure principle and the drive to mastery, along with their cooperation in the service of the libido, might be read in a similar fashion, as asserted over and against an unsettling fact to which the structure of their relations nonetheless attests. There is not self-mastery, there is other-mastery. There is not zero principle, there is pleasure principle. There is not death drive, there is life drive.

85. On the priority of the death drive to Eros, see Louis Beirnaert, “La pulsion de mort chez Freud,” Études 342 (March 1975): 401; J. B. Pontalis, “On Death-Work in Freud, in the Self, in Culture,” in Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature: A French-American Inquiry, ed. Alan Roland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 86; Fátima Caropreso and Richard Theisen Simanke, “Life and Death in Freudian Metapsychology,” in On Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” ed. Salman Akhtar and Mary Kay O’Neil (London: Karnac, 2011), 101–2.

86. This is my own way of making sense of the fact that Freud defended both an instinctual dualism and an energetic monism (I develop this idea further in the second section of the following chapter). Laplanche comes to the nearly opposed conclusion that libido is the sole psychic energy (noting that “destrudo” “did not survive a single day”) and that the death drive is its “constitutive principle” (Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 124).

87. Derrida, as I have already mentioned, devotes an entire section of The Post Card to the text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of which he offers an “athetic” reading, in recognition of “the essential impossibility of holding onto any thesis within it” (Derrida, The Post Card, 261). Relating Freud’s speculative efforts not only to the death of his daughter Sophie (as Wittels had long ago done) but also to Freud’s own position as authoritative “grandfather” (PP) of the psychoanalytic movement, Derrida argues that Freud himself is engaged in a “Fort-Da” in the text, with himself and with his theory of the death drive (ibid., 301). Freud is waffling, unable to decide, and this indecision is built into both the content and the form of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “Freud does with (without) the object of his text exactly what Ernst does with (without) his spool” (ibid., 320). While Derrida’s reading highlights a number of previously uninvestigated relations between Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the events of Freud’s life, his philosophical struggles, and the crisis of his own authority that he creates in the text, his reading also suffers from this breadth, and I have offered, in the notes to this chapter, a few examples of how Derrida is much too libidinal to actually remain with the text.

88. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1989), 19. Françoise Dolto picks up on this idea in La Vague et L’Océan:

Let’s take the ocean to be the human species. Each wave is an individual who reaches the maximum of its possibilities of expression before, at the peak of its force, returning to the non-differentiation of the ocean’s mass. In returning to this indifferentiation, the wave would represent, at the moment when it begins to fall, the experience of the death drives. Due to the momentum of the wave to maximally individualize itself at the moment of its breaking, there is a decrease in the very drive that formed the wave—is this not called “entropy?”—and a return to being a specimen of the human species; in other words, a return to the “it,” until the moment when a new “I” will speak.

89. Freud, Standard Edition, 18:26.

90. Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 8–9.

91. Catherine Malabou highlights the normativity inherent in this conception of psychic health: “In the same way that the sculptor can only work upon a material that has a consistency somewhere between polymorphism and rigidity, the psychoanalyst is helpless to do anything with the material—that of the psyche—which is either too ‘hard’ or too ‘soft’” (Malabou, The New Wounded, 175).

The translation of the epigraph comes from William James, who was working from the French. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Routledge, 2002), 122. A direct translation reads: “I grew sick of life; some irresistible force was leading me to somehow get rid of it. It was not that I wanted to kill myself. The force that was leading me away from life was more powerful, more absolute, more all-encompassing than any desire. The thought of suicide came to me naturally then as the thought of improving life had come to me before.” Leo Tolstoy, Confession, trans. David Patterson (New York: Norton, 1983), 28.

1. A self-professed ego-psychologist and by-the-book Freudian, Loewald was a clinical professor in psychiatry at Yale. Before emigrating to America in the forties, he had studied philosophy, his “first love,” with Martin Heidegger (and even furnished extensive transcripts for his teacher’s Marburg lecture course in 1924–25). James W. Jones, “Hans Loewald: The Psychoanalyst as Mystic,” Psychoanalytic Review 88 (2001): 793; Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 540. When Loewald began publishing his own work in 1951, his work immediately resounded with the psychoanalytic establishment and yet seemed to point beyond its narrow dogmatism. He was an early supporter of Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology “heresy,” and in turn was accorded the title of “proto-postmodern” when self-psychologists turned “relationalists.” Although his work has experienced a renaissance within American analytic circles in the last decade or two, it is still, unfortunately, largely unknown outside of them.

