Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge

 By studying particular things, we are constantly gaining insight into this universal, ageless nature.

It is said that in ancient Greece Plato and his followers gathered one day and asked this question; “What is a human being?” After a great deal of thought, they came up with an answer: A human being is a featherless biped.

Everyone was happy with this definition until Diogenes burst into the conversation with a live plucked chicken, shouting, “Behold! I present you with a human being.”

After all this commotion, the philosophers gathered again and refined their definition. A human being, they said, is a featherless biped with broad nails.

This is a very curious story that shows the kind of difficulties philosophers have been facing all along when attempting to give abstract, general definitions of what is to be human.

Even with no intervention from Diogenes, it seems pretty clear that describing ourselves as featherless bipeds does not really capture much of what it means to be human.

Heidegger was concerned with this question also; he came to answer it in a way that was strikingly different from many other people before him. Instead of attempting an abstract definition that looks as human life from the outside, he attempted to provide a much more concrete analysis of “being” from what could be called an insider’s position.

He said that since we exist in the thick of things (in the midst of life) if we want to understand what it is to be human, we have to do so by looking at human life from within this life.

If we want to know what it means to say that something exists, we need to start looking at the question from the perspective of those beings of whom being is an issue.

We can assume that although cats, dogs and lions are beings, they do not wonder about their being: they do not stress over these questions; they do not ask, “What does it mean to say that something exists?” But humans do. So whenever we want to explore questions of being, we have to start with ourselves, by looking at what it means to exist.

Now, we exist through the realms of desire, human beings are moved by inertia; controlled by time and others desire. Perhaps, one should extend this to the very definition of humanity: What ultimately distinguishes man from animal is not a positive feature (speech, tool-making, reflexive thinking, or whatever), but the rise of a new point of impossibility, the impossible-real ultimate reference point of desire.

The often mentioned evolutional difference between humans and apes acquires here all its weight; when an ape is confronted with an object beyond its reach which it repeatedly fails to obtain, it will abandon it and move on to a more modest object (maybe a less attractive partner), whereas a human will persist in its effort, remaining fixated by the impossible.

This must be why the subject as such is hysterical; the hysterical subject is precisely a subject who poses enjoyment as an absolute; he or she responds to the absolute of pleasure in the form of an unsatisfied desire. Such a subject is capable of relating to a term that is off limits; even more radically, it is a subject that can only exist insofar as it relates to a term that is “out of play”. Hysteria then, must be this elementary “human” way of installing a point of impossibility in the absolute pleasure principle.

To understand impossibility we must first be aware of what exactly do we want to conquer.  There is a difference between part-object love and primary object love; the former being the breast and the latter being the mother.

This may be a good way to explain the two-step process whereby the subject is constituted and desire is established.

The earliest sexual object is the breast, and the earliest source of satisfaction for the sexual instinct is the encounter between two partial objects, the infant's mouth and the mother's breast.

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), Freud explained that the breast becomes a lost object  "just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs" (p. 222).

Loss of the object of the oral instinct is thus a precondition of access to the total person as a possible love object. At the same time, however, this loss opens the door to autoeroticism for the infant as the infant assumes a complete body image. The infant, though in a passive position, is active with regard to a part of its own body, and this enables the infant to find a source of satisfaction that is the first substitute for the breast.

Later the lost object becomes the "whole person". Here separation from the object is addressed in two ways: either the child expresses an impulse to master the object by breaking it, casting it aside, or incorporating it in fantasy (and so working it over in the psyche ), or the child bypasses the need for the object by regarding it as a lost object beyond the reach of the self.

With the recognition of the absence of the object, therefore, the child makes a transition, as a result of working over in the psyche, to a capacity to do without the object.

When the subject does not recognize the object as lost, as in melancholia,  the object is incorporated in fantasy, where it maintains a silent existence within the subject.  Freud described this process in "Mourning and Melancholia." 

Object loss can also provoke anxiety, mourning, or pain. Do we feel those three elements when we aren’t able to grasp an impossible object?

The difference between humans and animals is clear now, humans experience a loss when it comes to separation and will try to fill this void thought their life by repetitions.

I believe there’s a feeling of impossibility within ourselves and hasn’t been completely conquered. It’s being externalized and that is the reason we will never find a cure. But, what is this impossible? Is it a yearning for this un-castrated being? Oneness with a supposed “perfect” object?

A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated (castrated) or missing (since birth?) is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts. The missing limb causes pain and can be made worse by stress, anxiety, and traumatic experiences. This pain is usually intermittent. The frequency and intensity of attacks usually declines with time.

This may be an odd comparison but when seen this way it appears as if we where walking with a missing limb, an imaginary extension of ourselves that we crave for in fantasy.  This appears as a constant reminder of how loss feels and how damaging it can be to the psyche.

As Erich Fromm once said “Life is fraught with anxiety and powerlessness because of our separation from nature and from one another.”

These feelings can be overcome through searching out and devoting ourselves to the discovery of our own abilities and ideas, embracing our personal uniqueness and developing our capacity to love.

Man’s main task is to give birth to himself. In doing so, he frees himself from confusion, loneliness, and apathy.

