The death drive: Conceptual analysis and relevance in the Spanish psychoanalytic community

Abstract

Based on a six‐year doctoral research, the author carries out a historical, epistemological and paradigmatic assessment of the controversial concept of the death instinct. The author analyses this notion’s speculative nature; its relation with the second principle of thermodynamics; the feasibility of a return to an inorganic state; the death drive’s metaphorical and isomorphic uses, as well as its theoretical and doctrinaire approaches; its relationship with repetition compulsion and masochism; the influence of Freud ’s scientific background on its formulation; and its context‐dependent meaning. Although this paper stems mainly from the theoretical aspects of the study, it also offers some clinical thoughts on the basis of a clinical vignette. The author stresses the underlying healing aspects of repetition in the analytic situation. Next, he presents concise comments on his empirical research on the current professional usage of the death drive in the Spanish psychoanalytical community. This research covered more than 27% of Spanish psychoanalysts (IPA) and psychotherapists (EFPP). The essay’s conclusions point to the ambiguous character of the death drive concept and its literal unacceptability and the absence of consistent arguments for its acceptance.

Key words:

• death drive
• doctrine
• epistemology
• evolutionary psychology
• incommensurability
• masochism
• metapsychology
• paradigm
• post‐traumatic dreams
• repetition compulsion
• thermodynamics
• Zeigarnik

1. Translated by Judith Flic.

1. Translated by Judith Flic.

Notes

1. Translated by Judith Flic.

2. These various meanings refer basically to the same theoretical reality posited by Freud in 1920. I use assimilation in Piaget’s sense of fitting the notion of death drive into each author’s theoretical framework. Each of them attributes a particular semantic connotation to this notion that changes its original meaning. In this way, we come close to the idea of conceptual elasticity (Sandler, 1983), which refers to the existence of a series of meanings that depend on context. Despite the enrichment it provides to clinical understanding, such elasticity brings about increasing conceptual fragmentation. In the end, lacking a common language, we are forced to occupy an ever smaller intellectual ground (Fonagy et al., 2001).

3. Home (1966), Gill (1976), and Klein (1976) assert that metapsychology’s scientific–natural framework is unsuitable to elucidate facts that originate in clinical practice. It does not refer to the patient’s subjective experience, and belongs in the context of the impersonal structures of the natural sciences.

4. “We have already explored the fiction of a primitive psychical apparatus [&] such an apparatus is to that extent a theoretical fiction” (Freud 1900, pp. 598–603).

5. Chessick (1992) states that trying to prove the existence of the death drive through clinical material is a mistake. We would fall into the error of demonstration through selected examples. Illustrations do not prove but support an argument. Referring only to examples that favour our argument and not probing into those that contradict it constitutes a fallacy.

6. We agree with Caropreso and Simanke (2008) that it is not possible to establish a symmetrical opposition between the life and death drives, for they are both ruled by economic principles that seek the release of tension. Nonetheless, this drive dualism may be justified in so far as to understand reality, our mind classifies it into dichotomies (white–black, inside–outside, good–bad, and so on) that are the product of the activity of the lower parietal lobe. Reality, however, is likely to be much more complex than this dual categorization (García‐Castrillón F, 2003a).

7. Personal communication (Meltzer, 1997).

8. Freud (1920, p. 41) states that: “There is unquestionably no universal instinct towards higher development observable in the animal or plant world, even though it is undeniable that development does in fact occur in that direction”.

9. ⁹Emergentism is the belief in emergence: systems can have qualities not directly traceable to the system’s components. These new qualities are irreducible to the system’s constituent parts. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. An example is water having a new property when hydrogen and oxygen combine to form H₂O (water). It ‘emerges’ a new property of a transparent liquid that would not have been predicted by understanding hydrogen and oxygen as gases.

10. Theories not only interpret data but generate it (Küchenhoff, 2004). The nature of the analytic process will vary depending on the analyst’s theoretical perspective. Data generated by analysts belonging to different psychoanalytic schools varies, and sometimes cannot be compared.

11. The term inconmmensurability (Feyerabend, 1975; Kuhn, 1982) refers to the impossibility of comparing two theories because the terminology used in one of them cannot be fully translated into the terminology used by the other one. There is no shared measuring criterion.

12. Goldberg (1976) suggests that the fact that two individuals with similar neurophysiological equipment differ in their perception of the same phenomenon does not necessarily mean that one is right and the other wrong. Rather, they approach the phenomenon from different theoretical perspectives that may be incommensurable.

13. “Che non men che saver, dubbiar m’aggrata” (Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, canto XI, v. 93).

14. Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient: 0.8220. Structure confirmed through the LISREL model. A Multiple Correspondence Analysis was performed.

15. Translator’s note: The author uses here the Spanish word des/encuentro, which bears a wider range of meaning than mis/understanding. A ‘desencuentro’ is also a failed or missed encounter. Each participant in the conversation is taking a different ‘interpreting path’, which gives rise to the inability to understand.

16. Caropreso and Simanke’s assertion that current biological research supports the notion that death is genetically programmed (Caropreso and Simanke, 2008) seems to have been refuted by some contemporary scientists. Richard Gregory (2006) claims that “the brain is designed to survive, not to search for truth” (Gregory, 2006, p. 457). Damasio (2006), in turn, states that “we are born with a mandate that we carry in our genes – to maintain life throughout our existence” (Damasio, 2006, p. 195). Furthermore, Tom Kirkwood (2005) asserts that “ageing is caused not by active gene programming but by evolved limitations in somatic maintenance, resulting in a build‐up of damage, in what I called disposable soma theory.” Kirkwood’s idea coincides with Meltzer’s views when he states that “when experts in genetics tell us that there is a gene in charge of ageing and that if we modify that gene, we will not age, I do not believe it. At 75 years of age, I believe that almost everything wears out” (Personal communication, 1997).