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Eros and thanatos - comedy in tragedy. The myth of the primitive horde. From the history of psychoanalysis

When Freud, in his mature works, chose new terms for his teaching, the problem remained unresolved. Then he saw three different forces operating in man: Es, that is, the totality of libidinal impulses; Super-Ego, i.e., a set of prohibitions that are repeatedly instilled in a person from the first years of life and then accompany it always in a more or less conscious form, constituting what is called “moral consciousness”; and Ego - personality, which is the result of the adjustment and partial and unstable balance of two other elements that are in contradiction. But here, too, all the difficulties remain the same

places. How can the Ego form as such and influence Es if it is only an “organized part of Es”? And how can the Super-Ego and moral consciousness be formed as a social formation if the only universal and constant force that operates in people is the force of Es?

Perhaps the awareness of these difficulties prompted Freud in the last years of his life to give a new formulation to his teaching, in which the dualism that had always inspired him was introduced into Es itself, that is, into the realm of unconscious impulses. Freud then made the assumption that there are two types of impulses: those that seek to preserve and unite and are therefore “erotic” precisely in the sense of Eros from Plato’s Symposium, or, more generally speaking, sexual; and those who, on the contrary, seek to destroy and kill, falling under the name aggressive or destructive. Thus, in the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, Freud saw the entire history of the human race condensed. And when Einstein, in the face of the unbridled violence of National Fascism and the looming danger of world war, asked Freud if it was possible to control the mental evolution of people so that they would become able to resist the psychoses of destruction and hatred, Freud replied that there was no hope

to completely suppress the aggressive tendency, but one can only try to dominate it by preventing it from finding expression in war. “The ideal state,” Freud wrote, “would naturally be a human community that would subject its own impulsive life to the dictatorship of reason. Nothing else could bring about such perfect and such lasting unity between people, even in the absence of emotional ties between them. But, apparently, this is a utopian hope.” It is truly utopian and, moreover, absurd, if we adhere to Freud's point of view. What is a certain “mind” and where can it come from if only two instinctive forces exist and operate in a person - Eros and Thanatos? The conflict between love and hate, according to Freud, will have to last forever, as he already said in the 5th century BC. e. Empedocles from Agrigentum.

5. Psychoanalytic revolution

In the forty years since his death, that aspect of Freud's teaching which he considered essential to the life of the individual and the community, the presence and action of the Super-Ego and the defense which, inspired by it, the Ego must put up against the impulses that fight it, has gradually disappeared.

living in the unconscious. This happened because the Super-Ego sees the organization of modern civilization in its worst aspects, primarily in its ability to suppress the desires of the individual, and the Ego is an artificial product of this society, a means or instrument capable of preserving it. The dualism between the instinctive unconscious, on the one hand, and I and SuperEgo - on the other, in which Freud always believed and which in the last phase became a dualism between beneficial and harmful instincts, in modern critical literature it has turned into a dualism between an instinct that is always beneficial and brings happiness and freedom and a civilized society that has difficulty pacifying it and suppresses. Adorno reproached Freud for being a supporter of the bourgeois condemnation of instinct and inconsistently oscillating between the denial of the renunciation of instinct as repression, contrary to reality, and the exaltation of this renunciation as sublimation, which is the driving force of culture (Minima Moralia, 1951). In contrast to Freud's dualism, Marcuse praised "the power of the unifying and satisfying Eros, shackled and exhausted by a sick civilization," and argued that a free Eros does not interfere with civilized relations, but "only rejects the over-repressive organization of human relations in a society dominated by

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There is a principle that is the negation of the pleasure principle" (Eros and Civilization, 1955). These ideas were repeated and disseminated by authors of all calibers and tendencies, who made them into an ideology that dominates large sections of modern society. Norman O. Brown in the famous book “Life versus Death. The psychoanalytic meaning of history" (1959) expressed in the most vivid form the main position of the "psychoanalytic revolution", which is a consequence of these ideas. “If we believe with Freud in the immortal power of our repressed desires, changing reality may be the only reasonable answer I to the contradiction between this activity and the principle of pleasure, which reigns unlimitedly in Es.” Psychoanalysis must become a project for the change of human civilization, a project that must restore a life of unlimited pleasure, play, enjoyment outside and against work, social order and the discipline of the organizing mind. I must ally with Es against society, which is protected by SuperEgo. This is Brown's main point. But, of course, Freud could not accept it. How can I to ally with Es and fight the Super-Ego without being reduced to the level of Es and without ceasing to be the Self?

The image of death has remained attractive to culture and art for centuries. Many characters come from antiquity, and among them is the ancient Greek god Thanatos, who was depicted as a winged youth in a hood, with an extinguished torch in his hand. He personified the extinction of life.

What is thanatos?

In a general sense, thanatos is the desire for death on an instinctive level and its personification. The term comes from the name of the ancient deity, also known as Fanatos, Tanat and Fanat, whose cult existed in Sparta for many centuries. From the ancient Greek language his name is translated as “death” (thanatos). The image was reflected not only in mythology, but also in art, psychology and psychoanalysis. The concept has several meanings.

Thanatos in philosophy

From a philosophical point of view, thanatos is an attraction to self-destruction, decay and disintegration. Together with Life, Eros, the concept is an integral part of being. No matter how a person interprets his death and imagines it, he always thinks only about how to prolong life and improve it. Philosophical reflections on the topic of death have lasted for centuries. She is a constant object of human thought. Increased attention to the issue was noticed in several time periods:

in the era of Freemasonry;
in the times of Fedorov and Dostoevsky, when spiritualist discussions were held;
in the Silver Age (emigrant journalism).

In Russian philosophy, this problem is analyzed by the interdisciplinary movement thanatology. Since the 1990s, the Association of Thanatologists has published the almanac “Figures of Thanatos” in St. Petersburg. The issues of the publication are as follows:

symbols of death;
images in art;
suicide;
materials of international conferences, etc.

Thanatos in psychology

In the twentieth century, the philosophical ideas of Schopenhauer and biological theory Weisman allowed us to form an image of death and some of its forces. Prominent psychoanalysts tried to answer the question of what thanatos is in psychology: E. Weiss, P. Federn, M. Klein, and others. The concept and definition of the term were introduced by the Austrian psychiatrist Wilheim Stekel. The struggle between living and mortal, aggression and destruction is fundamental. It is the basis of human existence and mental activity. These two opposing phenomena are dual and in psychology bear the names of the Greek gods.

Eros and Thanatos according to Freud

The famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud contrasted two drives, instincts - life and death. The will to the first is expressed by Eros - the instinct of self-preservation and sexuality. Thanatos, according to Freud, is just as strong and functions on the basis of libidinal energy. It can be of two types:

Directed towards people and various items, and then it takes the form of destructive actions, for example, vandalism, sadism, etc.
Directed towards yourself. This instinct is expressed in suicide attempts.

In his work “The Ego and the Id” (1923), Freud emphasized that in the psyche there is a constant struggle between two drives. Thanatos and Eros oppose each other, and between these two instincts is the human “I”. Eros is a troublemaker and is subject to the pleasure principle. And “mortal” instincts strive for peace and drag the individual along with them.

Thanatos - mythology

IN Greek myths people tried to give answers to exciting questions, to comprehend existence. So the “enemy” of Eros was a creature of darkness. The goddess of the night, the mother of Thanatos, bore the name Nyukta (“night”) and personified the darkness that comes with sunset. From the god of eternal darkness, Erebus, Nyukta gave birth to sons and daughters. Among them was the God of Death. He appeared in the tales of Hercules (under the name Tanat) and Sisyphus. It is mentioned in Hesiod's Theogony, in Homer's Iliad and other ancient legends. God had his own temple in Sparta, and his face was usually depicted on grave urns.

Who is Thanatos?

In ancient Greek art, the god Thanatos appeared in different forms, but all of them are attractive considering what the character represents. Typically it is depicted as:

a young man with wings behind his back;
in a black robe;
holds in his hands an extinguished torch and a sword.

His habitat is Tartarus and the young man is located next to the throne of Hades. The harbinger of the end appears to people at the very moment when the life span measured by the goddesses of fate ends. The messenger of Hades cuts off a tuft of hair from the head of the “doomed” and takes his soul to the kingdom of the dead. The ancient Greeks believed that Thanat sometimes gives a second chance at life.

Thanatos and Hypnos

According to legend, Thanatos, the god of death, had a twin brother Hypnos, and their images are inseparable. In some arts and crafts they can be seen as a white and a black boy. According to legend, Hypnos always accompanied Death and carried sleep on his wings. Calm, supportive of everyone, Thanatos’s brother was strikingly different from him in character. If Death was hated by both people and gods, Hypnos was treated with cordiality. The muses especially loved him. The sons of Nyukta and Erebus carried different values for people, but the importance of each cannot be diminished.

Sigmund Freud once said: “The goal of all life is death.” According to the judgments of the great psychoanalyst, the attraction to death and destruction is a normal phenomenon. How else can regular military conflicts be explained? Thanks to Eros - the instinct of life, culture and the general standard of living develop. People interact with each other, unite into groups: family, community, state. But the tendency to aggression, cruelty and destruction sooner or later makes itself felt. Then another instinct turns on, Thanatos. You can't joke with death, but you shouldn't forget about it either.

At the turn of the century, literature and society in both Russia and Europe were obsessed with the study of man as a social animal. The women's question, the institution of marriage and the concept of romantic love, questioned by the nihilists, all forced literature to formulate its attitude towards the “sexual question”. Ten years before the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams - Freud's first monograph, which popularized the ideas of psychoanalysis - Russian literature explores certain animal, demonic or psychic forces that control a person, pushing him to the frenzy of passion and unbridled violence. These forces, which Freud would later call the “love drive” and the “death drive,” are described by writers from a moralistic point of view (like Tolstoy), glorified (like Artsybashev), explored as a social phenomenon (like Kuprin) or poeticized (like Bunin). .

