The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Ten: Toward a Plasticity of the Compulsion to Repeat

189 Freud and the Formlessness of the Death Drive a drive without phenomenon? What does it mean to say “without remedy”? I will formulate my thinking as directly as possible. The limit of psychoanalysis is its failure to admit the existence of a beyond of the pleasure principle. This beyond, which would also be the beyond of all healing, of all possible therapy, never appears in Freud’s text. It does appear in contemporary neurology—but without ever being thought. Despite all his detours, Freud’s question—whether there is another principle than the pleasure principle, beyond it, at work within the psyche— receives a negative response. The severe traumatic illnesses envisaged in the text are ultimately considered only as exceptions to the law of the pleasure t e n Toward a Plasticity of the Compulsion to Repeat The difficulty, as far as the death drive is concerned, arises from the fact that it cannot be attributed so precisely with a function corresponding to that of sexuality in relation to the life drives (or love). What we are surer of is that it may alloy with the sexual drive in sado-masochism. But we have also the acute feeling that there are forms of destruction that do not exhibit this fusion of the two drives. — a n d r é g r e e n , The Work of the Negative 190 On the Beyond of the Pleasure Principle principle that governs the psyche all by itself—even in catastrophic circumstances that might seem to disregard or transgress this law. The impossibility of giving form to the beyond of the pleasure principle is part and parcel of Freud’s trouble finding a representative for the death drive that would do for it what Eros does for the life drives. Once again, for Freud, there is no plasticity of the death drive; it remains formless, structureless , and figureless. Sexuality, as a causal regime, is dualistic. It is constituted both by the sexual and the “other of the sexual,” which, according to the law of the dualism of the drives, is linked to the death drive. Without phenomena or representatives, however, it must be recognized that this second etiological instance remains essentially unenvisageable. Freud himself recognizes this fact at the very moment that he begins to elaborate this theory of the life and death drives; since the death drive does not have a representative, the character of its existence is inherently tenuous . “The difficulty remains that psychoanalysis has not enabled us hitherto to point to instincts other than the libidinal ones. That, however, is no reason for falling in with the conclusion that no others in fact exist.”1 André Green notes that in Freud’s late theory of the drive, Freud no longer speaks of the sexual drive but of the sexual function as a means of knowing Eros, with which it cannot be confused. This representative function does not possess all the properties that Eros does. On the other hand, Freud admits that we do not possess an indication analogous to that which libido represents for the sexual function enabling us to know the death drive in such a direct way.2 The figure of Eros does not exhaust all the occurrences of the life drive but it does makes it possible to offer an index or a sensible phenomenon of its multiplicity, whereas there is no such figure that would do the same for the death drive. sadism and masochism set aside In order to discern some “index” for the death drive, Freud turns toward sadism. When sadism extricates itself from the sexual drive, it seems well suited to play the role of the representative or the phenomenon of the death drive: “From the very first we have recognized the presence of a sadistic component in the sexual drive. As we know, it can make itself independent Toward a Plasticity of the Compulsion to Repeat 191 and can, in the form of a perversion, dominate an individual’s entire sexual activity.”3 If the sadistic drive can, as a partial drive, separate from the libidinal drive, it could then bear witness that the death drive has a degree of autonomy. “If such an assumption as this is permissible, then we have met the demand that we should produce an example of a death drive—though, it is true, a displaced one.”4 In The Ego and the...