2. In “On Motivation and Instinct Theory,” Loewald argues that “insofar as the death instinct can be equated with the constancy-inertia-unpleasure principle, the death instinct is nothing startingly new in Freud’s theory…. What is new in Freud’s new instinct theory and in the structural theory is the life instinct as an intrinsic motive force of the psyche paired with the death instinct.” Hans Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 124. The question as to why Loewald downplays the significance of the death drive, as well as avoids any systematic confrontation with it, is an open one. My suspicion is that he felt perfectly comfortable to explore the basic themes of Freud’s later metapsychology in his own language, without having unnecessarily to raise the hackles of his dogmatic colleagues in his chosen profession.

3. Ibid., 68. The Hans W. Loewald Papers collection at Yale offers bits of evidence for this claim of the secret (repressed?) importance of Freud’s late metapsychology to Loewald. To take two examples: 1. In a letter to Paul Federn, Loewald writes, “Last night, in the Almanach der Psychoanalyse for 1951, I read your paper on ‘Die Wirklichkeit des Todestrieb.’ It reminded me of the fact that I had wanted to send you the enclosed paper which I had read last spring before the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society. In this paper [“Ego and Reality”] I have not dared to concern myself with the problems of the death instinct, but with some, to me, less difficult and complex theoretical problems.” Hans Loewald, “Loewald to Paul Federn,” October 5, 1949, letter, Hans W. Loewald Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, box 1, folder 2. 2. In the unpublished manuscript “Interpretation, Instinct, Personal Motivation” (the first four chapters of which were shortened into chapter 8 of Papers on Psychoanalysis, “On Motivation and Instinct Theory”), Loewald crosses out the following revealing passage: “At this point I must make a confession: to find my way through the tangle of speculative considerations put forth in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in regard to instincts is beyond my present capacity or willingness. I will permit myself to cut through this gordic knot without attempting to untangle it.” Hans Loewald, “Interpretation, Instinct, Personal Motivation,” unpublished MS, Hans W. Loewald Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, box 4, folder 73.

4. Cf. Stephen Mitchell, “From Ghosts to Ancestors: The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 8 (1998): 825–55; Jonathan Lear, “The Introduction of Eros: Reflections on the Work of Hans Loewald,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 44 (1996): 673–98; Nancy Chodorow, “The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84 (2003): 897–913; Alan Bass, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), chapter 3.

5. As a word of warning for both this chapter and the next: like many “classic” psychoanalytic theorists, Loewald attributes a great amount of importance to the role of the mother for the life of a child that is, more often than not, imagined as male. For Loewald, the concept “mother” is formed in relation to a specific set of experiences—breastfeeding, holding, vibrations of the voice—where boundaries are diffuse (in contrast to “father,” where the same experiences of closeness are supposedly absent). Since he most certainly has the biological mother in mind when employing this term (invoking things like in utero experiences and endocrine coordination), I do not find it appropriate to change his language, which I quote extensively; but since he is in fact speaking of a psychic representative and not a biological reality, when developing his ideas in my own words here I will use the gender-neutral terms parent or caretaker to mean the one who holds close, who feeds, who nurtures, who is the implied party in Winnicott’s statement “There is no such thing as a baby.” We can thus read Loewald as using the term mother, like Bowlby, to indicate a primary caretaker or caretakers and affirm that many other persons, of different genders and in a variety of combinations, could serve this role besides the infant’s biological mother. John Bowlby, “Separation Anxiety,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 41 (1960): 101. I do not, however, simply mean to swap out problematic terms: I intend also to show, in the last section, that Loewald’s developmental theory can be interpreted in such a way as to avoid the mistakes for which feminist theorists have rightly criticized certain psychoanalytic categories.

6. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 4.

7. Loewald mentions the “biologistic” sections of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the first chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents as the primary sources of this other narrative.

8. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 5. A brief methodological note: in this chapter I will be treating Loewald’s first publication, “Ego and Reality,” as the core of his thought, and the rest of his work (encapsulated in his collection of essays titled Papers on Psychoanalysis and his two books, Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual and Sublimation) as filling in the details of this initial articulation of his vision. Particular attention will be paid to his essays “Primary Process, Secondary Process, and Language” and “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” in their relation to “Ego and Reality,” as the connections between these three pieces first inspired the writing of this chapter. While recognizing that Loewald’s work followed an internal dynamic that led him to new positions over the years, I do not believe those developments prevent one from viewing it as a more or less consistent whole; that is, as offering a unified developmental theory.

9. I have refrained from using the category of narcissism in reference to what Loewald calls the “primordial density,” though he himself is prone to employ it on occasion. The myth of Narcissus concerns the perils of identification with a specular other, which assumes at least a minimum of psychic differentiation; I will thus deal with the term narcissism in the next chapter on Lacan’s mirror stage. While Freud’s ambiguous speculations on primary narcissism have proven irresistible to many authors, I think it is a theoretical mistake to use the term to describe a psychic state lacking in clear self/other distinction.

10. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 6.

11. This connection between the death drive and the mother is made by many others, including thinkers as divergent as Lacan, Marcuse, Goux, and Green and is thus in itself nothing novel. See Jacques Lacan, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu,” in Autres Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 35; Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 25; Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 237; André Green, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Free Association, 2001), 83–84.

12. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 11. Claude Le Guen similarly argues that the energy of the death drive is best situated as “a function of the originary id (in other words, in that which precedes the distinction ego-id).” Claude Le Guen, “Du bon usage de la pulsion de mort,” Revue Française de Psychanalyse 53, no. 2 (1989): 550.

13. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 8.

14. Judith Butler, “The Pleasures of Repetition,” in Pleasure Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. Robert A. Glick and Stanley Bone (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 274.

15. See Karen Horney, “Observations on a Specific Difference in the Dread Felt by Men and by Women Respectively for the Opposite Sex,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 13 (1932): 348–60; Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Other Press, 1999), chapter 7.

16. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 16.

17. Loewald relies on the early Fliess papers to elaborate his conception of fantasy: “[Freud] speaks there of phantasies as ‘psychical façades constructed in order to bar the way to these memories’—memories, that is, of what he calls ‘primal scenes.’…In a letter to Fliess of the same date, he describes phantasies as ‘protective structures [Schutzbauten].’…At another point in the same letter he speaks of phantasies as Schutzdichtungen, protective fictions.” Hans Loewald, Sublimation: Inquiries Into Theoretical Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 1–2. Although Loewald prefers to render the German Phantasie as “phantasy,” I will use the more common term fantasy, as I remain unconvinced that a technical term is needed here.

18. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 83. According to Adam Phillips, “one mothers oneself, or rather foster-mothers one’s self, with one’s mind.” Adam Phillips, Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 44.

19. Eugenio Gaddini, “On Imitation,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 50 (1969): 476.

20. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 83.

21. “Mourning has acquired the status of a quasi-religious concept in psychoanalysis,” at the center of contemporary psychoanalytic theory’s understanding of the genesis of the psyche. Adam Phillips, “Keeping it Moving,” in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 153. Loewald’s place at the beginning of this emergence has not been appreciated.

22. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 263.

24. According to Joel Whitebook, “Loewald introduces a distinction between ‘mastery’ as ‘domination,’ that is, domination of inner nature by the imperious subject (cf. Freud’s image of the draining of the Zuider Zee), and mastery as ‘coming to grips with.’ One assumes that, in ‘coming to grips with,’ the imperious subject is itself civilized, which is to say, simultaneously decentered and naturalized.” Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 253. In this chapter, I am using mastery in this second sense of “coming to grips with,” which I have identified in the previous chapter with Bewältigung.

25. Phillips, Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, 24.

26. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 14.

27. Though Loewald was critical of Jung’s religious leanings, in this positive appraisal of what I am calling the tension-within position, they were aligned: according to Jung, the “temporary withdrawal into one’s self, which, as we have already seen, signifies a regression to the childish bond to the parent, seems to act favorably, within certain limits, in its effect upon the psychologic condition of the individual.” C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1917), 201.

28. Wherein “there is some prior condition” that is disrupted, leading to “a kind of redemptive hope that we can recover a sense of that prior condition.” Jonathan Lear, “The Slippery Middle,” in Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131–32. The “occupational hazard” here is not the simple assumption of a prior condition but the “tendency…to build too much goodness into the prior condition” (ibid., 132).