Devil
Leo Tolstoy 1890
"The Devil" anticipates "Resurrection", but - perhaps due to its relatively small volume - is much more intense; This is a work typical of the late Tolstoy about the destructiveness of carnal love. The main character, the nobleman Irtenev (note the similarity with the surname Irtenev - this is the name of the autobiographical hero from the trilogy “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth”), is good for everyone, except for his constant craving for women: he justifies himself by saying that this is “necessary for health.” " Is this really necessary for health? Tolstoy immediately explains: the married peasant woman whom Irtenev makes his constant mistress awakens erotic madness in him; family, child, household - everything goes to hell. The story has two versions of the ending, written in remarkably similar terms: in one, the exhausted Irtenev commits suicide, in the other he kills ex-lover and drinks himself to death.
Kreutzer Sonata
Leo Tolstoy 1890
The main statement of the late Tolstoy about sexual morality. The hero of the story, Vasily Pozdnyshev, talks about the furious jealousy that forced him to kill his wife, and shares his thoughts about the dangers of sexual desire, which turns a person into an animal, and about marriage as the sanctification of debauchery. Immediately after writing, The Kreutzer Sonata caused a scandal and was almost banned from publication in Russia; in a more puritanical America it was immediately banned, and future President Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy a pervert. In turn, Chekhov, who idolized Tolstoy, accused him of ignorance because of the writer’s opinions about sex.
Father Sergius
Leo Tolstoy 1898
Unexpectedly for everyone, Prince Kasatsky breaks off his engagement with his maid of honor and goes to the monastery: he learned that his bride was the mistress of Nicholas I. Having adopted the name Sergius, Kasatsky becomes a hieromonk, and then a recluse and healer. He struggles diligently with temptations (including cutting off his finger so as not to be seduced by a woman), but sin turns out to be stronger. Perhaps more important than the theme of carnal temptation here is the theme of pride and arrogance, which does not allow Father Sergius to be saved in the way he intended, and hinders true holiness. Tolstoy's story is a decisive statement in favor of almost unattainable simplicity and naturalness, and the attitude towards sin here, unlike many of his other texts, is ambivalent.
Resurrection
Leo Tolstoy 1899
Tolstoy's return to large prose form was unexpected by his contemporaries. The story of a juror who, at the trial, recognized in the accused prostitute the girl he had once seduced and set out to save her and marry her, made a huge impression on Tolstoy: also because he also happened to be a seducer; The surname of the main character - Nekhlyudov - is used in other autobiographical texts by Tolstoy. Nekhlyudov is ready to follow the path of repentance to the end - however, his former victim Katyusha Maslova frees him from this. The novel ends with Nekhlyudov’s reflections on the evil that he had to face over several months, and direct evangelical didactics: the entire preceding text of the novel is a kind of look back before turning to the absolute and indisputable truth.
After the ball
Leo Tolstoy 1903
One of the pivotal texts of Russian literature is built on the sharp contrast between the elements of love and the elements of death, eros and thanatos. Ivan Vasilyevich is in love with Varenka, the colonel’s daughter, and admires the colonel himself - loving father and seemingly modest and kind person. On the night after the ball at which Varenka shone, Ivan Vasilyevich goes to her house and sees his beloved’s father commanding the execution of a fugitive Tatar soldier, turning his body into a bloody piece of meat. The focus of physicality is transferred here from love (Varenka for Ivan Vasilyevich is incorporeal, ideal) to cruel violence, from pleasure to punishment. The spectacle kills love in the hero; at the same time, he cannot unravel the reason that makes many people maim and kill their comrade. Actively using the technique of defamiliarization, even meaninglessness of what is happening, Tolstoy returns to the idea of “the force that moves nations” from “War and Peace” and polemicizes with his own thoughts about historical necessity.
Duel
Alexander Kuprin 1905
Eros in “The Duel” is replaced by erotic vulgarity: the life of a good-looking person and awkward officer - second lieutenant Romashov - is upset because of trifles, the revenge of a rejected lover, the atmosphere of officer gossip, and dreary drunkenness; all this looks pitiful against the background of the soldiers’ hardships - no less routine, but even more hopeless. The last classic dueling text of Russian literature, “The Duel” is distinguished by a keen sense of the uselessness and conventionality of human rituals, which seem to be supposed to raise the action to a high tragedy, but this does not happen: the agreed conditions of the duel are violated, and the text ends with a clerical protocol on the murder.
Sanin
Mikhail Artsybashev 1907
The hero of the most scandalous Russian novel of the early 20th century differs sharply from Tolstoy’s righteous men and Kuprin’s wretches - Vladimir Sanin is life-loving, pragmatic in his own way (he refuses a duel, slaps the offender in the face and thereby drives him to suicide) and preaches indecent morality: you cannot be ashamed of your body and his motives, one cannot be afraid to feel; to kill one’s desires means to kill oneself. The Dionysian preaching of pleasure, combined with the Nietzschean desire to push someone who is falling, incestuous allusions and very daring love scenes for their time - all this was too much for public opinion, and Artsybashev was accused of producing pornography. On young people, however, “Sanin” had a huge influence, comparable to the effect of the novel “What is to be done?” forty-four years earlier.
At the last line
Mikhail Artsybashev 1911
One of the most striking and painful works of Russian prose of the early 20th century, “At the Last Line” continues many of the motifs of “Sanin”, especially with regard to eroticism, but the coarsened philosophy of the meaning of life and suicide, copied from Dostoevsky, comes to the fore here. Almost all the heroes of this novel go beyond the “last line”, committing suicide one after another. Although the novel is written very unevenly, it well conveys the suffocating social atmosphere of the early 1910s: the collapse of the old, traditional, estate culture of the 19th century, which allowed into itself the nihilism that denied it. “At the Last Line” is a vulgarized, but therefore prominent example of “decadence” that has descended into mass literature.
Pit
Alexander Kuprin 1915
The last decades of the Russian Empire were the heyday of prostitution and discussions about it. Entering territory that literature had previously been shyly silent about, and using, in essence, the techniques of the natural school, Kuprin shows the life of a brothel in the 1910s: sex without love, squabbles, exploitation, syphilis, death. Few contemporary critics appreciated Kuprin's courage; Readers of both sexes were shocked by the story - at the same time they read it voraciously, like a revelation.
Easy breath
Ivan Bunin 1916
Bunin’s textbook story about the high school student Olya Meshcherskaya, who had “easy breathing” - a certain inexplicable essence of female beauty and charm - gave rise to many interpretations: Olya’s impossible courage, her confession of the loss of innocence, which absolutely cannot be called a fall, her death at the hands of an officer overwhelmed jealous rage, the fanatical service of a classy lady to the memory of a murdered high school student - all this puzzled readers, whom Bunin forced to admire what is customary to condemn, and explained that this admiration is the truth. However, all moral considerations give way to the idea of “easy breathing”, which is possessed not only by Olya Meshcherskaya, but also by this entire story.
Mitya's love
Ivan Bunin 1924
Bunin’s story echoes Tolstoy’s “The Devil” in many motifs, but the precision of Tolstoy’s moralism is rejected here in favor of the metaphysics of love’s longing: Bunin describes a feeling that is frightening in its enormity, a feeling that the main character of the story, student Mitya, is not able to cope with. Bunin does not share romantic love and physical passion (the reproach of the heroine of the story Katya: “You love only my body, not my soul!” is absolutely unfair), demonstrates that this relationship can be disastrous, but, unlike Tolstoy, he is not horrified by it , but gets drunk. “Mitya’s Love,” written in exile, like “Dark Alleys,” lies far away from what is happening with the theme of sex in Soviet literature of Bunin’s time—having conserved his style, he penetrates deeper and deeper into the problematics of the connection between eroticism and death.

I am posting some points from the lecture “About Thanatos” (read for activists of the “Essence of Time” and “Cultural Front” in Perm on January 27, 2013).

First, theses:
1) The doctrine of the death instinct turns psychoanalysis into a philosophy of the soul. Freud rejects the “omnisexuality” of psychoanalysis and describes the life of the soul, the history of society and culture as the eternal battle of love and death – Eros and Thanatos. The very concept of “libido” within the framework of this theory does not mean sexual attraction, but a mental force that unites people - love in the broadest and most humanistic sense.
2) Developing this theory, Sigmund Freud goes from a tragic focus on death and reflections on our abandonment in life as a kind of “dungeon” - to the singing of love. Freud comes to the conclusion: love conquers death.
3) Implicitly, the controversy surrounding the Thanatos theory takes us back to the ancient debate about the nature of evil. Freud's main opponent, Konrad Lorenz, takes a “monistic position” and denies evil to exist, while Freud takes a dualistic position, in which evil turns out to be one of the principles of existence.
4) Erich Fromm rethinks the concept of Thanatos. He rejects the doctrine of two instincts and develops the doctrine of passions - exclusively human inclinations. In the soul of man, in his history and culture, regressive and progressive passions struggle, in extreme form- passion for life and passion for death. These passions are a person’s response to the general existential situation: a person finds himself in the world as isolated, lonely, mortal, set apart from the world by his rationality. He can become himself either through love and creation, or through denial and destruction. Thus, we can talk about Thanatos not as an instinct, but as a destructive passion characteristic of a person.
5) The predecessor of the psychoanalytic theory of destructiveness, Sabina Spielrein, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and the psychoanalytic philosopher Erich Fromm, ultimately agree that destructiveness is a deep desire to return to some kind of primordial matter, which in mental life appears as the “sea” or mythical “ foremother." This is a craving to return to the darkness beyond space and time, to the world of pre-life.
6) Destructive passion is associated with sexual perversions and certain mental deviations - with narcissism, autism, sadism, masochism, “anal libido”, incestuous attraction, necrophilia.
7) Thanatos makes itself known in culture through some mythological images and cults (including mythologies and cults of the mother goddess), but makes itself known in the culture of modern and contemporary times. Sabina Spielrein read Nietzsche's texts as a kind of confession about destructive experience and a sermon on the value of this experience. “Necrophilic” passion is expressed in various motifs of death, fetishization of objects of funeral ritual, in images of corpses and dismembered bodies, as well as in images of the main substitute for dead matter - excrement.

The following text is intended for those who are interested in details and who are willing to spend time discussing psychoanalytic theories of destructiveness.

The common term “Thanatos” (from the name of one of the gods of death in ancient mythology) refers to Sigmund Freud’s teaching on the dualism of primary drives. Human behavior is governed by two primary instincts - the instinct of life and the instinct of death. Sometimes they are called Eros (Freud himself readily used this term) and Thanatos (this concept is not found in Freud’s texts, but it already exists in the works of Wilhelm Stekel, Freud’s student, who wrote about Thanatos several years before the founder of psychoanalysis formulated his dualistic theory). Strictly speaking, the doctrine of the two drives does not correlate well with the classical version of Freudianism and does not receive serious development in psychoanalytic theory after Freud. Freud himself never abandoned it and even wrote with increasing conviction about the death instinct.

Freudianism and the theme of destructiveness

The main contribution of the Austrian scientist to the development of human sciences is the creation depth psychology. Freud considered the inner world of man, located outside of consciousness. The subject of psychoanalysis was the deep layers of the psyche that preserve the memory of the early history of the individual, containing the answer to the question: “Why am I like this?” Freud tried to comprehend the structure of the “soul,” a mental apparatus in which consciousness constitutes only the most superficial layer. He is looking for an answer to the question: what is “I” and what is in me besides “I”? It sometimes penetrates into those fragments of memory that indicate a period preceding the stages of personality formation.

The theory of the death drive, created in 1920, became the transition to the most in-depth consideration of the nature of the “soul”. One could even say that during this period Freud raised questions that worried St. Augustine - questions not only about the structure, but also about the origin of the soul.

But first, about Freudianism before the theory of the “death drive.” Freud believes that all the most powerful unconscious drives are sexual in nature. The thinker calls the energy of such drives “libido.” Freud originally thought dualistic, dividing and contrasting sexual desires(libidinal) and “I” drives (directed towards self-preservation). The former are governed by the “pleasure principle,” the latter by the “reality principle.” A certain “censorship” operates in the mental apparatus, expelling ideas and drives that contradict the drives of the “I” or the “principle of reality.” A significant part of mental illness is associated with a conflict between libido and “I”. Treatment of such diseases appears as a kind of educational practice – it is necessary to help the patient’s consciousness master unconscious ideas. Classical psychoanalysis is a child of educational culture.

This ocean of the unconscious is largely formed in the first years of an individual's life. The child experiences pleasures associated with different areas of his body. Before a normal “genital libido” is formed, its development goes through pregenital phases (anal and oral). The most important concepts of classical Freudianism are “narcissism” (libido directed towards the “I”) and the “Oedipus complex”. The child initially associates pleasures with the image of the mother and receives prohibitions from the father; this collision is overcome during the normal development of the individual, but it is basic for the formation of libido: in the situation of the “Oedipus complex,” the individual learns to love and accept prohibitions, learns to overcome conflicts, and reconcile the “principle of pleasure” with the “principle of reality.” Pathological development is associated with regression or delay in the “pregenital phases”, in the collisions of the “Oedipus complex”, in the shell of “narcissism”. Many are repulsed by the “omnisexuality” of Freudianism and, in particular, by the theory of childhood sexuality. Meanwhile, Freud, probably exaggerating the role of libido, discovered the most important layer of mental experiences that are obviously associated with neurotic states. What this connection is will be clarified in the course of professional discussions, but denying the significance of sexual development factors in the formation of mental pathologies is apparently unconstructive.

We will see that Freud gradually leaves the frame of “omnisexuality,” but this happens rather slowly. We can look at three sources for the concept that interests us.

(1) In 1911, Wilhelm Stekel’s voluminous work “The Language of Dreams” was published. Freud's student attempts to develop techniques for dream interpretation by reviewing and classifying the basic dream symbols. Stekel drew attention to the variety of symbols of a mortal nature that appear in dreams, signs that represent ideas about death. In particular, he attributed the images to such symbols of death closed premises, cramped rooms, actions associated with distance in space (going into the distance, leaving the room, etc.). The researcher is trying to substantiate the concept of bipolarity of mental ideas, according to which ideas exist only in antithetical connections with opposite ideas. Sexual desires, according to Stekel, must coexist with obsessive ideas about death. The very idea of “bipolarity” of ideas is closer in spirit to the emerging structuralism and today would rather be called “binary.” Signs of language within the framework of structural semiotics can fulfill their function of being signs only if they are opposed to some other signs (conditional example: for the concept of “father” to function, there must also be the concept of “mother” - otherwise both father and mother will merge , say, in the concept of “parent”).

(2) In 1912, Sabina Spielrein’s article “Destruction as the Cause of Formation” was published. Freud himself subsequently referred to this particular work, noting, however, that it remained incomprehensible to him, but many of his new ideas, as it seemed to Freud himself, were already heard here. Sabina Nikolaevna Spielrein (1885 - 1942) was born in Rostov-on-Don in a rich Jewish family. After graduating from high school, due to obvious signs of a mental disorder, she was sent to Europe for treatment; in a clinic in Zurich she becomes a patient of Carl Gustav Jung, and subsequently his student. The name Sabina Spielrein is often remembered in the context of her scandalous relationship with the then aspiring analyst Jung, but what is interesting is the possible intellectual influence that communication with this extraordinary woman had on Jung. Looking at her article, we will see that it contains ideas close to the analytical psychology that Jung later created. By the way, we note that, in our opinion, Freud’s reference to Spielrein’s article “Destruction as the Cause of Formation” looks rather strange: the theory developed by Freud is very far, at first glance, from the original concept of Sabina Spielrein.

So, Spielrein's research. Turning to biological facts, we see that the sexual act is associated with death: in primitive creatures the moment of reproduction and death coincides, in some animals the birth of offspring means the death of the individual. In humans, the mortal nature of sex is not obvious, but in human reproduction there is also the death of germ cells during their union. " It would be incredible that an individual would not be aware of these processes of destruction and restructuring in his body, at least in the corresponding feelings».

Psychoanalysis teaches about the libidinal nature of unconscious drives. Sabina Spielrein accepts this thesis, but discovers a different content in the libido: sex and death are inseparable in the unconscious, and together they represent a kind of call of the race (the urge for destruction in reproduction in the name of procreation). In various unconscious ideas, this sphere of the unconscious itself often appears in the images of the sea (in which a person dissolves) or a mother (the “Oedipal” understanding of the mother here moves towards a universal mythological one, the mother personifies the race). " The picture of the sea (“mother”) is at the same time a picture of the depth of the unconscious, which lives simultaneously in the present, past and future time, for which all places merge with each other (at the place of origin) and for which opposites mean the same thing. Each of its differentiated representations wants to dissolve in this foremother (the unconscious), i.e. it wants to transform into an undifferentiated state».

Thus, sexually destructive attraction is an attraction to the boundless generic element, the undivided space-time of origin. Accordingly, in a person, in addition to the individual psyche, there lives a generic psyche. On the basis of this scheme, the concept of severe mental disorders is built: hysteria is the hypertrophy of the “I”, schizophrenia is the rebellion of the “We”. Analysis of a specific schizophrenic case shows how “We” (sometimes turning into “They”) attack the personality and gradually take over it. A characteristic mood in schizophrenia is: “I am a stranger to myself,” which means: “they” have taken over the personality. According to Spielrein, schizophrenia is a kind of “wealth” of mental life.

The ancestral psyche contains the memory of peoples - that which is reflected in mythological ideas. Generally, " the generic Soul wants to assimilate the modern I-soul, while I, and every particle of it, has a desire for self-preservation in its present form" But the I also has a “longing for a return to the source”; it is looking for the most painless forms of dissolution in the generic beginning. Thus, Spielrein does not at all revise the classical dualism of the libidinal unconscious and the “I” with its instinct for self-preservation. The libido simply becomes the carrier of an ambivalent sexually destructive drive. " In neurosis, the component of destruction outweighs and is expressed in all symptoms of resistance to life and natural fate" In passing, Spielrein notes that self-destruction can be redirected, i.e. replaced by destruction of the victim.

Sabine Spielrein's article devotes significant space to the psychoanalytic analysis of myths and literary works. The creative act itself is interpreted as communion with the ancestral soul (“sea,” mother) and the embodiment in works of contents extracted from the ancestral psyche. The work of Friedrich Nietzsche is especially detailed and talentedly analyzed - mainly based on the material of the book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. It is proved that the organizing force for all Nietzschean images is the desire to return to the Mother, the sea, and the merciless generic principle. The desire to merge with the ancestral soul, with the ocean of undivided sexually destructive ideas, turns into a passion for knowledge in Nietzsche's philosophy. In fact, under the guise of knowing the truth, here comes the experience of being in the “mother,” in the dark element of the unconscious. Nietzsche's idea of the superman is a demand for renewal through self-destruction. Nietzsche's entire philosophy appears as the embodiment of “destruction-becoming”.

(3) Freud could not help but notice new trends in psychoanalysis and could not ignore the very need to analyze the destructive principle. In fact, the first reflections on destructiveness appear already in his work “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905) and are repeated in many respects in one of the generalizing theoretical works “Inclinations and Their Fate” (1915). In these works, the nature of the relationship between libido and aggression is not yet fully clarified: Freud is ready to combine them (to follow the path of Spielrein), but he also admits the idea that aggression may have an autonomous source. For the most part, as Freud believed during this period, aggressiveness is rooted in the instincts of the “I”.

In 1915, Freud gave a talk entitled “We and Death.” The content of the report does not have any particular conceptual value; the author himself claims that here he emphasizes some of the ideas presented in the book “Totem and Taboo” (1913). Freud characterizes our unconscious ideas about death, which can be summarized in two theses: deep down we do not know about our mortality (we do not believe in our own death) and at the same time we wish death for others (to achieve our own goals). Such ideas were characteristic of primitive man - they are preserved in the sphere of the unconscious. The significance of this report is that it demonstrates Freud's growing interest in this topic. It is likely that this interest was awakened by the First World War. From this moment you can count completely new stage history of Freudianism. Psychoanalysis (as the first version of depth psychology) initially solved problems that went beyond the boundaries of private science - it rediscovered man, comprehended the unknown in the mental world. At some point, this knowledge of the hidden in man had to leave the boundaries of empiricism and boldly move towards the formulation of far-reaching hypotheses.

