Was It Just a Dream? Aging and Dreaming the Psychoanalytic Process

By revisiting the last years of a long psychoanalytic treatment of a female patient, a psychoanalyst reflects on her own development as a clinician and on the changes in her experience of psychoanalytic generativity. An increasing ability to understand patient's shifts between creativity and destructiveness brings about a different understanding of the process of mourning, while the shared aging of the analytic dyad highlights the difficulty of ending an analysis that has become a way of life.

Desexualization: An interesting problem in The Ego and the Id

The sudden appearance of the term "desexualization" in The Ego and the Id is considered as a marker of the subtle, almost unnoticeable changes that occurred in Freud's thinking after 1920. The strict dichotomy between life and death drives posed a series of new problems that force Freud to invoke a "desexualized libido" in order to restore some fluidity in the psychic apparatus. But the mechanism of desexualization was difficult to describe and Freud seems to resort to a circular explanation. In the end, the restored dialectics between Eros and the death drive, thanks to desexualization, force Freud to invoke a split in the ego itself.

The Ego and the Id: Concepts and developments

In this note I have limited myself to describing some convergent and divergent developments arising from the innovative concepts present in The Ego and the Id. It could be argued that a part of the psychoanalytic movement wished to emphasize the function of the Ego (Anna Freud, Hartmann, Rapaport), while another part (Melanie Klein and her followers) delved into the dynamics of the Superego and the Id in primitive and pathological states of mind. I will examine three themes presents in The Ego and the Id: the assertion that a part of the Ego is unconscious; the idea that the death drive becomes part of the dynamics of melancholia and its Superego; the concept of fusion and defusion of the life and death instinct. Freud's writing represents a forge of new ideas that have made psychoanalysis ever more creative and capable of understanding the complexity and mysteriousness of the human mind.

Ferenczi's variations on the death drive

This theoretical paper discusses three variations on the death drive, developed by Sándor Ferenczi. We present a brief history of the use of the term death drive among the first psychoanalysts and argue that, as early as 1913, the notion is used by Ferenczi and serves as a conceptual background for his thinking. During the 1920s, Ferenczi revisits part of this concept, focusing on what he identifies as a primacy of self-destruction. The destructive drive gains an adaptive character responsible for the mortification of parts of the individual, in exchange for the survival of the whole. In this variation, the tendency to regress also arises as the self-destruction drive and the acceptance of unpleasure involves a psychic "reckoning-machine." In the final variation, left unfinished, the death drive at times receives new names, like drive for "conciliation," and at others, the very idea of the death drive is criticized.

An Accident With the Death Drive and Its Working Through in the Analyst's Countertransference

Working through the different faces and vicissitudes of the death drive in the countertransference, and especially through projective identification, is a very challenging process. A thorough and versatile process of containment and working through of the manifold threatening expressions and influences of the death drive is required, experienced most specifically and deeply in the arena of projective identification. This paper demonstrates how each aspect that unfolds in the analyst's countertransference sheds light on a particular layer of anxiety and internal object relations related to it. The creation of a new meaning to the differing expressions of the death drive gradually lessens the compulsion to repeat and enables a better integration between the life and death drives. This process will be illustrated by a prolonged clinical case that involved intense internal working through of the death drive in the analyst's countertransference.

On brutal gestures: trauma, destruction, and forms of mental illness

The Bohemian writer Milan Kundera narrates, more than once, an experience from his years of life under an authoritarian regime. It is the memory of a violent fantasy of rape, one in which libido and destruction are mingled. Based on this memory and how he wrote about it, we present two forms of mental illnesses (by activation and by passivation) and relate them to the model proposed by Green to think about depressive states through passivation. The first form of mental illness, by activation, is the result of an overly successful active defense against anxiety. The second form, by passivation, is a paradoxical reaction to agony in the face of deadly psychic states. Arguing that this second form of mental illness is frequently identified in individuals during periods of political change, we consider that the intricacy between the drives of destruction and the libido, even when it generates fantasies or brutal gestures, can reveal itself as an episodic attempt of an active defense amid the predominance of passivation generated by post-traumatic helplessness.

The work of Benno Rosenberg

Benno Rosenberg's work has been little translated into English. Yet, his work on masochism is a landmark in France. He set himself the goal of deploying all the richness and implications of the second Freudian drive theory and the introduction of the death drive. He therefore returns to "the Economic Problem of Masochism" to give all its value to the drive fusion that it achieves internally and which is therefore for it "guardian of life", even if it is can also be fatal. He draws consequences on the psychic construction of the ego, the superego and on that of temporality. He also describes a "work of melancholy" which is different from mourning. Thinking it necessary to push the consequences of the new theorizing further than Freud was able to do, he revisits "Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety" to articulate the triggering of anxiety by a libidinal demand and the threat to the unity of the ego who comes from the death drive due to conflict. Starting from the psychosomatic descriptions of Pierre Marty, whose options are specified, he also proposed a metapsychology of somatization during the overflow of the psyche by the destructiveness which will then threaten the body.

