Death and Desire (RLE: Lacan)

Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud

Richard Boothby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317916093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychanalyse

The immensely influential work of Jacques Lacan challenges readers both for the difficulty of its style and for the wide range of intellectual references that frame its innovations. Lacan's work is challenging too, for the way it recentres psychoanalysis on one of the most controversial points of Freud's theory – the concept of a self-destructive drive or 'death instinct'.

Originally published in 1991, Death and Desire presents in Lacanian terms a new integration of psychoanalytic theory in which the battery of key Freudian concepts – from the dynamics of the Oedipus complex to the topography of ego, id, and superego – are seen to intersect in Freud's most far-reaching and speculative formulation of a drive toward death. Boothby argues that Lacan repositioned the theme of death in psychoanalysis in relation to Freud's main concern – the nature and fate of desire. In doing so, Lacan rediscovered Freud's essential insights in a manner so nuanced and penetrating that prevailing assessments of the death instinct may well have to be re-examined.

Although the death instinct is usually regarded as the most obscure concept in Freud's metapsychology, and Lacan to be the most perplexing psychoanalytic theorist, Richard Boothby's straightforward style makes both accessible. He illustrates the coherence of Lacanian thought and shows how Lacan's work comprises a 'return to Freud' along new and different angles of approach. Written with an eye to the conceptual structure of psychoanalytic theory, Death and Desire will appeal to psychoanalysts and philosophers alike.

1

The Enigma of the “Death Drive”

Men do not always take their great thinkers seriously, even when they profess most to admire them.

—Sigmund Freud

Freud’s theory of der Todestrieb, translated by James Strachey as the “death instinct,” is arguably the darkest and most stubborn riddle posed by the legacy of psychoanalysis.¹ Jean Laplanche has remarked that “Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which in 1920 … introduces the death drive, remains the most fascinating and baffling text in the entire Freudian corpus”²:

If life … is regarded as materially present at the frontiers of the psyche, death’s entry on the Freudian scene is far more enigmatic. In the beginning, like all modalities of the negative, it is radically excluded from the field of the unconscious. Then suddenly in 1920, it emerges at the center of the system as one of the two fundamental forces—and perhaps even as the only primordial force—in the heart of the psyche, of living beings, and of matter itself. [Death becomes] the soul of conflict, an elemental force of strife, which from then on is in the forefront of Freud’s most theoretical formulations.³

As Laplanche indicates, Freud’s hypothesis of the death drive was of central importance during his last years. Unlike so many of Freud’s basic ideas, however, the death drive has not found a significant place in the popular diffusion of the psychoanalytic perspective. Not infrequently, expositions of psychoanalysis omit it altogether. In comparison with other key psychoanalytic concepts—the unconscious, repression, the agencies of id, ego, and superego—Freud’s supposition of a self-destructive drive has suffered positive neglect. Precisely to that extent we may be led to ask how adequately it has been understood. What did Freud mean by positing a drive toward death? How did the concept of the death drive function in the totality of the psychoanalytic theory? What has it meant to psychoanalytic theory since Freud? What can it mean for us today? The intention of this book is to raise these questions on the level of a theoretical inquiry and to indicate the direction of an answer.

Freud’s Most Daring Hypothesis

Let us briefly recall the problem to which Freud’s theory of the death drive provided a solution. From the inception of psychoanalysis in the 1890s and throughout the two and a half decades that followed, Freud conceived the psychic apparatus as a homeostatic system invested with quantities of energy and regulated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.⁴ Operating in this way according to a “pleasure principle,” the system seeks to release the tension of accumulated excitations and to promote an equilibrium of psychic energies. Evacuation or at least constancy and stability of energy were taken to be the basic aims of psychic life. The pleasure principle was therefore tantamount to a “constancy principle” (SE, 18:9). The reality principle, under the operation of which tensions might be tolerated for a time in order to be more satisfactorily discharged later on, qualified the functioning of the pleasure principle but in no way departed from its basic logic. By 1920, however, the assumption of the pleasure principle and the view of psychic functioning that followed from it could no longer satisfactorily account for a number of observations made in clinical practice. In a number of instances, the psychic system appeared to behave precisely contrary to expectation, deliberately reintroducing or increasing energic tensions. The evidence fell into four main categories. First, there were cases of recurrent traumatic dreams. Observed particularly in victims of war neuroses, the repetition of traumatic experiences in dreams and memories failed to tally with Freud’s earlier view, itself an expression of the pleasure principle, that dreams represent the fulfillment of wishes. Why, if pleasure is the aim of psychic life, should specifically painful, traumatizing experiences be repeated? Second, Freud remarked upon the repetitive games of children in which a painful loss is symbolically reexperienced. A child left alone by his mother was seen to re-create the painful drama of the mother’s disappearance by alternately throwing a spool over the edge of his bed, retrieving it, and casting it away again. Once more, the question was why the experience of an unpleasurable loss was repeated rather than repressed. Third, there was the problem of masochism, which, for obvious reasons, challenged the notion that mental life is governed simply by the pursuit of pleasure. In the case of the masochist, pleasure and pain seemed to be intertwined in a particularly striking and puzzling way. Lastly, Freud brought forward evidence specific to the analytic process itself, namely, the tendency of patients to obstruct the treatment by effectively re-creating, with the analyst, their most painful losses and disappointments. The search for the motive of these self-defeating behaviors, or “negative therapeutic reactions,” touched upon one of the most fundamental challenges faced by psychoanalysis, that of explaining the apparently self-inflicted character of all neurotic suffering.