"Beyond the Pleasure Principle"

We see that the topic of destructiveness interested Freud for a long time, that it was raised by his followers. And so, in 1920, Freud created one of the most complex and intricate texts in his work - the essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”

Freud recalls the role the pleasure principle plays in the theory of psychoanalysis and suggests viewing pleasure as a decrease in mental arousal, and displeasure as a high degree of arousal. Achieving pleasure means bringing the mental system into balance with a minimum of excitement. However, it turns out that there is something “beyond the pleasure principle.”

Firstly, traumatic dreams (a return to a traumatic episode in a dream) do not at all correspond to the rule of wish fulfillment, like all other dreams in Freud’s concept. Secondly, during psychoanalytic work, the patient often projects onto the relationship with the doctor those painful situations that once caused neurosis. Why does the patient want to experience suffering again? Freud’s view on the so-called “unfortunate fate” that “haunts” many neurotics is interesting: they constantly reproduce in life the situation that became the root cause of suffering. So, thirdly, the phenomenon of “unfortunate fate”. Another fact analyzed by the author is a children’s game he recorded, during which the child constantly acts out the mother’s departure, apparently not at all desirable for the child. This is fourth. These facts indicate that “beyond the pleasure principle” lies a mysterious principle of repetition.

Having reached an apparent theoretical impasse, Freud stipulates: “ Now comes speculation, often far-reaching, which everyone, depending on his own attitude, can accept or reject" Further, the author tries to speak, as it were, in the language of biology, but in reality, he is already invading the field of philosophy. In fact, he warned the reader about this.

Freud describes a certain ideal organism as a “bubble” susceptible to stimulation. Influences come from both outside and inside. Due to constant irritations from the outside world, the surface changes greatly; at some point it must be so powerfully deformed by these influences that upper layer The “bubble” dies off to a significant extent and turns out to be almost insensitive to influences. It is this layer between the inner and outer spaces that becomes consciousness and the perceptual system. On the surface, above the level of consciousness “burned” by the influence, a protection must be formed that protects against external intrusions. In general, all surface layers seem to protect the internal content. What is happening inside is brought to consciousness (remember, significantly deformed) as pleasure and displeasure. Freud does not say directly here, but implies that the system of consciousness is a hardened crust covering the real, complex inner life.

Trauma is an irritation from the outside that “pierces” the defense and breaks into the inner life. This stormy stream of a “creature” that came from outside must “bind”, master - for this it strives to repeat it. The primary urges emanating from the body also remain unconnected. Repetitions are attempts to master irritations that have already penetrated.

The principle of repetition suggests that mental life strives for peace. The same thing, in essence, is evidenced by a craving for pleasure, if we understand the latter as a decrease in excitement. Freud calls this the “nirvana principle” (nirvana, not Thanatos!).

« Once upon a time, the properties of life were awakened in inanimate matter by some completely unimaginable force influence.<…>The tension that arose then in hitherto inanimate matter sought to be balanced; This is how the first primary urge was given - to return to the inanimate.<…>It is possible that for a long time living matter was created again and again easily died, until the governing external influences changed so much that they forced the surviving substance to ever wider deviations from original image life and to increasingly complex detours to achieve the ultimate goal - death».

The compulsion to live has shaped complex system instincts, many of which serve " in order to provide the organism with its own path to death and to prevent other forms of return to the inorganic, except for the immanent ones" Why an organism should come to death only “in its own way” is not entirely clear from the work. Perhaps (remember the report “We and Death”), the body does not know that it is heading towards death, its direction is not connected with ideas about the final goal of the path. In any case, Freud himself does not give a clear explanation for such strange behavior of the living (which wants to become inanimate, but strives for self-preservation). " All that remains is the body's desire to die in its own way; and these guardians of life[self-preservation instincts] were originally companions of death».

At the same time, the simplest organisms exhibit a desire to merge with their own kind, to unite living matter. This is the instinct opposite to death, the expression of which in humans is the sexual instinct. " The life process of an individual leads to the equalization of chemical stresses, i.e. to death; and at the same time, connection with an individually different living substance increases these tensions, introduces, so to speak, new vital disagreements, which must be eliminated in the future».

Initially, a dualism of the drives “I” and libido was postulated. Now all life aspirations (both sexual and narcissistic - when libido is directed towards the “I”) can be called Eros. He is opposed by the primal urge to death.

Let us try to connect all the provisions of this work. The individual strives for absolute peace, death, resisting all external irritations. Pleasure as the removal of excitement is a manifestation of the death instinct. Life manifests itself through displeasure (“vital disagreements that must be... eliminated”). Repetition appears as a process in which the craving for peace appears only in a more obvious way than in the mechanism of pleasure. By explaining repetition, a model is created that also serves as an explanation for the pleasure principle. Libido, or more precisely Eros, is a force that creates additional tensions that prolong the life process.

It seems that until now no one has paid attention to how the early and late dualistic theories interact in the text under consideration. The dualism of the instincts “I” and sexual drives is not completely removed. Instincts for self-preservation are declared “companions of death.” In the text itself, Freud repeatedly uses the concepts “death instincts” and “ego urges” as synonyms. Here, implicitly, a metaphysical interpretation of the “I” is given. Imprisoned in a kind of prison of “life”, attacked from within and without, the Self desires one thing – “nirvana”. It does not want to receive death from the outside world, it avoids all its influences, it is tormented by the force that forced it to life, which created this world of irritations. I am death, truly nothing, which has become something, but wants to turn back into nothing. It is zero and emptiness. I am a bottomless opening into nothingness, into eternal peace.

Perhaps it was the author’s self-observations (which he often used in his works, usually passing them off as incidents with acquaintances) that gave rise to this gloomy concept. Internal focus on death forced Freud to look for an attraction to nirvana in the psychic apparatus, which contradicted everything that psychoanalysis knew before - the grandiose world created by sexual attraction. At the same time, this interpretation of “I” is by no means the only one in the work. The idea of a close connection between the “I” and the “principle of nirvana” remained in the subtext.

Development of the theory

In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud develops a new apparatus for describing psychic reality. I will not comment on this text in detail, but I will point out two points. Firstly, the author clearly seeks to introduce new terminology, to move from the opposition of “consciousness - unconscious” to the scheme “I - It - Super-Ego”. This already turns psychoanalysis into a new philosophy of the soul. Secondly, here Freud decisively separates the “I” from the death instinct.

Now the true “home” of both primary instincts turns out to be “It”; they penetrate into the “I” and “Super-Ego”. Two instincts become the building material for the entire mental apparatus, which, however, is built under the influence of the external world - according to the design, so to speak, of an impregnable fortress that protects the main inhabitants with the help of secondary systems (such as perception, consciousness). The article under consideration is an unfolding tragedy of the “I”, which grows and strengthens from the contradictions between “It” and the outside world. “I” tries to subjugate “It” by a variety of means, either by repressing too dangerous desires, or by identifying itself with the object of desire (as if turning to “It”: “Love me”). "I" suffers from powerful energies Eros and the death instinct, from the demandingness of the “Super-Ego” (speaking in the voice of the father: “You must... You have no right... You don’t dare... You have responsibilities..."). Thus, Freud retains some of the tragedy and abandonment of the “I”, outlined in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” but now clearly frees the “I” from the role of the source of death. “I” is forced to live in the world of Eros-Death dualism, reconciling and combining them with each other, so that none of these principles destroys the entire psychic world from within.

What were presented as bold hypotheses, over time, become basic explanatory schemes for Freud - first of all, models that explain violence and destructiveness. IN " Economic problem masochism" (1924) Freud describes how the libido directs the death drive outward, to foreign objects. The task of the libido is to fight death; It is under the influence of libido that the death instinct turns into external aggression. Subsequently, Freud always talks about the interaction of primary instincts; it is their combination that explains the diversity of mental life and behavior.

In the work “Cultural Discontent” (1930), Eros is interpreted as a universal force that goes far beyond sexual desires; it “creates one out of many.” Eros appears as love in the fullness of this concept. The opposite instinct is realized as aggression, demanding satisfaction. Love and death appear as two universal drives - to unite living matter and to destroy associations. Of course, in reality, love and death are fused and appear in confused combinations. The death instinct itself is accessible to observation only in its interactions with Eros (sadism, masochism). Often he actually serves the “I”, since he actively manifests himself in the realization of narcissistic drives. Thus, there is a principle in man that prevents us from loving each other. It is to suppress this principle, to overcome it that culture serves, but enmity and aggression act as eternal attributes of man. They manifest themselves in national or class hatred. Communist ideas about the eradication of private property, according to Freud, do not lead to peace and love, since aggression is rooted not in external circumstances, but in human nature itself.

Eros and death in their interaction created culture: “ We have the idea that culture is a process that has taken over humanity - we are still under the spell of this idea. This process is in the service of Eros, who wants to gather first individuals, then families, tribes, peoples, nations into one large whole, into humanity. Why this should happen, we do not know; such is the work of Eros. The human masses must be libidinally connected; Necessity alone, the benefits of joint labor alone would not have deterred them. This cultural program is opposed by the natural instinct of aggressiveness, the hostility of one to all and of all to each. The aggressive drive is the descendant and main representative of the death instinct, which we discovered next to Eros and shares with him power over the world. Now the meaning of cultural development becomes clearer. It should demonstrate to us, using the example of humanity, the struggle between Eros and Death, the instinct of life and the instinct of destructiveness" Pay attention to the context in which the term “libido” is used here: “The human masses must be libidinally connected...”

We see how the death instinct, interpreted as the very essence of the “I” in 1920, turns a decade later into negative force history and culture, giving rise to hatred between individuals, nations, classes. At the heart of this enmity is a huge will to destroy life (now not only your own, but life in general). An equally universal force is love—the will to unite all people.

In 1932, Freud wrote the essay “Is War Inevitable? (Response to Albert Einstein)." Here the thinker joins the pan-European discussion about the causes of the war. He, as you might guess, again expounds (in popular form) his theory of the dualism of primary drives: Eros, aimed at uniting and preserving, is opposed by destructive drives, whose goal is to destroy and kill. These drives are difficult to isolate, and even more than that, the death drive only becomes a destructive drive when it turns outward, toward objects, which happens through “ special bodies" However, it is precisely this death instinct that determines the “inevitability of war.” However, we can direct Eros against war, whose task is to contain and conquer death. Thus, in this text, Freud does not just talk about the operation of the law of dualism, but about the possibilities of our freedom within the limits of this dualism, about our power to use Eros vs Thanatos.

