Death instinct

Type of impulse postulated by Sigmund Freud in 1920, the death instinct competition life instincts (impulse of autoconservation and sexual instincts) or Eros, working towards contrary ends. This concept introduced into the Deuxième topic explicitly was inspired of a text of Sabina Spielrein (" Die Destruktion als Werdens" In Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyze, IV, 1912).

Introduction

Impulse

The impulse appears like internal stress, she is opposed to the need and spans the two registers of physics and psychic.

She is equipped with four characteristics: the push (its tendency to impose itself), its source, its object and its goal. This push originating in the that formula the Pleasure principle, but the Me will be able to bind the impulse, to defer it.

Pleasure principle and death instinct

In Beyond the pleasure principle (1920), the tendency of the neurotics of war to reactivate to them trauma in their dreams reveal in Freud the Compulsion to repeat, forced which calls into question the pleasure principle and testifies to a more fundamental tendency.

The pleasure principle is this law of the Inconscient according to which the instinctual impulses must be dependant (i.e. the Primary process S are transformed into Secondary process S) in order to bring back to low the level tensions or excitations imposed on psychism.

However, in the compulsion to repeat observed in the neurotics of war, the traumatic, generating event of very strong tensions, makes return in the dream unceasingly. In the play of the reel on the contrary, the child gives in scene a situation destabilizing so as to as a acquérier the control, so that with final the play for him a means is of decreasing the displeasure associated with this situation.

In conclusion of Beyond the pleasure principle , Freud arrives at the paradoxical conclusion that pleasure principle and death instinct are not opposed, are not contrary: in measurement indeed where the low level of tensions (level which the pleasure principle wants to reach) corresponds ultimately to at-rest state of not-alive, the pleasure principle is with the service of the death instinct.

Tendency to racking

Whereas the life instincts (gathering the Impulses of autoconservation (or ego instincts) and the Sexual instincts of the first instinctual dualism) tend to the connection, the death instinct tends to the racking: she wants to break , reduce to nothing, to destroy, bring back living it to an anorganic former state, and aims initially the subject itself - just like the Primary narcissism. But the death instinct would be seldom given to see in itself, free and untied as in the compulsion to repeat, because it is " silencieuse" and " muette" , and that it is remainder often related to an erotic motion.

In Malaise in the culture (1929), Freud arrives at the conclusion that it is this " éternel" fights; between the Eros and the death instinct which determined in a fundamental way the development of the human culture and played a central role in the formation of the super-ego.

The talk of this impulse will cause grinds debates and still today, certain psychoanalysts do not recognize the validity of it. The Théorie of the object-relationship accepts it like earlier than the sexual instinct.

analytical Psychology and death instinct.

Carl Gustav Jung spoken forever about the death instinct: this concept had not been forged yet by Freud at time of their collaboration. However he worked much this question with Sabina Spielrein and he published its second volume of the " metamorphoses of the libido " at the same time as it its article on " destructiveness as causes to become ". Sabina Speilrein affirms the desire there, in the love affair, to melt themselves in its partner in love, to disappear there, and to reappear about it. Jung as for him establishes the link between this desire and the desire of inceste “ life is a continual fight with disappearance, delivery violent and temporary of the night continuously to the aguets. This death is not an external enemy, but an interior personal aspiration towards silence and the calm deep one of a known non-being, clear-sighted sleep in the sea of becoming and disappearing. ” (p.591-592). The essential difference between the design of Jung and that of Speilrein is that for it this desire is related to the object in love, whereas for Jung it is not in oneself related to an object. It appears thus closer to the position than Freud will adopt 10 years later. But for Jung as for Speilrein this desire of death has a teleological aiming (to reappear), which never appears in the work of Freud. Finally that clarifies the difference between Jung and Freud on the question of the inceste, sexual desire for the relative of sex opposed for Freud, desire nonsexual (because anobjectal) of return to in-on this side life for Jung.

Thanatos

Thanatos returns to the mythological aspect of the death instinct.

References

Manifestations of the

Other dependant concepts
Pleasure principle

Random links: