Freud’s Concept of the Death Drive and its Relation to the Superego

This paper addresses the emergence of the ‘death drive’ in Sigmund Freud’s later work, and the significance of this development for his psychoanalytic theory as a whole. In particular, the paper argues that the ‘death drive’ is a pivotal concept, articulating a connection between what are commonly understood as the ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ functions of the psyche. Moreover, the death drive is pivotal in a second sense, in that it articulates a turn away from the strictly empirical realm of science, to a dark and obscure field indicated (in terms of lack), but not comprehended, by observable phenomena. Finally, the paper suggests that as Freud’s departure from his scientific methodology into the wilderness of speculation, the death drive represents his most valuable contribution to psychoanalysis. With the death drive, Freud is able to engender a new perspective of human being: one that is not already encompassed by the mechanistic neurological viewpoint from which his researches first issued. Late in his career, Sigmund Freud demonstrated what might be described as a crisis of faith with regard to the central tenets of his psychoanalytic account of the human psyche. In his paper “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” he momentarily shifts from a mode of discourse that embraces a scientific regard for the priority of evidence and experimentation, to a highly speculative discourse that, in a particular light, appears directly to challenge his scientific perspective. Freud attempts in this work to elucidate an aspect of human being that refuses to yield to the scientific gaze, he hypothesises, because it is residual of an inorganic heredity, existing within the organism, but ontologically prior to the interchange of stimulus and reaction charted by neurology. That most subterranean pocket of the psyche — the unconscious — harbours within it an even further inaccessible vestige of the organism’s inorganic origin, the ‘death drive.’ ISSN 1393-614X Minerva An Internet Journal of Philosophy 9 (2005): 153-176 ____________________________________________________ Joanne Faulkner 154 According to Freud, this precipitate of the organism’s prehistory circumvents the pleasure principle, which ensures a level of homeostasis in the body only once it has organised itself as a functional whole. In opposition to the pleasure principle, the ‘death drive’ — residual of a pre-organic, chaotic past — attempts to undo the organic whole. Indeed, it finds its specific pleasure precisely in what is most painful and disturbing to the organism. Yet, while Freud designates the death drive as the body’s primitive — most inhuman element — there are also intriguing connections between this most archaic and automatic impulse and that which we understand to be most cultured, creative, and human: conscience, art, religion, or what Freud nominated as the sublimated drive, and the superego. What he calls the highest human achievements—and presumably considers furthest from ‘brute instinct’—are also, in part, products of a primeval genetic legacy, according to Freud. In this manner, the ‘lowest,’ the most acephalous drive, intersects with the ‘highest,’ most creative and intelligent, in the region beyond the pleasure principle. This ‘beyond’ of the pleasure principle interests me because, somewhat appropriately, it takes Freud beyond his comfort zone as a scientific thinker, and as a respected ‘man of letters.’ For, while the concept of the death drives is useful to Freud (for reasons that I will elaborate below), these remarks are also usually only brief, tangential, and speculative, and are frequently accompanied by qualifications that suggest ISSN 1393-614X Minerva An Internet Journal of Philosophy 9 (2005): 153-176 ____________________________________________________ Joanne Faulkner 155 a certain embarrassment (regarding their lack scientific objectivity) on Freud’s part. Accordingly, if Freud derived both pleasure and discomfort from his idea of the death drive, then perhaps this idea itself is an experience ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle. If this is the case then, I would contend, it also constitutes his most valuable (i.e., sublime) contribution to psychoanalysis.