Contexts

Freud's main opponent was the biologist Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of ethology. The book “Aggression (the so-called evil)” proves that the aggressive instinct is by no means destructive, it is placed by nature at the service of life. From a biological standpoint, there is not and cannot be any death instinct. Everything that is created by the Great Designers (variability and selection) is good. Just as Freud awkwardly and not entirely correctly enters the field of biology, so Lorenz reveals in places superficiality and incompetence in matters of psychology. Erich Fromm was convinced that Lorenz, arguing with Freud, did not even bother to read the latter’s works and was familiar with them from retellings. I’ll add on my own: if Lorenz had read Freud’s texts, he would probably have attacked them with much harsher criticism.

In the title of his book (“so-called evil”), Konrad Lorenz poses a fundamentally important problem about the relationship of manifestations of aggression to the moral and ethical category of “evil.” In fact, the theories of the fathers of psychoanalysis and ethology are based on different concepts of evil as such. We are talking about the implicit reproduction of metaphysical concepts of good and evil, previously stated in religious teachings. Since such metaphysical concepts are universal, i.e. are constantly reproduced in the same spectrum of possibilities, we have the right to compare theories of destructiveness with theories of evil in religious ontologies.

In fact, the question of the nature of evil is resolved by Western thought in two paradigms - monistic and dualistic. Freud's desire for dualism and Lorenz's original inclination towards monistic explanations allows us to hypothesize that the theories of destructiveness that emerged in the 20th century reproduce in general terms more ancient paradigms. The debate about the nature of evil in European thought proceeded within the framework of the polemic between Christian doctrine and Gnostic teachings (especially in the era of late antiquity and early Middle Ages). This dispute gave shape to the Christian Theodicy (the concept of the justification of God), i.e. answer to the question: why does God allow evil?

Lorenz, praising the goodness of the Great Designers and the infallibility of evolution, returns us to the Christian Theodicy. There is no evil. Aggression is “the so-called evil.” Man, by his own will, deviates from world harmony, and Lorenz’s task is to find ways to overcome this deviation. THERE IS NO Evil.

Sigmund Freud, on the contrary, thinks in the paradigm of dualism; he seems to wander in the tortuous turns of the knowledge of evil. Beyond the Pleasure Principle proposes what may be called a “para-gnostic” concept. The existence of an individual is caused by some alien force. Life imposes its circumstances on the individual, manifested as irritations. Life is alien to the “I”; an unknown force tore it out of its inorganic integrity. The idea of the "I" wanting to return to an inorganic state is clearly close to the Gnostic interpretation of the spiritual "call", while other desires and needs are under the jurisdiction of the lower levels of human nature. In this case, destruction turns out to be not “evil,” but a craving for the authentic.

In subsequent works, Freud finds the opportunity to overcome the gloomy, pessimistic understanding of destructiveness within the framework of dualism. Really, human world appears in the struggle of Eros and death, love and violence. Both forces are primary, in a sense substantial. At the same time, Eros is a blessing; it is he who creates society and culture in the fight against death. Freud interprets evil within the framework of the mobilizing idea of “eternal combat.” The world of people was created by a good beginning, but it was created in the struggle against inorganic matter and attractions to it. Spontaneously sorting through dualistic perspectives, Freud, whose personal life is full of tragedy during this period (he is struggling with fatal disease), chooses the dualism of the fight against substantial evil - different in relation to the civilization of Eros.

During the World War, Freud thought intensely about death, as evidenced by the report “We and Death.” It can be assumed (in the words of Freud, “now comes speculation, often going far”) that the thinker experiences feelings close to what Gnostic philosophers called the “call” and interpreted as the voice of otherness - feelings of abandonment, abandonment, the desire to break out of the circle of existence , some disgust for life. This “call” (in fact, the tragedy of existence, revealed to many thinkers and artists of that era) forces Freud to seriously think through the dualistic concept. Initially, life itself appears as “evil”, hostile, and the instinct of death (“the call” that needs to be explained) is a desire to escape from a hostile life. But the educational orientation of Freud's thought, his humanism and, probably, internal forces force the thinker to change signs in his dualistic theory - to take the side of life against death.

Thanatos (Fanatos, Tanat, Fan; from Greek thanatos - death) - 1) god of death; 2) personification of death; 3) personified designation of the death instinct, the death drive, the instinct and drive for aggression and destruction.

As a general symbolic designation of death, Thanatos has received various reflections in mythology, art and psychology (mainly in psychoanalysis).

The death drive (death instinct) is a concept of psychoanalysis proposed by S. Freud to designate the presence in a living organism of a desire to restore the primary (non-living, inorganic) state. Contrasted with the desire for life. In some cases it is identified with aggressive drive, or mortido energy.

Mortido is a term used in psychoanalysis. Introduced in 1936 by Paul Federn, one of Sigmund Freud's students. The term refers to the energy of withdrawal, disintegration (decay) and opposition to life and development. Subsequently, another student of Freud, Eric Berne, studied this topic. A certain detail of the idea of mortido is the distinction between the death drive as a desire focused on self-destruction (mortido) and a hypothetical destructive instinct of aggression focused on killing others (destrudo). In this context, many people confuse the concept of mortido with destrudo or with thanatos, which is a broader concept that includes both mortido and destrudo.

Activation of mortido is an inhibition of metabolism, hormonal emission and immune activity, leading to a permanent depressive mental status due to an endorphin-enkephalin imbalance in brain neurochemistry. It is assumed that the activation of mortido occurs due to dissatisfaction with basic biological needs(reproduction, programs of social, property self-affirmation, increasing hierarchical status), initially this program gives a signal - instead of the release of endorphins - internal drugs, (morphinomimetic peptides that give a feeling of happiness, cheerfulness, euphoria, self-confidence) there is a release of enkephalins, which act on the mental continuum in exactly the opposite way - they lead to a depressive state, a feeling of melancholy, fear and reluctance to live.

Thanatos is the personification of death, a personified designation of the death instinct, the death drive, the instinct and drive of aggression and destruction. As a general emblematic designation of death, Thanatos has received various reflections in mythology, art and psychology (mainly in psychoanalysis). In psychology of the 20th century, the formation of ideas about the existence of the forces of death was carried out under the influence of relevant philosophical (Schopenhauer and others) and biological (A. Weissman and others) ideas. The most systematic ideas about the existence of the death instinct and the death drive, the instinct and drive of destruction and aggression were developed by a group of prominent psychoanalysts (E. Weiss, M. Klein, P. Federn, Freud, Spielrein, W. Stekel, A. Sterke and many others .). The idea of Thanatos and the concept itself were introduced into psychoanalysis by the Austrian psychoanalyst W. Stekel. The consolidation and dissemination of the concept of Thanatos and giving it categorical status was largely associated with the works of the Austrian psychoanalyst II. Fe-derna. In Freud's writings, the concept of Thanatos was not used, although, according to E. Jones, Freud repeatedly used it orally to designate the death instinct he postulated (the death drive, destruction and aggression), which is opposed by Eros (the instinct of sexuality, life and self-preservation). In psychoanalysis, the struggle between Eros and Thanatos is interpreted as an active, fundamental and determining basis for human life and mental activity. According to Freud, the death instinct functions on the basis of libido energy. Its outward focus (on people and various objects) appears in the form of aggression or destructive actions (for example, sadism, vandalism, etc.), and its inward focus (on the individual who is its carrier) appears in the forms of masochism and other perversions, self-destruction and suicide. The concept of Thanatos is now actively and very often used not only in psychoanalysis and psychology, but also beyond them. Although the problem of the existence of the instinct (drive) of death (towards death) and the complex of issues associated with it is the subject of scientific debate.

Thanatos, Tanat, Fan (ancient Greek Θάνᾰτος, “death”) - in Greek mythology the personification of death, the son of Nikta-night, the twin brother of the god of sleep Hypnos, who always accompanies Thanatos. Lives at the edge of the world. Mentioned in the Iliad (XVI 454). Thanatos has an iron heart and is hated by the gods. The cult of Thanatos existed in Sparta. Thanatos is considered the only one of the ancient Greek gods who does not like gifts.

Thanatos was usually represented as a winged youth with an extinguished torch in his hand.

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Death Attraction

The death drive (death instinct) is a concept of psychoanalysis proposed by S. Freud to denote the presence in a living organism of a desire to restore the primary (non-living, inorganic) state. Contrasted with the desire for life. In some cases it is identified with aggressive attraction.

When a person feels bad, it seems to him that he wants to die. This is hardly true in reality.

The concept of “drive” in psychoanalysis

Freud first used the concept of “drive” in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), when analyzing sexual drives, and later substantiated it in his work “Attractions and Their Fates” (1915). Freud defined this concept as follows: ““Attraction” is perceived by us as a concept that is on the border between the mental and the physical, is a physical representative of irritations that originates inside the body and penetrates the soul, becomes a kind of determinant of the work that needs to be done by the psyche thanks to its connection with the physical."

According to the theory of psychoanalysis, every drive has a goal, an object, a source. The goal of the drive is satisfaction, which is achieved by reducing its tension as much as possible. The object of attraction is the object with the help of which attraction achieves its goal. The source of attraction is the process of excitation in any organ or part of the body, which at the mental level is manifested by attraction itself.

Classical dualistic theory of drives by S. Freud.

Freud developed the theory of drives throughout his entire creative life. The development of his views on this issue is reflected in a number of works and later became known as the first and second dualistic theories of drives. The death drive was formulated and included in the system of drives only in the second dual theory.

