The Death Drive: Hypothesis or Belief?
Sédat, Jacques
The Death Drive: Hypothesis or Belief? - 2008.
22
The question of the drive was for a long time very much at the center of debates between Freud and Jung from 1907 to 1909, and was revisited in 1911 in a text by Sabina Spielrein on destruction. While Jung tended toward the unicity of the libido, Freud defended a dualism of drives: self-preservation and sexual drives. But it was only in 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that the “death drive” first appeared, at a time when Freud was going through a harrowing period of successive mournings. He then opposed the impulses of the Ego, which push toward death, and sexual impulses, which push toward life. But Freud clearly states that this is not a theoretical hypothesis but a “belief,” even a “speculation.” Moreover, he did not take it up in his later texts, even if this notion has survived and stimulated discussion well beyond Freudian thinking.
The Death Drive: Hypothesis or Belief? - 2008.
22
The question of the drive was for a long time very much at the center of debates between Freud and Jung from 1907 to 1909, and was revisited in 1911 in a text by Sabina Spielrein on destruction. While Jung tended toward the unicity of the libido, Freud defended a dualism of drives: self-preservation and sexual drives. But it was only in 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that the “death drive” first appeared, at a time when Freud was going through a harrowing period of successive mournings. He then opposed the impulses of the Ego, which push toward death, and sexual impulses, which push toward life. But Freud clearly states that this is not a theoretical hypothesis but a “belief,” even a “speculation.” Moreover, he did not take it up in his later texts, even if this notion has survived and stimulated discussion well beyond Freudian thinking.
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