To be angry is to revenge the faults of others upon ourselves. Alexander Pope.

An essay about death drive.

 The unconscious, being the most mysterious pocket of the mind covers inside and even further inaccessible parts of the psyche’s origin; the death drive.

According to Freud, this is an escape that avoids the pleasure principle, which ensure a level of homeostasis in the body only once it has organized itself as a whole. In opposition to the pleasure principle, the death drive tries to disentangle this whole. Indeed, it finds particular pleasure in what someone might assume is most painful and disturbing.

In many countries during the war, suicide rates drop. In some countries when homicide rates are low, suicide rates rise, and vice versa. There is an innate drive, which compels balance in the destructive forces.

Freud believed that most people channel their death instinct outward. Some people, however, direct it at themselves. In Eastern philosophy there is an indication that self-centered acts may be a form of self-destructiveness.

How many people, through their acts of selfishness, isolate themselves from others? How many find themselves alone and with no support? Selfishness, when it leads to isolation, may be part of the death drive too.

Buddhism mentions that it is selfishness that leads to disconnection and unhappiness. The Dalai Lama asks: “Should I use everyone else to attain happiness, or should I help others to gain happiness?” He follows with, “If you can, help others. If you can’t, at least don’t harm them.”

There are many interesting links between the most primitive and mechanic impulse and that we seem to comprehend to be creative, experienced and human: the ego, the artistic, religious tendencies, or what Freud called the sublimated drive and the superego.

This might be conceived as the highest human achievement and moves far away from these innate instincts. In this way, the lowest of the drives intersects with the highest, most intelligent, in the place beyond the pleasure principle.

Beyond the pleasure principle interests me because, somewhat appropriately, it takes Freud beyond his comfort zone as a medical thinker, and as a respected man. While the concept of death drive may have been useful to Freud, it is also accompanied by attitudes that come with certain embarrassment on his part.

If Freud borrowed both pleasure and discomfort from his idea of death drive, the maybe the idea itself is beyond the pleasure principle

The death drive is there to cover a void, a lack. The death drive is the most hidden, unknown element of the unconscious. It is dark because it is earlier than libido; in fact Eros comes from from Thanatos, as its outward manifestation.

Are we the creators to our own destruction? According to Freud we are and maybe it was the only way that he could explain the apparatus of the pleasure and the reality principle.

Masochism, sadism, the pleasure that the neurotic has from his symptoms, war; is that all explained by his theory? Freud could only explain this phenomenon in a partial way.

Sadism is in fact a death instinct, which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the object? It now enters the service of the sexual function. (Freud 1991).

In this way, sadism becomes like a mutual consent between the death drive and the libido. Or, perhaps sadism represents a possession of the destructive urge, to the libido, so that instead of taking itself as its object in an act of self-attack, it joins other objects to the ego, and serves the pleasure principle by discharge.

It’s really complicated when dualism comes into the picture. Instead of being an opposition between Eros and Thanatos, it is more like a negotiation between life and death drives; an arrangement that is necessary in order to coexist in the same body. After all, the libido first arises as a “modification” of the death drive:

The nirvana principle, belonging as it does to the death instinct, has undergone a modification in living organisms through which it has become the pleasure principle; and we shall henceforward avoid regarding the two principles as one. (Freud, 1961).

There must be some kind of instability between the life and death drive, not just because there are different forces but because energy is allowed to flow between Eros and Thanatos, as it is claimed by one or the other, and this energy would be the basic movement of the drives.

Sublimation is another way of seeing the manifest content of the drives; Freud refers to “desexualized” energy as a perceived dangerous drive turned into a non-sexual goal. Eventually, desexualized energy will be turned into writing, religion, art, music, sports, etc.

If the energy is desexualized does it mean that the psyche is at peace? There is still a chance of returning to primary masochism. With sublimation there is a great connection between culture (society) and death drive: Sublimation still wears the same clothes but is still connected with the same impulse that generates neurosis, wars and violence.

The superego is commonly represented as an internalization of the parental figure, which the child enacts in its social environment. This “inner voice” may be seen as an imposition of culture upon the psyche, creating a dualism between body and reason.

The severity of the superego would seem to distort what the human being essentially is, by means of a repression of the drives. Of course that the mind is capable enough (is it?) to accommodate or incorporate this new concept.

In the Ego and The Id, Freud characterizes the superego not only as a part of culture attached to the drive, curiously the superego is represented here as also a primitive character that takes the person to his primitive origins:

What has belonged to the lowest part of the mental life of each of us is changed, through the formation of the ideal, into what is the highest in the human mind by our scales of values. (Freud, 1991).

According to this passage, the “lowest” most primitive portion of the drive is transformed or even educated into becoming the “highest” most pristine: the most culturally valuable. This transformation is slowly generated, the parent performs a function that brings the child into a crisis in which he represses and sublimates libidinal attachment to one parent and aggression towards the other.

Is there a connection between the superego and the death drive? Freud stated that sublimation opens the psyche to the death drive, because the desexualization of the drive loosens energy.

The superego is a way in which the parental figure is introjected, this first identification deriving from the oral phase, in which the infant assimilates good objects into itself through eating.

The superego emerges, as this incorporating father who’s filled with power and strength and starts a battle with the id, the superego also, paradoxically, represents the id’s complaints to the ego:

Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world, of reality, the superego stands in contrast to it as the representative of the internal world, of the id. (Freud, 1991).

It’s surprising that the superego takes the father into itself, both devouring and destroying the object, taking also the features of the parental figure that most frustrates the id.

So what is the relation between the superego and the death drive? The superego is not just about being vengeful to the id or sublimation and doesn’t necessarily serve as the child’s path to civilization. Rather, Freud’s most enigmatic claim is that the superego links the psyche to its primitive past. The relation of the superego and the death drive, which always returns to its origins, achieves this connection.

Superego is not just excessive terror and utter sacrifice, at the same time it’s also obscenity and laughter. The law is not only severe, ruthless and blind, it also mocks us. There is an obscene pleasure in practicing the law.

The problem for us is not our desires satisfied or not, the problem is how to know what we desire. There is nothing spontaneous or natural in the human desires, our desires are artificial, we have to be taught to desire.

Comprehending the death drive can help one manage depression. Recognizing that there is an inner voice that wishes for death and destruction can help to separate, and also distance one from these thoughts.

Anger is an emotional response to a situation. Feeling angry is not more harmful than feeling happy; it takes your brain only 100 milliseconds to have an emotional reaction to something. It takes the next 500 milliseconds for the cortex of our brain to recognize that reaction. It’s how we respond to feeling angry that matters.

Sometimes distancing from thoughts helps one disown them and take away their power. Once we recognize the unconscious power of our own death drive, we can do the same with it.

Embrace our Madness.

References.

Freud, S. (1955). Beyond the pleasure principle (Parts I-V). In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 7-43). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1920).

Freud, S. (1955). Beyond the pleasure principle (Parts VI-VII). In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 44-64). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1920).

Freud, S. (1961). The ego and the id (Parts I-III). In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 12-39). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1923).

Freud, S. (1961). The ego and the id (Parts IV-V). In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 40-59). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1923).

Cheri, H. (1999). The Depression Book: Depression as an opportunity for Spiritual Growth. Keep it Simple Books, USA.