Freud's 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' (1920) is both a critically important paper in the evolution of Classical Psychoanalysis and, at the same time, wrong in the formulation and abstractification of its central conceptual feature -- 'the death instinct'.
In this paper, Freud juxtaposed his very controversial concept of 'the death instinct' against its bi-polar opposite concept -- 'the life instinct'.
The life instinct, in turn, was an expansion of his earlier concept of the 'sex instinct'...which makes it look like Freud was doing to his concept of the sex instinct what Jung did earlier with Freud's concept of 'libido' (sexual energy) -- turning it into a 'life energy' rather than just a 'sexual energy' where Freud was continually being criticized by theorists such as himself and Adler for his 'pansexualism' (i.e., his 'narcissistic fixation' with sex. Freud's concept of 'narcissism' incidently was an earlier attempt (1914) -- a largely successful one in my opinion -- to overcome his perceived narcissistic fixation with sexuality alone -- even though who of us doesn't have some sort of narcissistic fixation with sex on one level or another -- by broadening his concept of sexuality to include the idea of 'self-interest' and 'egotism', encompassed by the concept of 'narcissism', as well as just pure, unadulterated 'sexual pleasure', 'sexual energy' -- or his classical concept of 'libido').
There is a part of Freud's thinking here, regarding 'the death instinct' that was about 50 or 60 years ahead of its time. Freud was trying to integrate scientific thinking and medical thinking with psychological thinking and the broader scope of man's behavior -- particularly his propensity for war and self-destruction. Also, this was pretty close to the time when Freud was first diagnosed with cancer which he would carry in his body for another 19 years. Undoubtedly, Freud was starting to see the 'conflictual playoff' in his own body between 'life' and 'death' forces...
There was also the very mystifying clinical phenomenon that he called 'the repetition compulsion' -- people's tendencies to obsessively-compulsively re-think and re-enact the scenes of their greatest traumacy. Not the scenes of their greatest triumphs but the scenes of their greatest traumacy. Why?
Fritz Perls would answer this question about 50 years later by saying that it was because these traumatic scenes were 'unfinished' and demanded 'organismic -- and therapeutic -- closure'...
Perls' style of 'Gestalt thinking' involving the idea of 'the unfinished situation' and 'the need for organismic and therapeutic closure' was very similar to the type of thinking that Freud engaged in up to and including 1896 before he started to abandon his 'traumacy-seduction' theory. Prior to 1896, Freud used concepts such as 'abreaction' and 'catharsis' to describe the therapeutic process in Psychoanalysis of helping the client to 'remember' and then to 'emotionally release' the feelings tied to the scenes of his 'repressed traumatic memories'... But that would all change after 1896 when Freud started to talk more and more about 'repressed fantasies' and 'repressed sexual instincts and impulses'...
His theoretical and therapeutic perspective after 1896 -- the subject of so many controversial and raging debates still to this day -- was to undergo a revolution of 180 degrees as Freud essentially stopped writing about 'childhood traumacies' and particularly 'childhood sexual traumacies' and instead started to talk about 'sexual desires, impulses, fantasies, instincts...and their 'vicissitudes' (i.e., their various manifestations and 'compromise-formations' that combine the original instinctual impulse with a partial defence against the same impulse...compromise-formations revealing 'allusions to immediacy' and at the same time 'allusions to core nuclear transference conflicts' -- my latter addition)...
Adler would indirectly add his contribution to the mystery of the 'repetition compulsion' in clinical settings...For Adler, in similar but slightly different fashion to Perls, these 'repetitions compulsions' were not about 'repeating the traumacy' which is how Freud connected it to the 'death instinct' in over-riding the idea that there was a therapeutic 'life instinct' at work here...to repeat, for Adler, these repetition compulsions were all about 'overcoming' the traumacy, not repeating it which is why it more rightfully deserves to be called the 'mastery compulsion' or in Adler's own words 'superiority striving' and/or 'lifestyle striving'...
Adler's conceptuology relative to 'overcoming traumacy' and Perls' conceptuology relative to 'closing unfinished traumatic situations' are important additions to my work here...and more rightfully connect the 'repetition compulsion' to the 'life instinct', not the 'death instinct' even though in symbolically returning to scene of one's greatest childhood traumacy one is risking -- strongly risking -- the same or similar traumacy and potential self-destruction all over again...
In this regard, Freud was not completely 'out to lunch' in connecting the repetition compulsion to the death instinct...He saw -- both inside and outside the clinical setting -- how much self-destruction could be connected to the repetition compulsion, regardless of what its underlying motivation was...
If a cowboy gets on a 'bucking bronco' and is thrown from his saddle to the ground with various broken bones and related injuries...And if, when that cowboy is sufficiently healed, he insists -- obsessively-compulsively insists -- on getting back up onto another 'bucking bronco' and is then 'thrown again' off the saddle onto the ground with various new and/or related broken bones and other injuries....we can clearly see in the cowboy's underlying motivation a perceived need for 'mastering and controlling the horse', for 'overcoming' the cowboy's previous imperfections and inadequecies relative to 'mastering the bucking horse'....However, we can also clearly see the potential for 'great self-destruction' to the cowboy's body over time at the expense of 'obsessively-compulsively attempting to control and master the bucking bronco'...and we can either give the cowboy great accolades when he finally does learn how to master a bucking bronco...or we can say to him...'Buddy, you are going to kill or cripple yourself if you keep doing what you are doing...your body is getting more and more battered...and you are getting older....not younger...is this really what you want to continue to do...until you end up in a wheelchair or a body bag?
Such is the paradoxical obsessive-compulsive nature of the 'repetition compulsion' and its underlying 'core nuclear transference complex'...
There might be a time when we all might seriously want to consider....
Walking away from our own private 'bucking bronco'...our 'rejecting but exciting transference figure'...our customized 'narcissistic (sexual and/or romantic) fixation'...our core nuclear transference conflict and resulting 'split ego'...one side of ourselves rejecting ourselves...and the other side obsessively-compulsively still trying to prove that we 'shouldn't have been rejected'...that we are worthy of 'love' and 'triumph', not 'repetitive rejection'...
That's the 'transference merry-go-round', the 'transference roller coaster', the 'transference bucking bronco'...
And there is a time in our life when we all perhaps need to seriously stand back and ask ourselves,
'Am I not getting too old for this merry-go-round ride, this roller coaster ride, this bucking bronco...?'
'Isn't it time perhaps that I left this idiotic game -- this bucking bronco that wants to trample me -- for the younger, more naive cowboys and cowgirls?'
Or maybe in the end, Freud was right...
Perhaps I do have a 'death instinct'...a 'death wish'....and/or a 'self-destructive wish'...
We all have to choose...
We can either follow our obsessive-compulsions into the rodeo stadium...
Or we can say,
'That's enough for me...time to pack it in...
I'm looking for a gentler game.'
-- dgb, Aug. 6th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
