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Politics
Published in Alan Bleakley, Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice, 2020
Beyond sovereign and capillary power (power exerted) is powerlessness. While Aristotle suggested that what distinguishes humans from other animals is our political will, thus separating nature from culture, we might think that the most natural political force of nature is life morphing into death. As the Preface notes, death is the most natural of powers as the universal exercise of entropy, while it is medicine’s sworn cultural role to thwart nature’s death drive. This is a power struggle, a political venture, whether it is critical interventions in downstream hospitalism or “at source” prevention in deep upstream primary and community care.
Ecstasy
Published in Alan Bleakley, Routledge handbook of the medical humanities, 2019
Sigmund Freud believed that certain behaviours betray a death drive. Soldiers from World War I who suffered grave traumas had dreams that repeatedly brought them back to the scene of the disaster. Freud’s patients who had suffered painful experiences that had subsequently been repressed compulsively re-enacted those experiences. Children’s play often staged the loss of the mother or of themselves. Freud speculated that all living organisms tend to the quiescence and inertia of inorganic matter.
Naming the nameless
Published in Björn Salomonsson, Psychodynamic Interventions in Pregnancy and Infancy, 2018
Daniel Stern was an infant researcher and a psychoanalyst. Over the years, he distanced himself from aspects of Freudian theory. The specific topic of infantile anxiety occurs rarely in his writings. The focus is on the baby’s interpersonal world (Stern, 1985) and his “sense of self-and-other, [which] has as its starting place the infant’s inferred subjective experience” (p. 26). This process is rarely portrayed in the dramatic colours from the authors earlier. As an intersubjectivist, Stern rejected Klein’s idea that anxiety derives from the death drive. Rather, it is triggered by expectable and banal stimulation. This parallels his objection that an infant would experience, as Klein said, the world as good or bad, or connect “‘pleasurable’ and ‘good’ or ‘unpleasurable’ and ‘bad’ at the level of core-relatedness” (p. 252). Such abilities enter later in development, he says. The baby’s “reality experience precedes fantasy distortions in development” and is “unapproachable by psychodynamic considerations” (p. 255). Klein would surely protest.
The Uncanny Swipe Drive: The Return of a Racist Mode of Algorithmic Thought on Dating Apps
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
Freud saw the death drive as a strange compulsion that goes beyond the pleasure principle, but Lacan claims it goes beyond death itself: a “Will to destruction. Will to make a fresh start. Will for an Other-thing” (1997, p. 212). This positions humans as creators after the death of god, according to Lacan. He explains that this is an impressive feat because it is not “difficult to make what is called thought emerge from the evolution of matter … What is difficult to make emerge from the evolution of matter is quite simply homo faber” (1997, p. 214). In this way, Lacan inverts the death drive: No longer leading to destruction, it becomes the ground of emergence for a godless homo faber. This inversion is congruent with a paradigm shift that took place in the interim between Civilization and Its Discontents and Lacan’s reading of it just quoted. I turn to this shift next because it is a crucial link between the user unconscious and the death drive.
Sabina Spielrein’s Death Drive, Queer Experience, and Psychoanalytic Twogetherness
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2021
“A considerable part of this speculation has been anticipated in her work,” Freud acknowledged in a footnote to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1955), referring to Spielrein’s thinking on the death drive in “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” (1912/1994). Spielrein was indeed the first psychoanalytic author we know of to engage the subject of the death drive. Her take on this subject was, however, very different from Freud’s own—unlike Freud’s teleological concept, denoting the body’s striving to return to the inorganic state, Spielrein conceptualized the death drive as the drive to merge sexually with another person. The ultimate purpose of the merger was establishing a new, joint self, based on a sense of we-ness—she used as her metaphor the two sex cells merging into one in the process of conception. As Fatima Caropreso points out, Spielrein was referring to the drive toward the death of the ego, not of the physical body—quite a different kind of drive (Caropreso, 2016).
Mass Trauma and Cultural Amnesia: A Case Study of a Society’s Untranslatable Excess
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2022
In accounting for the destructive elements within the unconscious, Laplanche rejects Freud’s (1920/1989) distinction between the sexual and death drives, and thus a separation of aggression from the realm of sexuality (Laplanche, 1995/2015a). He draws upon Freud’s (1905/1953) early description of the sadistic and fragmenting aspects of sexuality in The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and locates human capacity for cruelty and sadism within what he calls the sexual death drive. This aspect of sexuality is characterized by “unbinding” and thus by its disruptive and fragmenting impact on the psyche. In contrast, the sexual drive initiates the binding of psychic contents and is ultimately the source of the ego’s assimilating and symbolizing functions.