29. A brief point on historical specificity: I believe the clarity of the distinctions between, on the one hand, the “other” and tension-within reality and, on the other hand, the other and tension-between reality, is what distinguishes the bourgeois/modern psyche from its prebourgeois counterpart. In constraining the number of identifications made by the child—and in turn the diffusiveness of emotional connection—within the nuclear family, the “other”/other takes on a role of heightened importance in psychic development.

30. Bass’s understandable but ultimately misplaced claim that Loewald does not deal with “internalization anxiety,” and thus that he makes it seem as if “an intrinsic drive toward integration will take care of itself,” must be understood as an effect of the absence of any discussion on his part of the need/dread of union in relation to the two realities (Bass, Difference and Disavowal, 114). I agree that Loewald does indeed present an overly tidy picture of psychic development (see chapter 3), but on the perils of internalization he is perfectly clear.

31. In Bass’s words, “the permeable border between internal and external becomes a rigid opposition” (ibid., 102). I take this language of “overbuilding” from Winnicott, who speaks of “the overgrowth of the mental function reactive to erratic mothering.” D. W. Winnicott, “Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma,” in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1992), 246 (my emphasis). Lacan also refers to the ego as an “overly strong structure.” Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 265.

32. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 23. In “The Concept of Cumulative Trauma,” Masud Khan argues for the exact opposite of what is being proposed here: that the mother and the associated “holding environment” are equivalent to Freud’s Reizschutz. M. Masud R. Khan, “The Concept of Cumulative Trauma,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 18 (1963): 290. For Loewald, parents are not themselves “stimulus barriers” in Freud’s sense but rather prevent an overbuilding of this barrier (which is itself a kind of protection).

33. To follow this idea to its unfortunate conclusion: a certain amount of dread is necessary to healthy psychic development, as this dread is an indicator of attempts at parental mutuality, attempts that have failed in a particular instance but that may be part of a more general care structure that is “good enough.” Excessive dread would then mean a parental inability to allow individuation and an icy lack of dread that the tension-within position has never been properly maintained.

34. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 29.

35. I am unprepared to say how precisely we ought to understand this claim: although he seems to indicate that it is a social crisis that has produced an overly defensive individual, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is also a familial crisis (i.e., the result of more parental frustration than gratification). Isaac Balbus has convincingly argued for the relation between these two in Marxism and Domination: A Neo-Hegelian, Feminist, Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual, Political, and Technological Liberation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and also “Patriarchal ‘Production’ in Marx,” in Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society (New York: Other Press, 2005). In general, Loewald’s brief forays into cultural critique are as vague as his psychoanalytic insights are incisive.

36. Bass, Difference and Disavowal, 102, 103. Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 6, 202.

37. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 30.

38. In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown turns to Sigmund and Anna Freud’s respective theories of defense to explain what “psychic reassurances or palliative walls provide amid…the loss of horizons, order, and identity attending the decline of state sovereignty.” Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn: Zone, 2010), 107. One might object, with Loewald, that “walling” is not a defensive reaction to the supposed weakness of a sublimated father figure but rather an overbuilding of structure in response to failed mutuality.

39. I am making a connection here and before between identification and imitation as they lead to internalization, one that is, while not explicit in Loewald, implied in his heavy reliance on Werner and Kaplan’s Symbol Formation, where the capacity for delayed imitation “at some temporal remove from the presentation of content” is said to manifest the existence of “some kind of internal model or ‘schema.’” Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan, Symbol Formation: An Organismic-Developmental Approach to Language and the Expression of Thought (New York: Wiley, 1964), 91. In other words, the psyche’s architecture is a product of imitative behaviors that have gained the child a certain independence; in Werner and Kaplan’s words, “the liberation of gestural depiction from concretely presented content,” i.e., the ability to do more than just respond co-actively or reactively to the present (ibid., 91).

40. See the conclusion, n1.

41. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 11. Or, as Freud writes: “The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which growth is still free—though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal.” Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), 18:42.

42. Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Karnac, 2004), xix.