The first dualistic theory of drives received a complete formulation in the work “Attractions and Their Fates” (1915). The instinct of self-preservation, aimed at preserving the individual, was opposed to sexual desire, aimed at preserving the species. However, later in the study of the problems of narcissism, masochism and aggressiveness, a number of contradictions arose due to this opposition of drives. Dissatisfaction with the first dualistic theory and the emergence after 1920. Freud's interest in the topic of death forced him to reconsider his views.
Second dualistic theory of drives. The topic of destructiveness and the death drive has been repeatedly raised and discussed in the psychoanalytic environment. The forerunners of Freud's concept of the death drive were Alfred Adler, Sabine Spielrein, Wilhelm Stekel, and Carl Gustav Jung. However, Freud's merit is that he was able to combine these disparate views into one coherent theory. The main provisions of the second dualistic theory were formulated in the work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920). According to the new theory, the death drive (aggression) was opposed to the life drive, which included sexual instincts and self-preservation instincts. “If we accept as a fact that does not admit of exception,” Freud wrote, “that everything living due to internal causes dies and returns to the inorganic, then we can say: the goal of all life is death, and vice versa - the inanimate was before the living. Once upon a time, some completely unknown forces awakened the properties of living things in inanimate matter. The tension that arose then in the previously inanimate matter sought to be balanced: this was the first desire to return to the inanimate.”

Development of the death drive theory

The second dualistic theory was not recognized by most psychoanalysts during Freud's lifetime and was not sufficiently developed in the writings of psychoanalytic theorists after Freud's death.

Among Freud's students, only Alexander, Eithington and Ferenczi accepted the idea of the death drive (Alexander later changed his mind). Subsequently, they were joined by P. Federn, M. Klein, K. Menninger, G. Nunberg and some others.

Paul Federn popularized the term “Thanatos” (the term itself was first used by W. Stekel) and developed the concept of the energy of the death drive (mortido).

Karl Menninger, in his work “War with Oneself” (1938), examined various forms of self-destructive behavior, which he divided into suicide itself, chronic suicide (asceticism, martyrdom, neurasthenia, alcoholism, antisocial behavior, psychosis), local suicide (self-mutilation, simulation, polysurgery, intentional accidents, impotence and frigidity) and organic suicide (somatic diseases). In each of these cases, Menninger saw the presence of a death instinct.

Melanie Klein used the idea of the death drive to explore psychic dynamics. childhood. According to Klein, the feeling of anxiety is caused by the danger that the death drive exposes the body to. M. Klein also discovered the effect of the death drive in various childhood conflicts.

It is curious that the idea of the death drive was well received at the beginning of the century by Russian psychoanalysts (N. Osipov, Vinogradov, Golts). They reacted quite positively to the idea of L.S.’s death drive. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria, who wrote the preface to the Russian translation of Freud’s work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” However, the persecution of psychoanalysis that began in the USSR after 1928 deprived for a long time the prospects for the serious development of psychoanalytic ideas.

Modern concepts of the death drive

Among modern depth psychological concepts that not only rely on S. Freud’s theory of drive, but also make attempts to significantly revise and develop its basic ideas, one can name the “consolidated formal-logical model of the psychoanalytic theory of Libido and Summer drives” by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau and “monistic typhoanalytic concept of the death drive” Ph.D. Yu.R. Vagina.

Libido and Leta K. Schmidt-Hellerau. In the work “The attraction to life and the attraction to death. Libido and Lethe" (1995) Schmidt-Hellerau conducts a fundamental revision of Freudian metapsychology and creates a modern model of the psyche on its basis. From the author’s point of view, attraction is a vector quantity that determines the direction of attraction in only one direction. It can deviate from this direction, but can never be directed back, which excludes the Freudian understanding of the death drive as a “desire to restore a previous state.” In addition, it is impossible to determine whether the drive has a goal, because this means that he has some kind of “memory”. But “memory” exists only at the level of structures that are not drives. According to Schmidt-Hellerau, the death drive is not identical to the destructive drive, which is a complex that includes drives and repressions, elements of drive, perception and motor discharge. She also proposes to abandon the concept of “aggressive drive”, considering aggression as an affective act or affect associated with self-preservation or sexuality.

Schmidt-Hellerau comes to the conclusion about the introvertive nature of the death drive, implying inaction. The death drive gradually helps to repress the active drive to life and thereby contributes to the process of maintaining organismal balance. Based on the passive nature of the death drive, Schmidt-Hellerau proposes to call the energy of this drive Lethe, emphasizing in this mythological image the presence of oblivion (repression) and the drive’s turn inward, towards the unconscious.

Monistic theory of drives (typhoanalysis) Yu. Vagina. The typhoanalytic concept was formulated by Yu.R. Vagin in 2003. From the point of view of Yu. Vagin, the conviction that there is a desire for life in biological organism- fundamental error modern biology, psychology and psychoanalysis. Main feature typhoanalysis is the rejection of the classical dualistic concept of drives of psychoanalysis and reliance on the original monistic concept of drives. According to the provisions of typhoanalysis, a living organism does not have an attraction to life, inorganic matter has a tendency (attraction) to life, which under certain conditions gives rise to life as one of the forms of its existence, life has an internal tendency to return to its original inorganic state, which Freud designated like the death drive, all mental processes and behavior in normal and pathological conditions are motivated by the primary death drive. Typhoanalysis offers a natural scientific and materialistic orientation to the study of the problem of the death drive and, in addition to psychoanalytic methodology, is based on research data in biology, physiology, and biothermodynamics. Yu. Vagin proposed a number of new conceptual solutions to the problems of fear, aggression, and the instinct of self-preservation.

It. The personal experiences of the individual are considered.

The attraction to life is a concept of psychoanalysis, also denoted by the term “Eros”; complex of drives incl.

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Thanatos - god of death in mythology

What is thanatos?

Thanatos in philosophy

From a philosophical point of view, thanatos is an attraction to self-destruction, decay and disintegration. Together with Life, Eros, the concept is an integral part of being. No matter how a person interprets his death and imagines the afterlife, he always thinks only about how to prolong life and improve it. Philosophical reflections on the topic of death have lasted for centuries. She is a constant object of human thought. Increased attention to the issue was noticed in several time periods:

in the era of Freemasonry;
in the times of Fedorov and Dostoevsky, when spiritualist discussions were held;
in the Silver Age (emigrant journalism).

symbols of death;
images in art;
suicide;
materials of international conferences, etc.

Thanatos in psychology

In the twentieth century, the philosophical ideas of Schopenhauer and the biological theory of Weismann made it possible to form an image of death and some of its forces. Prominent psychoanalysts tried to answer the question of what thanatos is in psychology: E. Weiss, P. Federn, M. Klein, Z. Freud, etc. The concept and definition of the term were introduced by the Austrian psychiatrist Wilheim Stekel. The struggle between living and mortal, aggression and destruction is fundamental. It is the basis of human existence and his mental activity. These two opposing phenomena are dual and in psychology bear the names of the Greek gods.

Eros and Thanatos according to Freud

Directed at people and various objects, and then it takes the form of destructive actions, for example, vandalism, sadism, etc.
Directed towards yourself. This instinct is expressed in masochism and suicide attempts.

Thanatos - mythology

In Greek myths, people tried to answer pressing questions and comprehend existence. So the “enemy” of Eros was a creature of darkness. The goddess of the night, the mother of Thanatos, bore the name Nyukta (“night”) and personified the darkness that comes with sunset. From the god of eternal darkness, Erebus, Nyukta gave birth to sons and daughters. Among them was the God of Death. He appeared in the tales of Hercules (under the name Tanat) and Sisyphus. It is mentioned in Hesiod's Theogony, in Homer's Iliad and other ancient legends. God had his own temple in Sparta, and his face was usually depicted on grave urns.

Who is Thanatos?

In ancient Greek art, the god Thanatos appeared in different forms, but all of them are attractive considering what the character represents. Typically it is depicted as:

a young man with wings behind his back;
in a black robe;
holds in his hands an extinguished torch and a sword.

Thanatos and Hypnos

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Chapter 9 Attraction, libido and narcissism

As a result of mastering the material in this chapter, the student should:

Fundamental provisions of the theory of drives;

Concepts of libido and narcissism;

Give examples of narcissistic manifestations;

Explain the concepts of Eros and Thanatos;

Analysis of manifestations of aggression and sadism;

Psychoanalytic interpretation of drives;

In the professional analysis of drives in normal and pathological conditions.

This chapter will examine the concepts of "libido" and "narcissism", as well as some additional aspects of the previously mentioned concept of "drive".

In psychoanalysis, drives are understood as internal impulses, and more generally, as spiritualized representations of instincts (common to us with animals) that encourage the body to achieve a particular goal. Taking this into account, drive correlates simultaneously with both the somatic (like instincts) and the mental sphere, but unlike instincts, which are strictly determined by biological programs of behavior, drive acts as an intrapsychic dynamic force, under the control of the Ego and Super-Ego and determining everything types of personality activity. Normally, attraction is almost never realized in its pure form and is manifested through its representations. For example, sexual attraction can be manifested by feelings of love, excitement, fantasies, turning to poetry, dreams, etc.

Freud used the term “libido” to designate the energy of sexual desire, the source of which is associated with the somatic sphere, and the main “reservoir” is the Id (It). In modern psychoanalysis, the term libido has received a broader interpretation and is often used to refer to psychic energy as a whole. Depending on where this psychic energy is directed, invested and with what it is associated (cathected), a distinction is made between object libido (object-libido), directed towards external objects, and narcissistic libido (I-libido), directed towards one’s own self.

Alexander Cabanel. Birth of Venus. 1863

One of the variants of I-libido is narcissism. In modern psychoanalysis, the term "narcissism" is used in four main cases:

1) to describe the perception of oneself and the significance that the subject gives to himself, i.e. self-esteem (normal narcissism);

2) to denote the most early stage psychosexual development, when the child’s libido is completely directed towards himself (the stage of primary narcissism), and only much later is transferred to other objects (with the appearance of object-libido);

3) to describe the homosexual variant of development (narcissistic choice of object);

4) to denote a narcissistic character and narcissistic personality disorder (pathological narcissism).

9.1. History of the formation of ideas and concepts

Freud introduced the term “drive” to explain the internal motivational forces that determine human mental life, although in a narrower sense (in accordance with the concept of psychosexual development) this concept was used to mean “sexual desire”, while emphasizing that adult sexuality is largely determined by how the period of infantile sexuality was passed (successfully or not very successfully). As has already been substantiated in the previous sections, repressed sexual desires play a special role in the origin of neurotic symptoms, therefore the causes of psychopathology in many cases are associated with disorders of the psychosexual development of the child.

Subsequently, the definition of the term “attraction” was repeatedly clarified. In the first theory of drives (1905-1917), Freud identified two alternative groups: the actual sexual drives (having their source in bodily stimulation) and the drives of self-preservation (drives of the Self), which differ, according to the author’s figurative expression, in the same way as love and hunger. The drives of the ego give rise to many needs related to maintaining the life of the individual and self-preservation. These include,

for example, the need for food, territory, security, as well as the desire for power, the need for self-affirmation, etc. The drives of the ego (self-preservation) can be satisfied only through an external object and are subject to the principle of reality. Sexual desires, on the contrary, are influenced by the pleasure principle and are aimed at obtaining bodily pleasure. They can receive satisfaction not only with the help of external objects, but also through own body, as well as through fantasies, while they have the ability to replace and change their objects if direct satisfaction is impossible.

John William Waterhouse. Echo and Narcissus. 1903

During the infantile period of development, the drive of self-preservation and sexual drive are not yet separated, for example, sucking the mother’s breast by a small child simultaneously satisfies his need for food,

and gives pleasure. But in the process of development of the individual, the drives of the Self and sexual drives are divided according to their orientation and goals

and begin to act autonomously. In some cases, internal conflicts may arise between these divided drives, creating conditions for the formation of neuroses.

In Freud's work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” an additional (second) theory of drives was formulated, which questioned the undivided dominance of the pleasure principle. In particular, a hypothesis was put forward about the existence of an aggressive drive that acts autonomously, i.e. regardless of sexual attraction. The reason for the transformation of the original hypothesis was clinical observations of patients’ tendency to aggressive and destructive actions, to masochism and sadism, as well as the events of the First World War and the increase in aggressiveness in social life. These observations later led to the conclusion

about the existence of another special attraction - to death.

9.2. Eros and Thanatos

In accordance with S. Freud's second theory of drives, two antagonistic groups were identified: the drive to death and the drive to life. The main part of the death drive (Thanatos) is projected outward -

in the form of aggression and sadism. But a certain “remnant” of it may remain in intrapsychic structures, directed towards one’s own self, which forms primary masochism. Thus, sadism and masochism are interconnected mental (in some way mirror) phenomena. The death drive is opposed by the drive to life (Eros), which combines sexual drives and self-preservation drives. Eros manifests love, connection with the outside world and creation; whereas the goal of the death drive, on the contrary, is aimed at breaking ties and destruction (including self-destruction). A typical manifestation of thanatological tendencies is the breakdown of families, wars, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, etc.

Later it was substantiated that in each individual person either the death drive or the life drive can dominate. In the first case, a destructive (self-destructive) mental structure of the personality is formed, as, for example, with sadism or masochism. And when the drive to life prevails, the destructive component is neutralized, and aggression is used in the interests of the Self and is directed primarily towards socially approved goals and objectives. But even at this, the destructive component of libido energy, transferred to external objects, can manifest itself in various forms channeled aggression, including in the form of a desire for leadership, suppression, dominance or power. Nevertheless, Freud emphasized that the renunciation of direct aggression represents the first and perhaps the most difficult sacrifice that society requires of the individual from early childhood. In principle, it is this Freudian thesis that underlies all democratic transformations and opposition to all totalitarian regimes.

Let us explain how the foundations of these ambivalences are laid in childhood. For example, the mother’s breast as a primary object is always partially split in the child’s psyche, i.e. is perceived simultaneously as a good object (object of libido) and as a threatening or persecuting object (derivative of the death drive), in particular when the child is weaned (before his need for food is satisfied) or is weaned altogether. Already in this preverbal period of development, a constant (psychotraumatic) oscillation between the experiences of “love and hate” may arise, which in the future may require psychotherapeutic influence to integrate multidirectional drives.

9.3. The fate of desires

Exploring drives as dynamic and motivational forces, Freud identified four of their characteristics: source, goal, object and tension (persistence). The source of attraction is considered to be a state of somatic arousal in any organ or part of the body. The purpose of the drive is pleasure, which is achieved as a result of eliminating this excitement in a direct or indirect way. The object of desire is something through which satisfaction can be achieved.

theft. The object of satisfaction is the most unstable component of desire. This role can be played by both external objects (for example, in case of sexual attraction - a partner or some object), and parts of one’s own body. The same object can serve simultaneously to satisfy several drives. A particularly close attachment of the drive to an object is called “fixation” on the object.

The tension of the drive is characterized by its strength and energy, and therefore the drive is experienced as internal pressure that encourages activity. Drives belong to the area of the unconscious, they are generated by the “needs of the id” and in some cases pose a threat to the ego. In the work “Attractions and Their Fates” (1915), Freud clarifies that by “the fates of drives” he means ways to protect the ego against the realization of dangerous and forbidden desires. We emphasize - protection, but not cancellation. Therefore, the fate of drives can be: their transformation into their opposite (for example, love into hatred); turning on oneself (changing the object of attraction from another person to one’s own person); repressing unacceptable ideas or feelings from consciousness; sublimation (displacement of desire for non-sexual purposes), etc. Defenses help reduce anxiety and the severity of internal conflict, but the conflict between the id, which powerfully encourages the realization of the drive, and the prohibitions emanating from the super-ego, is still present.

The transformation of attraction into its opposite is quite common in the norm. Most often this manifests itself in the form of ambivalence - the simultaneous experience of opposing feelings. Freud identified three main dyads of manifestation of ambivalent drives: love - hatred; sadism - masochism; exhibitionism (including psychological) - voyeurism (desire to spy) 1.

It is generally accepted that initially love is realized in the narcissistic version, since the baby practically does not need the outside world (its inner world and incorporated food are a source of pleasure), and the outside world (for example, hygiene procedures, swaddling, etc.) can be a source irritation (as a prototype of hatred). Later, immediate external objects (parents or other nurturing figures) may also become sources of both pleasure and frustration, for example imposing prohibitions and causing both love and hatred. Love as a special relationship of the I to my sexual object reaches full development only at the genital stage (starting from adolescence), when partial sexual drives are synthesized into a holistic object feeling. Let's clarify these concepts: a partial object is either a part of the body, for example, a mother's breast, or a corner of a blanket that is sucked, replacing the breast, but the main thing is that the subject treats this object as if it exists only for him and to satisfy his needs. A complete object is a person, in relations with whom one initially accepts

1 Many advertising effects and a number of television shows are based on these drives and mental mechanisms.

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Part 4. Non-clinical problems of psychoanalysis

Chapter 17. Eros and Thanatos

Repetition compulsion, life drive and death drive

In psychoanalytic theory, Freud formulated the position that a person in his activity is guided by the principle of pleasure and the course of mental processes is automatically regulated by this principle. Receiving pleasure or eliminating displeasure is accompanied by a decrease in the tension of the energy potential. With the recognition of this point, the psychoanalytic theory of mental activity began to include an economic point of view. Topical (by location), dynamic (transition from one system to another) and economic ( quantitative change excitation) ideas about the functioning of the human psyche formed the basis of metapsychology as a general psychoanalytic theory.

To be extremely precise, it is hardly necessary to say that the pleasure principle controls the course of mental processes. Freud understood this. Clarifying the meaning of the pleasure principle he introduced, he emphasized that what we are talking about, in essence, is the recognition of the presence in the human soul of a strong tendency towards the dominance of this principle. This trend is being countered various forces and conditions, as a result of which the final result will not always correspond to the principle of pleasure.

One of the circumstances that makes it difficult to implement the pleasure principle is the body’s desire for self-preservation, as a result of which this principle is replaced by the reality principle. Under the influence of the reality principle, the final goal, that is, the achievement of pleasure, does not lose its significance, but is, as it were, postponed for a while so that a person can find his way to pleasure in a roundabout way.

According to Freud, the replacement of the pleasure principle with the reality principle only partially explains human life experience, which is associated with an increase in the amount of excitation of the body caused by displeasure. A significant source of displeasure is intrapsychic conflicts and splits occurring in the soul. The incompatibility of individual drives and their components makes it difficult to achieve the unity of the Self. As a result of repression processes, socially and ethically unacceptable drives are delayed in the early stages of mental development, and the possibility of their satisfaction is postponed indefinitely. In Freud's understanding, repression turns the possibility of satisfying drives into a source of neurotic displeasure. Ultimately, a person feels displeasure from an internal perception of tension, which is associated with the dissatisfaction of his own drives, or from an external perception, which gives rise to unpleasant expectations, recognized as dangers threatening him.

There was nothing in these discussions of Freud that would allow us to look beyond the pleasure principle. However, the experience of clinical practice and clarifications regarding the concept of drives in connection with the discussion of narcissistic libido raised the need for further rethinking of previous ideas about unconscious mental activity of a person.

Changes in the practice of psychoanalysis concerned primarily new guidelines for psychoanalytic technique. Initially, the task of psychoanalytic work was reduced to identifying the patient’s hidden unconscious in order to bring it to the patient’s consciousness. Psychoanalysis acted as the art of interpreting the unconscious. However, this turned out to be insufficient for effective psychoanalytic work, and therapeutic activity began to be aimed at ensuring that, relying on his own memories, the patient could confirm the constructs and constructions put forward by the analyst. In the process of solving this problem, the effectiveness of the patient’s resistances was revealed, and it became obvious that therapeutic activity involves, first of all, working with his resistances. The art of psychoanalysis now consisted in discovering and revealing the patient's resistances, bringing them to his consciousness and encouraging him, thanks to the efforts of the analyst, to overcome and eliminate them.

However, it turned out that even on this path the general goal of transferring the unconscious into consciousness is not fully achievable. The patient did not always remember exactly what led him to the disease. His memories could concern only part of the repressed unconscious. Often, instead of remembering his past experiences, he reproduced and repeated what was repressed in the form of new experiences, which was reflected in the transference, that is, in relation to the analyst. During psychoanalytic treatment the so-called compulsive repetition caused by the repressed unconscious. This obsessive repetition, revealed by psychoanalysis in neurotics, also turns out to be characteristic in the lives of people who do not suffer from neurotic disorders.