Taken together, the traumatic dreams of the war neurotic, the presence/absence game of the child abandoned by its mother, the joy taken by the masochist in his own mistreatment, and the so-called negative therapeutic reaction indicated an order of satisfaction “beyond the pleasure principle,” a paradoxical pleasure in pain. The evidence pointed Freud to what he could only call “mysterious masochistic trends of the ego” (SE, 18:14). The repetitive, even compulsively repetitive character of these phenomena led Freud to suspect the operation of a fundamental instinctual force. Alongside the homeostatic principle of pleasure there must exist a second basic principle, a destabilizing, disruptive force that tends not toward equilibrium and harmony but toward conflict and disintegration. In addition to the life drives, there must exist a primordial drive toward death. In his very late essay on “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud summarized the main thrust of his argument:

If we take into consideration the whole picture made up by the phenomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative therapeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many neurotics, we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental events are exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the presence of a power in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction according to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death instinct of living matter. (SE, 23:243)

The Theoretical Value of the Death Drive

It is difficult to overstate the strangeness and radicality of Freud’s death-drive hypothesis. It amounts to saying that the true goal of living is dying and that the life-course of all organisms must be regarded as only a circuitous route to death. Shocking as this conclusion appeared, even to its author, the hypothesis of the death drive served to account for clinical observations that otherwise remained inexplicable. But in addition, and perhaps even more significantly, the idea appealed to Freud on purely theoretical grounds. First and foremost, the opposition between the life and death drives allowed Freud to reassert a fundamental dualism in the aftermath of his studies on narcissism.⁵ The theory of narcissism, which supposed a differential investment of libido between the ego and its objects, seemed to lend support to the instinctual monism of Jung and his followers. The new theory of life-and-death instincts reexpressed Freud’s deeply held dualist sensibility as it installed conflict in the heart of the psychical process, indeed, in the very substance of organic material itself. Freud insisted that “only by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts—Eros and the death instinct—never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life” (SE, 23:243).

Although he maintained a cautious skepticism concerning his revised outlook, Freud valued the elegance and simplicity of the new theory. “To my mind,” he said, the hypotheses of the life and death instincts “are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than any other possible ones; they provide that simplification, without either ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific work” (SE, 22:119). Despite the tireless fidelity to the details of observation that has made Freud an intellectual hero, even among many who disagree with his conclusions, Freud’s scientific spirit retained a decidedly philosophical bent. Metapsychology, as he hinted in a letter to Fliess and reiterated in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, was Freud’s answer to metaphysics.⁶ The theory of the death drive was the highwater mark of Freud’s speculative urge. In one of his late essays, Freud enthusiastically compared his view of the life and death instincts with the Empedoclean principles of philia and neikos. He claimed to be “all the more pleased when not long ago I came upon this theory of mine in the writings of one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece. I am very ready to give up the prestige of originality for the sake of such a confirmation” (SE, 23:244).

After 1920, Freud’s commitment to his most controversial hypothesis was reinforced by the fact that the death drive came to play a key role in resolving several specific problems plaguing psychoanalytic theory. Primary among them were the origins of human aggressiveness and the nature and function of the superego. With respect to the former, although it was far from the case that Freud failed to recognize the importance of aggression in human affairs prior to 1920, there can be little doubt that, after that time and with the theory of the destructive drive in hand, he felt more confident in approaching the subject and in surveying it theoretically. In the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he asked himself, “Why have we ourselves needed such a long time before we decided to recognize an aggressive instinct? Why did we hesitate to make use, on behalf of our theory, of facts which were obvious and familiar to everyone?” (SE, 22:103). In fact, Freud’s rhetorical question bears directly on certain points in the history of the psychoanalytic movement. Freud resisted the idea of an aggressive instinct when it was introduced in 1908 by Alfred Adler. In 1912, Sabina Spielrein posited a specifically self-destructive instinct in her paper “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming,” but again Freud refused to accept it.⁷ Only with the working out of his own approach in Beyond the Pleasure Principle did Freud settle on a definitive view of the problem of aggression. Only then did he resolve the difficult question of sadism and masochism that had always oriented his thinking about human aggression. It became clear that although masochism and sadism are intimately bound up with one another, masochism is the more primary impulse. Sadism is to be conceived as a turning outward of a more primitive masochistic tendency. This view led Freud to the revolutionary thesis that all aggression and destructiveness in human beings is, according to its original nature, self-destructiveness. This means that human aggressiveness is to be understood neither as a reaction of self-defense nor as a result of an innately brutish disposition, but rather as an expression of an internal conflict of the individual human being with itself. Freud consistently maintained these views throughout the last period of his life, emphasizing them in The Ego and the Id, the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents, and An Outline of Psychoanalysis.