43. The “rewriting” of the death drive accomplished therein is characterized by what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, or “afterwardsness,” in Jean Laplanche’s translation. Freud had introduced this term in the Project for a Scientific Psychology in discussion of the case of Emma, who, at eight years of age, is sexually assaulted by a shopkeeper (about whom she can only remember his laugh; Freud, Standard Edition, 1:353). On a shopping trip at eighteen years, someone happens to laugh at her clothes, and this seemingly benign gesture sets off hysterical symptoms. The temporality of this episode is what interests Freud most: it is not that her encounter at age eight becomes sexual at eighteen, but rather that it becomes retroactively sexual at eight. She is guilty après-coup. To put it in the awkward tense of the future perfect, her episode at eight will have been traumatic. In a similar way, it is not that the arche of the tension-within position becomes the ego-ideal telos after a certain developmental accomplishment, but that the arche will have been the telos, that the primordial density toward which the child bears an urge to union is “rewritten” as the ideal future toward which the ego strives.

44. “Sublimation…involves an internal re-creative return toward [the mother-infant matrix], a reconciliation of the polarized elements produced by individuation and, one may suspect, by sexual differentiation. Sublimation thus brings together what had become separate” (Loewald, Sublimation, 21–22).

45. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 45.

46. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 90. Mark C. Taylor draws the parallel between Kierkegaard’s stages and the psychoanalytic developmental model in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 73–74.

47. Loewald explains the interpenetrating and temporal nature of the relation between id, ego, and superego as follows:

The id, if it can be said to represent the inherited past, the degree and quality of organization with which we are born, has a future insofar as we make it ours by acquiring it, by imprinting on it the stamp of ego organization. Insofar as this is an unfinished task, and to the extent to which we experience it as an unfinished, never-finished task, our superego is developed. The superego then would represent the past as seen from a future, the id as it is to be organized, whereas the ego proper represents the id as organized at present.

48. The overlap here with the views of Jean Laplanche is striking and deserving of longer treatment, but in brief: for Laplanche, drives are formed in response to the “difference between that which is symbolizable and that which is not in the originary enigmatic messages” received from adults. Jean Laplanche, Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1987), 141. This conception of drive is at the base of his rejuvenation of the seduction theory as a “generalized” one. In his formulation, the death drive and Eros should be understood as elicited by the same “object-source” (the parents), though the death drive responds to that source as Kleinian “part-object” (thus leading to “unbinding” [déliaison]) while Eros does the same for the “total-object” (ibid., 144). While Loewald would appreciate Laplanche’s “relational” understanding of drive, agreeing with Laplanche that drives emerge in response to the demands of early developmental life, I believe that he would worry that too much emphasis is being placed on the infant’s confrontation with “messages that do not make any sense to him” to the neglect of the infant’s affective pull toward the caretaker (ibid., 148). Similarly, while he would also agree that the death drive and Eros share more than they are typically thought to, he would object to the idea that the death drive is one of “unbinding,” since it is actual union that is its aim. He would thus oppose death drive and Eros not along the axis déliaison/liaison but rather actual union/symbolic union.

49. Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 78. Loewald would agree with Jean Gillibert that both Eros and the death drive “limit the madness of mastery,” but disagree that this mastery should be understood primarily as a “possessive power.” Jean Gillibert, “De l’objet pulsionnel de la pulsion d’emprise,” Revue Française de Psychanalyse 46, no. 6 (1982): 1223.

50. As Loewald argues, to have a superego is to recognize that autonomy is a crime against the sacred parental bond, to feel guilt about the conflict between id dependence and ego independence, and to attempt to atone for this “parricide” by transmuting oedipal relations “into internal, intrapsychic structural relations” (Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 389). I mean by “the appropriation of its own method of construction” here what Loewald calls “secondary internalization” (ibid., 266).

51. See Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 246–57.

52. One might call this process, with Hegel, a “purification of the drives” (Reinigung der Triebe), by which he means (negative connotations of the term purification aside) not their elimination but rather their being freed from immediacy and contingency as the individual “makes them his own, puts them in himself as his own” or, in language less appealing to a psychoanalyst, as the drives are taken up into “the rational system of the will’s volitions.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 28, 229, 29.

53. A distinction must be made between binding in the service of mastery and binding into ever greater unities, i.e., binding in the service of Eros, though the two are related: it is the latter that prevents the former from leading to ego rigidity.

54. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 187.

55. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2004), 1:68; Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 320.

56. “Language…develops within the growing differentiation between self and object-world” (Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 191).