The traumatic and the work of the après-coup in Freud's opus

This text explores the evolution of the notion of trauma in Freud's work and of its decisive import for the organization of psychic functioning through a two-stage process called the après-coup. By following the three steps of Freud's theory of the drives, the author shows that the conception of the traumatic is gradually internalized to become a basic quality of all drives as a tendency to return to an earlier state, and ultimately an organic, inanimate state. An open question remains in Freud about this tendency's relation to Eros, and therefore to the links between Eros and the traumatic state. This question has remained latent within the psychoanalytic community. The author proposes to conceive of Eros as an infinitely extensible tendency that needs containing in order for it to contribute to evolving inscriptions. Thus is outlined one traumatic state as a return to the inorganic and another traumatic state as an infinite extensibility, both being transformed by the superego and its imperatives in order to generate all life forms.

Beyond the death drive: Entropy and free energy

In this paper I offer an overview of the possible links between psychoanalytical metapsychology and contemporary work in neuroscience concerning entropy and the free energy principle. After briefly describing the theory of living systems put forward by the neuroscientist Karl Friston based on the notion of entropy, we sum up the use of the notion of free energy by Friston and Freud. I then analyze how these notions improve the intelligibility of psychic functioning and can be associated with several psychoanalytical concepts, in particular the death drive. I approach from the same perspective the regulation of free energy associated with psychic envelopes and early intersubjectivity. It thus appears that the psychic apparatus can be considered at its different levels, from the most primary to the most secondary, as having the essential function of reducing entropy and free energy. Various forms of "failure" of this process of linking, regulation and transformation of energy within the psychic apparatus could be considered as the origin of different psychopathological manifestations as suggested in the last part of this paper.

Repetition and the compulsion to repeat, a French perspective

The discovery of a compulsion to repeat and its involvement in the elaboration of the second drive theory of the libido and the death drive was fundamental in the evolution of Freud's thought: psychic functioning was no longer governed by the pleasure principle alone, and this changed analytic technique. This led in 1923 to a change of topography in order to take into consideration the existence of destructiveness within the mind that Freud had hitherto underestimated.

From the Principle of Inertia to the Death Drive: The Influence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics on the Freudian Theory of the Psychical Apparatus

In the Freudian theory of the psychical apparatus, the introduction from the 1920s onward of the second drive dualism appears as a major turning point. The idea of a "death drive," first expressed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920), is generally considered to be a new concept, one that represents a break with Freud's previous thinking. It has often surprised the scholars because it seemed, at first sight, difficult to reconcile with the idea of the singularity of living organisms within which the psychical functions form an integral part. Our research aims to demonstrate that the theory of the death drive does not represent a complete change in direction for Freud. It is present, in essence, in his earliest work, to the extent that the "principle of inertia" described in 1895 in A Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1895) can be seen as a precursor to the death drive. Based on a reading of Freud's early formulations of his ideas, we aim to bring to light how certain aporias that seem inherent to the concept of the death drive can be overcome if we consider them in the context of an epistemological model that draws on the paradigms of physics which were conveyed by the Helmholtz School. Namely, we can consider the idea of death drive in reference to the principle of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics.

Working Out Phantoms in Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma

The concept of Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma (TTT) is explored through a clinical presentation of a young man in search of a history buried by negation, disavowal, and foreclosure of the ravages of traumatic beginnings of unwelcome children. Transmitted down the generations as phantoms buried in crypts of the psyche, they emerge generations later as holes in the self manifested as a sense of meaninglessness, alienation, and feeling outcast. Historicization of the buried past can bring symbolic representation to phantoms and disperse their influence. Social consequences of unwelcome children are discussed as some may choose violence against others as a solution to their excessive death drive.

Metapsychology or metapsychologies? Some comments on Paul Denis's paper 'The drive revisited: mastery and satisfaction'

In this commentary on Paul Denis's paper 'The drive revisited: mastery and satisfaction', the author defends the idea of a plurality of metapsychologies that must be contrasted with and distinguished from each other while avoiding incompatible translations between models. In this connection he presents various theoretical approaches to aggression and the death drive, and demonstrates the differences between the drive model and the model underlying the theory of internalized object relations. The author holds that the concept of the internal object differs from Freud's notion of the representation (Vorstellung). He also considers that the imago as defined by Paul Denis in fact corresponds to the concept of the internal object. Lastly, he addresses the complex issue of listening to archaic forms of psychic functioning and their non-discursive presentation within the analytic process, which affects the transference-countertransference link.

