Freud’s introduction of the idea of a “death instinct” into psychoanalysis occured as a relatively late development. Prior to its introduction, the pleasure principle, coupled with the reality principle, was used as the only basis basis for explaining human behavior and the processes that occur as part of our mental life.
It asserts that while our primary, basic instinct, associated with the id, is to seek pleasure and avoid pain, under certain circumstances, the drive to bring an end to pain and psychological tension, can trigger a desire for the cessation of life. That is, if the course of our mental activity is set in motion by some kind “unpleasurable tension,” it will take a direction such that the final result is the biologically influenced need to reduce that tension, at times with violence that appears to conflict with the assumption that pleasure seeking is the primary directive of maximizing pleasure over pain.
The pleasure principle thus has a close relationship to the biological aspects of the organism and represents a way of explaining the appearance of physical violence in an organism whose instincts naturally serve to lead it toward pleasure and away from pain.
Contents:
- The Introduction of the Death Instinct
- Psycho-Somatic Development
- Sadistic and Masochistic Impulses
- The Life and Death Instincts and the Development of Civilization
- References
The Introduction of the Death Instinct
For the early Freud, it is the libido, the life-instinct that accounts for the desire that motivates all of our ultimately pleasure-seeking interaction with the world. But in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and afterward in Civilization and its Discontents, this view acquires greater complexity. Freud now introduces the idea of a death instinct alongside the libidinal life instinct as something always present within an individual.1 While the latter has as its aim a union with some objective other (which is consonant with his earlier view), he now attempts to explain the source of aggression within ourselves as emerging from a different source. The death instinct has its ultimate source in the body’s biological need to return to quiescence, a de-excitation that results in the lowering of unpleasurable tension. Freud holds that this same “conservative” impulse exists in biological organisms in the most elementary forms and impels them even toward the cessation of life.
For the early Freud, it is the libido, the life-instinct that accounts for the desire that motivates all of our ultimately pleasure-seeking interaction with the world. In Civilization and its Discontents, for example, he writes,
Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death.
Civilization and its Discontents (1930), 65-66
It would seem that pure logic, or else a resolute will to reason back from effect to cause, is itself Freud’s only justification for holding to this explanation of the origin of the death instinct. It does however, show evidence of his determination to find a biological explanation for mental events. Certainly Freud approaches his own explanation as conjectural, but does feel that it is necessary to find an independent source to explain aggression apart from the libido.
Psycho-Somatic Development
At an early stage of development, the pleasure seeking id takes up the entirety of our ego as an undifferentiated ego-id).2 The compulsion to seek to lessen the tension aroused by hunger, for example, enters in as driven by a survival instinct. At this stage, the death instinct is overcome by id-ego and is not recognizable as such. But later, when the ego has become more developed and the infant has become able to distinguish him or herself from objects in the world, the desire for satisfaction from objects in his or her environment or else the compulsion to avoid them or even destroy them, becomes a necessary part of its survival. Whereas eros is characterized by a desire for an object for the purpose of uniting with it, the death instinct, represents the opposite compulsion and manifests itself as aggression once the infant has begun to discover itself as a body apart from other-objects that may represent either pleasure or pain. Eros describes the direction of libido toward such objects as are considered to bring satisfaction of desire, while the death instinct manifests itself in terms of aggression and destructiveness. In the former case, again, the desire is directed toward unification and combination whereas in the latter it tends toward dissociation and disconnection.
Sadistic and Masochistic Impulses
Furthermore, Freud regards the death instinct as emerging along with sadistic or masochistic impulses.3 As was indicated above, he regards the death instinct as hidden in early childhood before the ego has become developed. Interestingly, he associates its first appearance with the development of teeth:
Sadistic impulses already begin to occur sporadically during the oral phase along with the
An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940), 28-29
appearance of the teeth. Their extent increases greatly during the second phase, [following the oral phase] which we describe as the sadistic-anal phase, because satisfaction is then sought in aggression and in the excretory function. We justify our inclusion of aggressive impulses in the libido by supposing that sadism is an instinctual fusion of purely libidinal and purely destructive impulses, a fusion which thenceforward persists without interruption.4
As the last sentence of the quotation indicates, when the death instinct does emerge, its usual way of doing so is in combination with eros, the life instinct. Thus, sadistic and masochistic behavior appears as aggression that represents a manifestation of the death instinct “alloyed” with the life instinct. While sadistic impulses arise out of aggression directed outward, away from oneself toward some object, masochistic impulses occur when the aggressive or destructive instinct has oneself as its libido-object.
The Life and Death Instincts and the Development of Civilization
Freud recognizes the tension between the love and destructive instincts in such cases and sees it not only as an inescapable part of what we observe in human history, but as the key to understanding the evolution of civilization:
I may now add that civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man’s natural
Civilization and its Discontents (1930), 69-70
aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and, the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life arid the
instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species. And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.5
References
- See Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated and edited by James Strachey (New York: Norton 1961) 44-49 and his Civilization and its Discontents, translated and edited by James Strachey (New York: Norton 1961) 64-65.
2. Civilization and its Discontents, 64-65.
3. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 47-49; Civilization and its Discontents, 66-67.
4. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, translated by James Strachey (New York:
Norton 1940) 28-29.
5. Civilization and its Discontents, 69-70.
