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§15 Eros–Thanatos—Freud’s Final Division Beyond the Pleasure Principle marks a profound shift in Freud’s thought, adding a remarkably novel twist to his continually invoked theme of the primacy of conflict within the psyche.1 The primary theoretical change announced in this text is well known: The human psyche is divided against itself in the struggle between life and death drives, a struggle over which the pleasure principle can no longer be said to invariably rule.2 Civilization and Its Discontents, one of Freud’s most famous texts written after the 1920 abandonment of the thesis regarding the primacy of the pleasure principle, employs two dichotomies in the effort to resolve the single enigma of perpetual human suffering. In attempting to answer questions as to why both individuals and entire societies find themselves in a state of recurrent malaise (despite increasingly favorable circumstances of existence ), Freud advances two hypotheses. First, the irreconcilable tension between Eros and the Todestrieb internal to each subject’s libidinal organization condemns the individual to endure a perpetual margin of dissatisfaction . In a sense, individuals sabotage themselves, thwarting their own attainment of enjoyment (neurotics epitomize this self-subversion in that they invariably find ways of avoiding pleasure and/or inculcating feelings of guilt). Second, beyond the conflict internal to individual subjects’ psychical systems, discrepancies are always at work between drives and civilization .3 The social order, although providing pathways of sublimation for various drives—of course, aggressive drives are sublimated through the installation of a super-ego, which results in further conscious suffering in the form of guilt—ultimately must check the unmitigated expression of libidinal urges so as to maintain a collective stability. On this level, Freud The Fundamental Conflicts of Psychoanalysis 123 5 retains the earlier distinction between the pleasure principle (that is, drives in general) and the reality principle (civilization). However, the pleasure principle no longer plays the obviously dominant role that it did before.4 Human suffering is the main issue prompting Freud’s drastic change of mind in 1920. Although the dual drive model is partially intended as a response to the “monolibidinalism” of Jung, it can easily be understood as organically emerging out of decisive conceptual impasses in Freud’s own work. The initial difficulties for Freud arise from traumatic neurosis. Why do certain patients repeatedly return, in both their nocturnal dreams and daytime recollections, to scenes of a terrible trauma? Why is there a recurrent arousal of pain and anxiety in this class of neurotics? Furthermore , Freud locates traits of traumatic neurosis in other analytic phenomena pertaining to all types of analysands—the insistent repetition of repressed material in the transference, the “negative therapeutic reaction ,” the occurrence of resistance, and so on.5 After taking these factors into account, Freud recants as to the dominance of the pleasure principle: On a certain level, human beings desire pain and suffering. The basis for positing a separate category of Trieb, one operating independently of the pleasure principle, resides in two observed features of human psychical life—compulsive repetition and the accompanying recurrence of negative affects.6 For now, an explication of the various nuances of the death drive must be postponed (see §20). Simply cataloguing the multiple senses of this notion in Freud’s writings would be a book-length project unto itself. One should note that the incredibly problematic nature of the death drive is due, in large part, to Freud’s employment of it in an extremely loose fashion. It permits him numerous equivocations—a reduction of tension to zero and a homeostatic constancy of tension (the death drive and the “Nirvana principle” are often treated as interchangeable);7 the tendency toward unpleasure and the pleasure of repetition (the death drive is both “beyond the pleasure principle” and yet a servant of it);8 the diminution of tension and the arousal of aggression (the death drive is both the peaceful absence of excitation and the impulse to engage in violent behavior ).9 Freud fails to fully clarify the precise nature of the death drive. In a way, it signifies both everything and nothing—never encountered in a pure state, and yet always dominating the field of human reality.10 In the face of these Freudian inconsistencies, the most productive strategy is to selectively extract the useful components of the final drive theory—this involves highlighting and preserving particular traits of the Todestrieb, while rejecting others. The combined aspects of repetition com124 T I M E D...

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