58. Like Robert Pogue Harrison, Loewald thus posits an “underlying nexus between grief and human vocalization.” Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 62. According to Harrison, “it is through that shared, objective language of grief that the work of separation begins to take place” (ibid., 58).

59. Freud, Standard Edition, 19:46.

60. As Freud himself spells out this connection, “the ego is that portion of the id which was modified by the proximity and influence of the external world, which is adapted for the reception of stimuli and as a protective shield against stimuli, comparable to the cortical layer by which a small piece of living substance is surrounded” (ibid., 22: 75).

61. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 190.

64. Unlike Lacan and Žižek, who conceive of language as a “mortifying mechanism,” the speaking subject being an effect of subjection to “symbolic death,” Loewald sees in the waning of the Oedipus complex a revivification, an entrance into a second life. Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 120.

65. “The Greek symbolon is actually a shard. It was the custom, when a friendship was ritually confirmed, to break a small clay tablet in two parts. Each of the two friends took one piece along on his life’s journey, and when the friends, or their descendants, met again, the clay tablet could be reconstructed by fitting the two broken edges together, thus affirming the friendship. The primary layer of meaning of symbolon thus includes both the break and the wish for an unbroken union.” Christoph Türcke, Philosophy of Dreams, trans. Susan Gillespie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 31.

66. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 45.

67. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, 188.

69. Loewald, Sublimation, 60.

70. Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher,” in Adorno and the Need in Thinking: Critical Essays, ed. Donald Burke et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 38.

71. John Bowlby, “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 39 (1958): 350, 351, 369.

74. Bowlby nonetheless did his best to reconcile his theories with those of Freud, pandering: “In stressing the survival value of the five component instinctual responses we are put in mind of Freud’s concepts of libido and Life instinct. Not only is there the same emphasis on survival, but the means of achieving it—a binding together—is the same: ‘Eros desires contact because it strives to make the ego and the loved object one, to abolish the barriers of distance between them.’ Despite the starting points of the two theories being so different, and their having different implications, the themes appear to be the same” (ibid., 369). It is a gross misinterpretation, of course, to say that Freud’s “Life instinct” is a “survival instinct,” no less than that the abolition of barriers of distance between ego and object is the means to achieve some kind of evolutionary advantage.

75. Ibid., 362 and 369.

77. Taking up the survivalist emphasis of attachment theory in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler attributes attachment to a Spinozist “desire to persist in one’s own being,” one that she wrongly attributes to Freud (Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 28). Attachment, in my view, is precisely the opposite of a desire to persist in one’s being: it is a desperate attempt to refuse the overwhelming nature of one’s being for the comfort of being-with (or perhaps, as Winnicott has argued, simply being). D. W. Winnicott, Human Nature (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1988), 127.

78. Bowlby, of course, takes it as axiomatic that “psychological characteristics are subject to the” “interests of species propagation” (Bowlby, “Separation Anxiety,” 95).

79. Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 166.

80. According to Laplanche, “from the start, there is something more than an ‘attachment’ in the simply literal sense of the term.” Jean Laplanche, Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000–2006, ed. John Fletcher, trans. John Fletcher et al. (New York: International Psychoanalytic, 2011), 17.

81. Mary Ainsworth further distanced attachment theory from this line of thought by describing “an attachment bond not as dyadic, but rather as characteristic of the individual, ‘entailing representation in the internal organization of the individual.’” Jude Cassidy, “The Nature of the Child’s Ties,” in Handbook of Attachment, Second Edition: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications, ed. Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver (New York: Guilford, 2008), 12.

82. Bowlby, “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother,” 359.

83. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (London: Karnac, 1998), 10.

84. Ibid., 46. I am especially wary of this latter projection claim: when dealing with the world of the infant, most every description could be accused of the same (and attributing a sense of “self” to the neonate seems particularly ripe for this kind of criticism).

85. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 184. See also Michael Eigen’s critique of Marion Milner’s use of “undifferentiation” in The Electrified Tightrope, 164–71.

86. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 99.

87. Cf. Isaac Balbus, “Between Enemies and Friends: Carl Schmitt, Melanie Klein, and the Passion(s) of the Political,” Theoria and Praxis 1, no. 1 (2013): 47, n115. For this reason, though I will be avoiding the term undifferentiation in what follows, I will retain other terms like oneness, wholeness, and unity, all of which accurately describe the feeling of what I am calling the tension-within position.