The drive revisited: Mastery and satisfaction

Starting from the theory of the libido and the notions of the experience of satisfaction and the drive for mastery introduced by Freud, the author revisits the notion of the drive by proposing the following model: the drive takes shape in the combination of two currents of libidinal cathexis, one which takes the paths of the 'apparatus for obtaining mastery' (the sense-organs, motricity, etc.) and strives to appropriate the object, and the other which cathects the erotogenic zones and the experience of satisfaction that is experienced through stimulation in contact with the object. The result of this combination of cathexes constitutes a 'representation', the subsequent evocation of which makes it possible to tolerate for a certain period of time the absence of a satisfying object. On the basis of this conception, the author distinguishes the representations proper, vehicles of satisfaction, from imagos and traumatic images which give rise to excitation that does not link up with the paths taken by the drives. This model makes it possible to conciliate the points of view of the advocates of 'object-seeking' and of those who give precedence to the search for pleasure, and, further, to renew our understanding of object-relations, which can then be approached from the angle of their relations to infantile sexuality. Destructiveness is considered in terms of "mastery madness" and not in terms of the late Freudian hypothesis of the death drive.

"AFTER THE EVENT": FREUD'S UNCANNY AND THE ANXIETY OF ORIGINS

This essay aims to revise Freud's theory of the uncanny by rereading his own essay of that name along with the key material Freud drew on in formulating his theory: E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story "The Sandman" (1816a) and Ernst Jentsch's essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny" (1906a). While arguing, initially, both that Jentsch's work is fundamentally misconstrued by Freud and that it offers a better account of what happens in Hoffmann's story, the essay moves beyond Jentsch's account to offer a more philosophically oriented theory of the uncanny, one more in line with Freud's ideas in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920a).

On the reception of the concept of the death drive in Germany: expressing and resisting an 'evil principle'?

With Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud attempted 'to describe and to account for the facts of daily observation in our field of study' (1920, p. 7), in particular concerning destructive clinical phenomena that confront us in the analytic situation: traumatic neuroses, melancholic states, negative-therapeutic reactions, masochism, repetition compulsion and so on. The author demonstrates in the first section how Freud's own resistance - later self-diagnosed - to recognizing these unwelcome facts was expressed in the terminological and conceptual ambiguities of the death drive hypothesis then introduced, ambiguities that to some extent continue to impede the reception of its clinical usefulness to this day. As soon as Freud had demonstrated the connection with clinical practice more directly in The Ego and the Id (1923), some contemporaries adopted it as a helpful clinical concept, while others believed that they could (and must) refute it. The second part outlines its reception in the 1920s and 1930s, which was part of an international discussion that was, of course, initially conducted mainly in German. The beginnings of an important further development of the death drive hypothesis are described in a separate section because it originated from Melanie Klein's earliest experiences in analysing children in Berlin in the early to mid-1920s. She referred at that time to an 'evil principle', and in 1932 published her view of the death drive hypothesis, which was further developed in subsequent decades by her and her followers in London. In this period, conditions changed dramatically: in Germany Freud's books (among others) were burnt, crimes against humanity were instigated and psychoanalysis ceased to exist in this country. Almost all the analysts who published on the death drive had to emigrate. From then on, entirely different discourses took place in the various regions. In Germany, the death drive hypothesis was (largely) disregarded or rejected for decades after the Holocaust. Frank demonstrates how the uncritical recourse in relevant works to this day to an article by Brun in 1953 that considered the death drive to have been comprehensively refuted on the basis of (apparently) comprehensive literature research can be understood as a symptom. Pursuing some reflections by Beland (1988) and Cycon (1995), the author expounds her thesis that in Germany the clinical usefulness of the death drive hypothesis could not be considered as long as destructive impulses were still an immediate social reality. According to the author's observations, in stating that there had been a 'definite reaction formation against death drive hypotheses', Brun had unintentionally made an accurate diagnosis. It was not until the realization of inevitable perpetrator identifications ('Hitler in us') in this country became (more widely) possible that a concern with the death drive hypothesis could also resume. In the final section, the author takes up one line of this development and traces how some German analysts in the 1980s came into contact with Kleinian developments that had since occurred and how these found and find their way into their analytic working. She closes by asking whether it might be appropriate to consider Melanie Klein's concept of an evil principle - along with the pleasure and reality principles - as a less ambiguous one for the phenomena under consideration.

The King of Norway: negative individuation, the hero myth and psychopathic narcissism in extreme violence and the life of Anders Behring Breivik

The paper discusses negative individuation and the hero myth as developmental concepts. It is suggested that in negative individuation healthy psychological development is hindered and goes astray. Aggression then becomes the central psychic system. Repressed anger is the core element in psychopathic narcissism (Diamond) and malignant narcissism (Kernberg). Both Diamond and Kernberg extend narcissistic personality structure to antisocial, psychopathic personality in an effort to better understand extreme violence. According to Freud, love (libido) and hate (the death drive) are the major motivational systems in the human psyche. In contrast to Freud, Jung sees libido as a life force in general, not simply as a sexual drive. Jung writes about evil and the shadow but does not present a comprehensive theory of the negative development of an individual's life. The concept of negative individuation connects the shadow and the death drive with psychopathology, psychiatry and psychotherapy. In this paper, I explore these concepts in the light of contemporary affect theory according to Kernberg. I also ask how ideology is tied to extreme violence and how it is possible that narcissistic personality structures can lead to such radically different outcomes as were manifested in the lives of Anders Behring Breivik and Steve Jobs.