{
  "issue_key": "vol05-no2-2017",
  "volume": 5,
  "number": 2,
  "season": "Winter 2017",
  "year": 2017,
  "sequence": 8,
  "type": "research-article",
  "section": "Research Article",
  "title": "Revisiting the Death Drive",
  "subtitle": null,
  "slug": "revisiting-the-death-drive",
  "corporate_author": null,
  "authors": [
    {
      "given_name": "Jon",
      "family_name": "Mills",
      "credentials": "Professor, PsyD, PhD",
      "affiliation": "Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto",
      "email": "psychologist@sympatico.ca",
      "orcid": null,
      "is_corresponding": true,
      "sequence": 1
    }
  ],
  "abstract": "Freud’s thesis on the death drive is one of the most original theories in the history of ideas that potentially provides a viable explanation to the conundrums that beset the problems of human civilization, subjective suffering, collective aggressivity, and self-destructiveness. Contemporary psychology, including many psychoanalytic theorists, tends to view the death drive as fanciful nonsense, an artifact of imagination, but I wish to argue otherwise. Freud accounts for an internally derived motivation, impulse, or activity that is impelled toward a determinate teleology of destruction that may be directed toward self and others, the details of which are multifaceted and contingent upon the unique contexts that influence psychic structure and unconsciously mediated behavior. Although Freud largely believed that his ideas on the death drive were “left to future investigation” (1933, p. 107), he was committed to the notion that mind seeks “a return to an earlier state” (1940, p. 149), a notion that is verifiable through clinical observation. Despite the psyche’s inherently evolutionary nature, death becomes the fulcrum of psychic progression and decay.",
  "keywords": [
    "Death drive",
    "Todestrieb",
    "pleasure principle",
    "repetition compulsion",
    "trauma theory",
    "self-destruction",
    "aggression"
  ],
  "first_page": 92,
  "last_page": 100,
  "pdf_start": 16,
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  "references": [
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  "notes": [
    "5\\. Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Prof. Jon Mills, 1104 Shoal Point Road, Ajax, Ontario L1S 1E2, Canada. Email: psychologist@sympatico.ca",
    "6\\. Reflections from the author in private correspondence",
    "7\\. I am puzzling over how to update it in terms of a more modern commentary",
    "8\\. I have written and will submit an unpublished piece on this for a later volume of JCD&MS for comparison to this death drive article",
    "9\\. JM: Recall that Freud aspired to become a philosopher before deciding on medicine, was tutored by Franz Brentano in university, and told Fliess that “Through the detour of being a physician . . . I most secretly nourish the hope of reaching my original goal, philosophy” (p. 159). See Letter to Fliess, January 1, 1896.",
    "10\\. Derived from Plautus, Asinaria II, iv, 88; see Freud (1930), p. 111.",
    "11\\. JM: The impetus, loci, and movement behind the force of the negative are the bases of Hegel’s entire logic of the dialectic. This is exemplified in his treatise on the evolution of cognition, self-consciousness, and the ethical development of the human race in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and is ontologically grounded in his formal system introduced in the Science of Logic (1812).",
    "12\\. JM: All references to Freud’s texts refer to the original German monographs compiled in his Gesammelte Werke, Chronologisch Geordnet, 18 Vols., Anna Freud, Edward Bibring, Willi Hoffer, Ernst Kris, and Otto Isakower, in collaboration with Marie Bonaparte (Eds.) (London: Imago Publishing Co., Ltd.). Jenseits des Lustprinzips appears in Book XIII, 1920-1924, pp. 1-69. All translations are mine. Because readers of this journal may not have access to the original German texts, I have cited the page numbers to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 Vols. (1886-1940); James Strachey (Trans. & Gen. Ed.) in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press).",
    "13\\. JM: It should be noted that the language of energetics, homeostasis, and hydrolics has been replaced by equivalent metaphors in contemporary discourse that stress activity, experience, process, and action when describing mental functions. Even physicists use the language of quantum mechanics but they stress non-material reduction, highlight the energetic stratification of material interactions via systemic and holistic paradigms, dark matter/dark energy—a metaphor for death, and use the poetics of determinate possibilities when describing the emerging processes of cosmology.",
    "14\\. JM: It should be observed that Freud’s original theory of neurosis is based on defensive albeit adaptive reactions to trauma. Here in his mature theory he cannot escape the resonance of his earlier position by privileging the role of traumatic interference on psychic organization introduced by the forces of external reality. In fact, the death drive is constituted in the immediacy of trauma, itself a defence against annihilation. Here Freud may be begging the question as to whether death is constitutive or reactionary, but it nevertheless is present in the genesis of the self-preservative drive toward life. Paradoxically, it is this defensive psychic order that is also inherently oriented toward destruction, whether this be internally or externally manifested. Proponents of an extrinsic trauma model may have no need to posit the primacy of a death drive when external intrusions give an adequate explanation. Freud, however, felt the theoretical need to explain the internal processes operative within unconscious mentation before incurring external trauma. Therefore, in my opinion he attempts to logically prepare the psyche’s response to trauma by accounting for a priori forces that govern the mind’s primordial activity. Here Freud interiorizes death qua trauma as well as privileges its sequence as an exogenous intrusive act that simultaneously arouses and institutes the psyche’s aim toward self-destruction, albeit in routes it chooses through its own determinate teleology.",
    "15\\. JM: It is interesting to note that Whitehead’s (1929) entire cosmology of process explains how each “actual entity” that comprises the universe is oriented toward seizing upon its inherent freedom to actualize its potential possibilities and actions that are ultimately destined toward “perishing” into the next events that constitute ongoing process. Hence, the telos of all living entities or “occasions” is death. This is compatible with many contemporary theoretical physicists who postulate an inherent entropy to the cosmos.",
    "16\\. JM: The reader may refer to my extensive treatment of Hegel’s notion of the unconscious abyss where the inherent negativity within his dialectic becomes an indissoluble aspect of his entire philosophy (see Mills, 2002)."
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