The Contours of the Death Drive

A summary of a paper by Otto Kernberg (see reference below).

Not for the feint-hearted, in some ways this material is kind of like an episode of Grey's Anatomy directed at the psyche rather than the body, and without the attractive American actors.

Repetition compulsion, sadism and masochism, negative therapy reactions and depression resulting in suicide are all explored in this paper, and Kernberg draws the conclusion that the general dominance of aggressive affects can count for much of the explanatory power of the ‘death drive’. The theories of Eros and Thanatos are proposed by Freud to be fundamental motivational principles that have implications for the formation symptoms and unconscious schemata.  Through biological study we know that the primary motivational system for humans consists of affects of a positive and negative activation. Embedded libidinal positive and negative affects are implicated in fantasies of love and hatred. (p.1010)

Kernberg (2009) identifies the death drive as ‘a dominant unconscious motivation towards self-destructiveness’.  It may extend beyond the bounds of the self to imply the destruction of others.

Kernberg captures aggression, as per Freud, as arising from the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Biological preparation in the service of territoriality or the competition of males for females is seen as the ground upon which more complex manifestations of the death drive emerge, including repetition compulsion, sadism and masochism, negative therapeutic reaction, suicide and self-destructive development in group processes. (p.1012)

The repetition compulsion is the repeating of the same destructive behaviour while being resistant to analysis.  Repetition compulsion can be a working through of a conflict or a traumatic relationship, and it may reflect a re-kindling of primitive processes embedded early in the behavioural chain. Identification with the perpetrator of the trauma may be one other way that the compulsion becomes apparent, where an effort to reverse the roles and place someone else in the role of overwhelmed victim is a reified unconscious defensive response.

‘Andre Green...has described unconscious identification with a ‘dead mother’, that is, a severely depressed mother who had chronically frustrated the needs for love and dependency of her infant...The patient, in unconscious identification with a fantasied ‘dead mother’ denies the existence of all live relationships in reality as if he himself were dead to the world’ (p.1012).

Destructive narcissistic organisation in some clients presents as a level of denial that destroys the work of an envied therapist – a relentless self-destructive motivation becomes apparent as the client uses the denial to reassure and protect themselves from awareness of their avoidance of life tasks (p. 1013).

Kernberg parallels sadism and masochism with anorexia, in viewing the unconscious conflicts of anorectics as extending across a spectrum of Oedipal rivalry through to primitive self-hatred. Perversity in the form of a recruitment of love in service of aggression in order that the beloved object, seduced into helpfulness, is lured into a trap that ends with the destruction of the person in a symbolic or a real sense also qualifies here as self-destructive pathology. Some clients with profoundly forbidden oedipal urges or severe unconscious aggression simply destroy what they receive (p. 1014).

Negative therapeutic reaction is a severe self-directed destruction that may arise through guilt over receiving treatment or be apparent in narcissistic clients in envy of the therapist. Some patients too can only manifest a real relationship with a person who will destroy them. Pursued into countertransference, analysands may find themselves ‘acting out’ the roles which allow the client to escalate their self-destructive behaviour (p. 1015).

Suicidal tendencies in melancholia, where the introjection of an ambivalently loved and lost object draws aggression into that object in order that the ego might destroy it constitutes a very final form of self-destruction on behalf of the superego (p. 1015).

Kernberg describes the work of Melanie Klein in object relations, where she described the work of the depressive as overcoming a split between positive, idealised relations and aggressive projections onto the object. This split is a normal component of early development, but is a split that is returned to across all later mourning processes as the primal moment of object loss. Relentless self attack may form part of this split pathology where an attack is launched on the self from the superego, and in severely narcissistic personalities, abandonment to death, or suicide, emerges with the superego triumphant over a ‘depreciated, worthless world’ (p. 1016).

Self destruction may also emerge in social movements, where enemy formations, protected dependency and focussed aggression combined with the projection of a superego onto the leader may activate destructiveness at a social level (p.1017).

Severe self-destructive aggression is not a primary tendency but rather is an organised motivational system that is not simply ‘secondary to trauma’. The clinical view offers intrapsychic struggles between internalised sadistic representations and masochistic representations of the self. The internalised sadistic representations include projected and reintrojected aggressive impulses, plus traumatic experiences. Masochistic self representations include eroticisation of painful experiences and guilty suffering. What makes a self destructive person is a difficult question to answer, even for Kernberg. He points to some genetic determination of a negative affect dominance and for inadequate cognitive contextualisation of negative affect expressed as an insecure attachment style in early years. Traumatic experience early in life will often constitute the ground for a disorganised personality style that is self-destructive at core.  Intensity of negative aggressive affect and an internalised narcissistic structure emerge as consistently present in the dominant motivation for self destruction in clients.

Ref:

Kernberg, O. (2009). The concept of the death drive: A clinical perspective. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,, 90, 1009-1023.