Is the Death Instinct Silent or Clinically Relevant? From Freud’s Concept of a Silent Death Instinct to Understanding Its Clinical Manifestations

Gertraud Diem-Wille

doi:10.5772/intechopen.94444

Abstract

When Freud introduced his concept of the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he solved three theoretical problems which could not be explained by the one drive theory: masochism, repetition compulsion and the negative therapeutic reaction. The concept of two inherently opposed instincts remained one of the most controversial parts of Freud’s theory. For Melanie Klein, Freud’s idea of the death instinct was a powerful instrument in solving her greatest problems of integrating her clinical evidence of an earlier, very harsh superego. In Freud’s account, the superego was the manifestation at birth of the death instinct operating in destructiveness towards the person, as he had argued. In this way, Klein put – as Hinshelwood claims – clinical “flesh on the bones of Freud’s theory of the death instinct.” I will describe the development of Freud’s theory and how this was elaborated by Klein and her followers Bion, Esther Bick, Segal and Rosenfeld. With three clinical vignettes--from an Infant Observation, a child analysis and an adult analysis--the clinical use of the concept will be illustrated.

Highlights

The death instinct is perhaps Freud’s most controversial assumption. It has been severely criticized by both psychoanalysts and others and highly appreciated and further developed by Herbert Rosenfeld [10], Betty Joseph [11] and Hanna Segal [12]- the object relation school. This was difficult for the psychanalytic community to accept, because Freud thought that the manifestation of the death instinct was silent, meaning that one could not investigate it in clinical material as they two instincts are fused and defused with the result that it can be observed in a number of different mental states, e.g. a fear of falling apart and disintegration, selfdestructiveness, destructiveness, envy, sadism ([5], p. 298)
The patient struggles to accept his unconscious murderous wishes expressed in his dream by the two aggressive workers and his jealousy against his new baby M. which he dearly loves
In the session I described, he is enormously agitated and reveals himself in a puzzling way: he has a new baby but behind his pride and joy of having a new baby he feels burdened by it--it is another mouth to feed

Summary

Introduction

Freud’s model of the mind is a dynamic one- that is, it understands the mind as being in constant movement and conflict between impulses arising in one area, along with defenses against these impulses [1, 2]. He developed three models, adjusting them to his clinical material according to his understanding of therapeutic work with his patients as research into the human mind – “psychic apparatus,” as he first called it

The topographical model of the mind

The structural model

Melanie Klein’s and Bion’s concept of the death instinct

Child analytic case

Vignette from an analysis from an adult patient Mr a

Discussion

Final remarks