88. Bass, Difference and Disavowal, 117; Bracha Ettinger, “Matrixial Trans-subjectivity,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23, nos. 2–3 (2006): 219; Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 171; Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 27. Loewald would also be in agreement with Ettinger that object relations theorists tend to reduce the caretaker to a function—Bion’s “container” or Winnicott’s “holding environment”—when early developmental life ought to be understood as a dynamic coemergence within a caretaker-infant “matrix” (Loewald, Sublimation, 33).

89. Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 157.

90. Just as I find the turn to the closely allied relational theory an overreaction to the theory of intrapsychic drives; see, for instance, Lynne Layton, “Relational Thinking: from Culture to Couch and Couch to Culture,” in Object Relations and Social Relations: The Implications of the Relational Turn in Psychoanalysis, ed. Simon Clarke et al. (London: Karnac, 2008), 3. In claiming that drives are “connection-seeking” relational phenomena, Loewald did a great deal to preemptively defuse the drive versus relational theory debate. Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black, Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 189–90.

91. As Loewald rightly points out, however, it is unclear that primary narcissism was ever meant in this way. As Freud describes it in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” primary narcissism is related to “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (Freud, Standard Edition, 21:65). Indeed, in the many divergent directions in which this idea is developed by later thinkers, it rarely indicates the atomism it is commonly supposed to signify; see D. W. Winnicott, “Metapsychological and Clinical Aspects of Regression Within the Psycho-Analytical Set-Up,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 36 (1955): 19; Margaret S. Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 42; Heinz Kohut, “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 14 (1966): 245–46; Béla Grunberger, Narcissism: Psychoanalytic Essays, trans. Joyce S. Diamanti (New York: International Universities Press, 1979), 107.

92. For an excellent critique of intersubjectivism in both psychoanalysis and critical theory, see Joel Whitebook, “Mutual Recognition and the Work of the Negative,” in Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: Essays in Honor of Thomas McCarthy, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 257–83.

93. Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, trans. William and Elaine Robson-Scott (London: Hogarth, 1966), 154.

94. As Laplanche puts it, “there is surely a death of the psyche by disintegration, death by the death drive, but there is also a kind of psychic death by rigidification and excessive synthesis, psychic death by the ego” (Laplanche, Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse, 146).

95. Just as it is the inorganic Reizschutz that creates the conditions for the favorable “reception of stimuli” for Freud.

96. For both thinkers, it is wrong then to oppose psychic maturity qua bounded and stable ego and qua dynamic and many-sided relatedness: in Eli Zaretsky’s words, “the ego reaches down into its earliest, most primal, and essentially immortal dependencies precisely when it is strongest and most independent. Eli Zaretsky, Political Freud: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 147.

97. Freud, Standard Edition, 19:53. On one level, the claim that the death drive finds expression in the superego has been upheld, though with new conception of the death drive.

98. While Freud tended to present the superego in an overwhelmingly negative light, as the enforcer of an inwardly directed aggression, he also hinted at another side of the superego, one that could, “in humour, [speak] such kindly words of comfort to the intimidated ego” (ibid., 21: 166). His conclusion was an open one: “we have still a great deal to learn about the nature of the super-ego” (ibid., 21: 166). After Freud, a great many analysts found it helpful to distinguish “good” and “bad” sides of the superego, or to separate the “ego-ideal” from the superego, in recognition that some part of what Freud described under the name superego was a positive influence on the psyche as a whole. See J. C. Flugel, Studies in Feeling and Desire (London: Duckworth, 1955), 145; Roy Schafer, “The Loving and Beloved Superego in Freud’s Structural Theory,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 15 (1960): 163–88; Joseph Sandler, Alex Holder, and Dale Meers, “The Ego Ideal and the Ideal Self,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 18 (1963): 139–58; Jacob A. Arlow, “Problems of the Superego Concept,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 37 (1982): 229–44. The death drive itself has also found some explicitly positive valuation: for instance, in Le Guen, “Du bon usage de la pulsion de mort,” 554; Benno Rosenberg, Masochisme mortifère et masochisme gardien de la vie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991), 156; and Donna Bentolila López, “The Enigma of the Death Drive: A Revisiting,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 19 (1996): 17.