Death Drive - The Making of The Theory: Beyond The Pleasure Principle

The Making of The Theory: Beyond The Pleasure Principle

It was a basic premise of Freud's that "the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle... with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure". Three main types of conflictual evidence, difficult to explain satisfactorily in such terms, led Freud late in his career to look for another principle in mental life beyond the pleasure principle - a search that would ultimately lead him to the concept of the death drive.

The first problem Freud encountered was the phenomenon of repetition in (war) trauma. When Freud worked with people with trauma (particularly the trauma experienced by soldiers returning from World War I), he observed that subjects often tended to repeat or re-enact these traumatic experiences: "dreams occurring in traumatic have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident", contrary to the expectations of the pleasure principle.

A second problematic area was found by Freud in children's play (such as the celebrated Fort/Da game played by Freud's grandson, who would stage and re-stage the disappearance of his mother and even himself). "How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?"

The third problem came from clinical practice. Freud found his patients, dealing with painful experiences that had been repressed, regularly "obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of...remembering it as something belonging to the past". Combined with what he called "the compulsion of destiny...come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome", such evidence led Freud "to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat - something that would seem more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides".

He then set out to find an explanation of such a compulsion; and in Freud's own words, "What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection". Seeking a new instinctual paradigm for such problematic repetition, he found it ultimately in "an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things" - the inorganic state from which life originally emerged. From the conservative, restorative character of instinctual life, Freud derived his death drive, with its "pressure towards death", and the resulting "separation of the death instincts from the life instincts" seen in Eros. The death drive then manifested itself in the individual creature as a force "whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death".

Seeking further potential clinical support for the existence of such a self-destructive force, Freud found it through a reconsideration of his views of masochism - previously "regarded as sadism that has been turned round upon the subject's own ego" -so as to allow that "there might be such a thing as primary masochism - a possibility which I had contested" before. Even with such support, however, he remained very tentative to the book's close about the provisional nature of his theoretical construct: what he called "the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses".

Nevertheless, in later years Freud would build extensively upon the tentative foundations he had set out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Ego and the Id (1923) he would develop his argument to state that "the death instinct would thus seem to express itself - though probably only in part - as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world". The following year he would spell out more clearly that the "libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfils the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards....The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power", a perhaps much more recognisable set of manifestations.

At the close of the decade, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud would acknowledge that "To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way".