Just as the theory of the death drive contributed to a new understanding of aggressivity, it also shed new light on the activity of the superego and the feelings of guilt produced by it. As an attempt to understand neurotic behavior, psychoanalysis was centrally concerned from its very beginnings with the question of the motive force behind the experience of guilt. It was in answer to this question that Freud offered another of his most speculative hypotheses: the supposition of an inherited predisposition to guilt. Totem and Taboo traced the existence of an inborn propensity to guilt back to the murder of the primal father by the fraternal band of sons. It was an idea that exerted an enduring hold on Freud’s imagination, even after the theory of the superego was introduced with the 1923 publication of The Ego and the Id. As late as 1933 he remarked in Civilization and Its Discontents that “the superego has no motive that we know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted, makes itself felt” (SE, 21:125). With the introduction theory of the death drive, however, a new avenue of approach opened up. If human aggressiveness could be shown to derive from a fundamental aggressiveness of the individual against itself, then the self-inflicted sufferings of the neurotic became understandable in a new way. The motive force behind the hostility of the superego could be assigned to its participation with the death drive. The punitiveness of the superego, most remarkable in obsession and melancholia, could be attributed to its containing “a pure culture of the death instinct” (SE, 19:53).

Repudiation of Freud’s Idea

However mysterious a notion in itself, there can be no doubt as to the pivotal importance of the death drive in the theoretical constructions of Freud’s maturity. “In the series of Freud’s metapsychological writings,” James Strachey observes, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle may be regarded as introducing the final phase of his views.”⁸ Despite occasional hesitations, Freud became increasingly convinced of the fundamental value of his most speculative construction. “When, originally, I had this idea,” he confided to Robert Fliess, “I thought to myself: this is something altogether erroneous, or something very important.… Well, lately I have found myself more inclined toward the second alternative.”⁹ Thirteen years after the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud reaffirmed his faith in the basic correctness of the death-drive theory, relying on the duality of life and death to frame his most sweeping conception of the nature and progress of human civilization. “To begin with,” he admitted, “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 on me that I can no longer think in any other way” (SE, 23:119). J.-B. Pontalis has summarily remarked that “the theme of death is as basic to Freudian psychoanalysis as is the theme of sexuality. I even believe that the latter has been widely put forward so as to cover up the former.”¹⁰

The dialectic of life and death represented the culmination of Freud’s effort to conceptualize his experience and guided his thinking throughout the last third of his intellectual life. The notion of the death drive was thus the veritable keystone of Freud’s most mature and far-reaching theoretical synthesis. But to the degree that we more fully appreciate its importance to Freud and its central function in the final elaboration of his theory it can only strike us as more astonishing that the death drive was almost unanimously repudiated by his early followers. Ernest Jones remarked on the singular unpopularity of Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

The book … is noteworthy in being the only one of Freud’s which has received little acceptance on the part of his followers. Thus of the fifty or so papers that have since been directed to the topic one observes that in the first decade only half supported Freud’s theory, in the second decade only a third, and in the last decade, none at all.¹¹

“I am well aware,” Freud himself complained, “that the dualistic theory according to which an instinct of death or of destruction or aggression claims equal rights as a partner with Eros as manifested in the libido, has found little sympathy and has not really been accepted even among psychoanalysts” (SE, 23:244). Ernest Becker, although not himself a psychoanalyst, has pronounced what can be taken as the majority view both inside and outside the analytic community: “Freud’s tortuous formulations on the death instinct can now securely be relegated to the dust bin of history.”¹²

The speculative tenor of the death drive that seems to have appealed to Freud, especially in his last years, was an important factor in the negative reception of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Bibliographic Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Enigma of the “Death Drive”
• 2. Lacanian Reflections on Narcissism
• 3. The Energetics of the Imaginary
• 4. Rereading Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• 5. The Unconscious Structured like a Language
• 6. The Formations of the Unconscious
• 7. Metapsychology in the Perspective of Metaphysics
• 8. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index