 Embrace our Madness.

 References.

Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE,7:123-243.

Freud, Sigmund. (1916-1917g [1915]). Mourning and melancholia. SE,14:237-258.

Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE,18:1-64.

Winnicott, D.W. (1962), Ego integration in child development. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press. pp. 56-63

Zizek, Slavoj. (1997). The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, UK.

Murray, Craig. (2010). Amputation, Prosthesis Use and Phantom Limb pain. Springer, UK.

Fromm, Erich.(1999). Erich Fromm; His life and ideas. Rainer Funk, NY.

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.

All my misfortunes come from my need to attach my heart…. It is only when I am alone that I am my own master. Rousseau.

Why do we seek attachment with others? 

Why, in a way, we need our patients to be attached to us? 

Are we constantly trying to fix or repair a certain need as analysts by being “what they need”? 

 hile being loving to others we are living in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others, this is the life we are more inclined to live, and indeed is the one we are often living without letting ourselves know that this is what we are doing. 

 Living according to our sympathies, we think, will weaken or overwhelm us; kindness is the saboteur of the successful life. What is it about our time that makes kindness seem so dangerous? Compassion is always hazardous because it is based on the susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures or sufferings. 

 “Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality. He has forgotten the movements of his heart” Hume, D. 1741. 

Being empathetic also means being involved in a narcissistic transference, being a vessel for others’ needs, bear the vulnerability of the other, therefore of oneself and for a moment being one body giving and receiving at the same time. Kindness is an individual attribute that could never escape the prison of the ego. 

Narcissism is a flight from pain, “We are never”, Freud wrote, “so defenseless against suffering as when we love” 

 One is never able to enjoy oneself without the cooperation of the other; self sufficiency is an impossible fantasy. We often let ourselves be moved by pity by transporting ourselves outside of ourselves and identifying with the sufferer; by leaving our own being to take on its being. 

This “pitying” imagination replaces the narcissistic cocoon of infancy with another self, born through desire and fantasy. People happier than us are likelier to arouse envy than sympathy. Like if we don’t feel that they have the same ills as ourselves we don’t feel the need to identify with them. 

The helpless dependence of the other generates rage and hatred, the components or erotic desire and aggression intertwine. Identifying with other people risks obliterating them as separate beings. We must feel the sufferings of others as theirs, not ours, if we are to retain a sense of their differences. What makes an analyst identify with his patients? Imaginatively identifying with them but as separate beings. 

His vitality must serve to maintain the self/other boundary, even as fantasy leaps the divide. Enjoying pity for others reminds us our own aliveness, which makes sympathy easier. 

The individual’s capacity for kindness depends on the strength of his self-love. Only an energetic, self-caring child can afford to pity others without feeling overwhelmed by them and so ending up hating them. 

“They don’t know how to love themselves; they only know how to hate what is not themselves” Rousseau. 

An analyst has to be capable to bear his own frustrations in order to put the needs of his patients before his own inside the room. There is a strange confusion here: On the one hand, we experience the feeling for others; our identification with our patient’s sufferings and pleasure, as among our own most immediate experiences, as though to feel for our patients is akin to an instinct or a reflex, as if we automatically know our patients to be essentially the same as ourselves. (Narcissistic Countertransference). 

On the other hand, many of our most compelling accounts of ourselves are about our resistances or fear of this very experience. At its strongest we have to come to believe that feeling too much for others, being too sympathetic either endangers our lives or is against our nature. 

Our capacity to identify with other people may be the aspect of ourselves that we find the most disturbing. Lacan once said, “is to escape from his desire; it may be also to escape from his kindness”.

Freud believed that the very thing that draws people together (erotic transference) also generates insupportable rivalries and antagonisms, of which love and kindness then become casualties. We must love, as Freud said, in order not to fall ill, and it is loving that makes us ill. 

From a psychoanalytic point of view, what are the dangers or a fellow feeling? The individual’s fear about himself is that his hatred is stronger than his love; that there is, as Ernest Jones’s says, “much less love in the world that there appears to be”. 

Being vulnerable with another person implies that we are looking back in time. Our lives, from the beginning, depend upon vulnerability and love, and it is for this reason, it terrorizes us. We begin literally as a piece of another’s body; we begin as part of the very body we grow out of. Growing out of two forms of absolute dependence, as through after the biological birth there’s another birth; the psychological, in which over time a person establishes herself as a separate, more or less independent individual. 

The self-satisfaction of narcissism and the consequent rejection of others and hatred of our own need for them are never entirely given up. 

In Darwinian terms one might say: the first task is survival, which entails dependence on parental love and care; and once that is established, the next is the creation of conditions for reproduction and sexual satisfaction.

There is the wanting of parents and then the limit set to the wanting of parents by what is called the incest taboo. The child’s innocence and tenderness begins as a magical rescue or cure that invariably fails. Out of this failure genuine kindness emerges; or it does if the parents can tolerate the failure.

Understanding attachment is a hard task; it involves introducing ourselves to the deep pond of unconscious fantasy and having intense revelations that aren’t just an expression but an impression of our own psyche.

Embrace our Madness.