Based on this understanding, Freud put forward the hypothesis that in the mental life of people there is a tendency towards obsessive repetition that goes beyond the pleasure principle. The psychoanalyst encounters repetition compulsion both in the mental life of early childhood and in cases from clinical practice. Thus, in children's play, a child is able to repeat even unpleasant experiences. Moreover, repeating the same thing turns out to be a unique source of pleasure. In the patient being analyzed, the repetition compulsion in the transference of his infantile period goes beyond the pleasure principle. In both cases, it turns out that repetition compulsion and a person’s drives are closely related.

From this point of view, attraction, according to Freud, can be defined as a kind of organic elasticity, an inherent desire in a living organism to restore its previous state, which, due to various kinds of external obstacles, it had to leave. Along with the internal tendency to change and development, a person’s drive also includes a tendency to repeat, restore, maintain the status quo, and in this sense is an expression of the conservative nature of all living things. Based on the recognition of this state of affairs, Freud put forward the assumption that all drives strive to restore their previous state and, therefore, every living being is directed through all sorts of roundabout paths of development to its original state. If we recognize the simple truth, according to which, due to internal reasons, everything living sooner or later dies and returns to its inorganic state, then we, according to the conviction of the founder of psychoanalysis, can say that the goal of all life is death.

How does the statement “The goal of all life is death” fit with Freud's previous idea that every human being has a drive for self-preservation? After all, the position he put forward in his work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” about the inherent human drive to achieve death, in fact, came into clear contradiction with the original dualistic concept based on the recognition of the drive to self-preservation and sexual drives.

Without shying away from answering this question, Freud believed that the instinct for self-preservation can be considered as a particular one, intended to prevent any other possibility of a living organism returning to an inorganic state, except for its own inherent path to death. A living organism strives for natural death, and the “guardians of life,” personifying the instinct of self-preservation, were originally nothing more than “servants of death.”

Sexual drives, including those that serve the continuation of the human race and counteract dying, in Freud’s understanding, are just as conservative as all other drives. They serve to reproduce the previously existing states of a living organism and seem even more conservative, since they resist external influences and strive to preserve life at all costs.

As a result, in the process of his reflections on the relationship between repetition compulsion and human drives, Freud came to a new dualistic concept, according to which he identified as the main attraction to life And attraction to death. Thus, willingly or unwillingly, he seemed to come to philosophical constructs previously developed by various thinkers, including, for example, Empedocles and Schopenhauer.

Putting forward ideas about a new dualistic concept of drives, Freud proceeded from the fundamental opposition between the drives to life and the drives to death. He derived a similar polarity from the orientation of libido towards an object, when the relationship between love (tenderness) and hatred (aggression) was considered. The beginnings of these ideas were already contained in Freud’s early ideas related to the recognition of the phenomena of sadism and masochism in the process of human psychosexual development, when masochism was considered as an appeal of sadism to one’s own self. Returning to these ideas from the standpoint of the new dualistic concept of drives, the founder of psychoanalysis was forced to refer to Spielrein’s article “Destruction as a cause of formation.” He acknowledged that much of her discussion on this topic was anticipated in this article, in which the sadistic component of sexual desire was called destructive. He made this recognition in his work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”

Ten years later, in The Discontents of Culture, Freud expressed his willingness to admit that in sadism and masochism, the psychoanalyst deals with a fusion of eroticism and destructiveness, directed either inward or outward. At the same time, he noted that he himself did not understand how he and many psychoanalysts had overlooked widespread aggressiveness and destructiveness.

Freud's idea of a new dualistic concept of drives, put forward in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, led to the fact that sexual drive turned into Eros, and sexual drives themselves began to be seen as object-oriented parts of Eros. In his understanding, Eros turns out to be the “attraction to life,” which acts as a counterbalance to the “attraction to death.” In accordance with this understanding, he tried to solve the riddle of life by accepting these competing drives.

At the same time, the founder of psychoanalysis believed that the drives to life deal primarily with a person’s internal perceptions, act as peace disturbers and bring with them tension. The principle of pleasure is subordinate to the death instinct, which strives to complicate life processes, guards external perceptions and in a special way protects itself from internal irritations.

In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud continued his discussion of the dualistic concept of drives formulated three years earlier. This discussion was caused by the need to bring into a single connection the structural understanding of the psyche with its division into the Id, Ego and Super-Ego with this concept, according to which two types of primary drives were distinguished - to life and to death.

If in the book “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” we talked about polar drives, then in the work “I and It” the idea of the existence of two instincts was clearly voiced - the instinct of life and the instinct of death. These instincts were considered by Freud by analogy with the polarity of love and hate. At the same time, he proceeded from the fact that the difficult-to-define death instinct finds its representative in the destructive instinct, the focus of which on various objects is directly related to hatred. Clinical experience has shown that hatred is an inevitable companion of love and under various conditions one can turn into the other. A person is initially ambivalent, and the transformation of one into another can be carried out in such a way that the weakening of the energy of the erotic feeling can lead to an increase in hostile energy.

From Freud's point of view, the active and capable of displacement energy in the Ego and the Id represents desexualized Eros, the source of which is associated with narcissistic libido. Being desexualized, this energy is sublimated, serving the goal of unity so characteristic of the Ego. Thus, it is the Ego that desexualizes and sublimates the libido of the Id. In fact, this means that the Ego not only works against the goals of Eros, but also begins to serve the opposite destructive instinct, directed outward precisely under the influence of the forces of Eros. And this is only one side of the issue related to the relationship between the structural understanding of the psyche and the dualistic theory of drives.

The other side of this issue is that the Super-Ego, acting as a critical authority, conscience and feelings of guilt, can develop such cruelty and severity towards the Self that it turns into sadism and merciless rage. Recognizing this circumstance, which is clearly manifested in the practice of psychoanalysis in the example of patients suffering from melancholia, Freud saw in the Super-Ego a destructive component associated with the direction of a person’s aggression not so much outward as inward. Consequently, the psychoanalytically understood Super-Ego turned out to be a kind of “pure culture of the death instinct.” This is exactly how the founder of psychoanalysis characterized the Super-Ego, which, in his opinion, is capable of bringing the unfortunate Self to death. And if this does not happen, it is only due to the fact that the ego can protect itself from the tyranny of the super-ego by escaping into illness, that is, due to the development of mania.

Ultimately, Freud's attempt to explain the connections between the structural understanding of the psyche and the dualistic concept of drives ended with the recognition of the inherent aggressiveness of man. This followed from the entire course of his reasoning. How more people limits his aggression directed outward, the stricter he becomes towards himself and the more destructive the demands of the Super-Ego turn out to be for the inner world, since all or most of the aggression is directed inward, towards the Self. In the own words of the founder of psychoanalysis, the more a person masters his aggression, the more his ideal’s tendency to aggression against his ego increases.

In Freud's understanding, through identification and sublimation, the I helps the transition of the death instinct to the It, but at the same time it finds itself in such a dangerous situation when it itself can become the object of the death instinct and, therefore, die. To prevent this from happening, that is, in order to avoid possible death The ego borrows libido from the id, is filled with sexual energy, becomes a representative of Eros and thereby acquires the desire to be loved and continue its life. In turn, the work of sublimation leads to the release of aggressiveness in the superego, and the fight against libido turns out to be fraught with new dangers. As a result, the Self may become a victim of the destructive Self, which leads to death. This, from Freud’s point of view, is the dialectic of life and death, internally setting the guidelines for the confrontation between creative and destructive tendencies, Eros and the death instinct.

Z. Freud: “There remains much that justifies the compulsive repetition, and this latter seems to us more original, elementary, possessing greater coercive power than the pleasure principle that it pushed aside.”

S. Freud: “Reflection shows that this Eros operates from the very beginning of life and acts as a “life drive” in contrast to the “death drive” that arose with the origin of organic life.”

Z. Freud: “When the Super-ego is formed, a significant amount of aggressive instinct is fixed inside the ego and acts there self-destructively. This poses a danger to human health on the path of cultural development.”

Chapter 4. When an invasion of someone else's space occurs. Viewers who watched these scenes were asked to evaluate the behavior of the boss and the visitor. Their assessments and explanations made it possible to notice a number of patterns. According to viewers, the visitor's status was at its lowest when he stopped at the door and began to address him from there.

Types of Brides How significant and influential she is, one can only guess, but the very fact that in fact this may be exactly the case flatters and comforts the woman in her shadow role.

Forgetting FoucaultAs the economic reference loses its power, either the reference of desire or the reference of power becomes dominant. The reference of desire, born in psychoanalysis, reaches its peak in Deleuze's anti-psychoanalysis in the form of disintegrated molecular desire. Reference of power.

BASIC LITERATURE Installations should be extremely concise, succinct and at the same time bright. I demonstrated the simplest installation many times at my training seminars. A person formulates for himself the following: “My right hand much stronger than it was before. I feel my right hand getting heavier.

If we comprehend the nature of cultural-historical psychology as a work of Mozart in psychology, the question of the causes of Vygotsky’s modernity will appear in a completely different light. It will be just as justified as the question about the modernity of Mozart, Dürer, Dostoevsky, Hegel or Schweitzer. The same attitude in.

III. The Transformations of PubertyHaving observed for a decade how this book was received and the impression it made, I would like to preface the third edition with a few comments directed against misunderstandings of it and the unrealistic claims made on it. First of all, it is necessary to emphasize that.

3. Dead ends and new solutions Mary: They have been involved in the Prosecutor-Victim game for so long that, most likely, they will behave worse and worse for some time. It will take them time to understand that they can go to bed without execution. Do you understand?

The successful development of materialist natural science completely refuted these anti-scientific statements of Dubois-Reymond. This question, theoretically put forward in the twenties by the Russian biologist Bakhmetyev, is now receiving great attention. practical significance. Using hypothermia, surgeons perform operations on the heart and lungs with great success. Under these conditions, the influence of pain reflexes is reduced. owls emerging.

Dreams about women There is only one corner, and it is enough to take a step to get out of it, and not go diagonally to another corner, but simply leave the cage. What took me so long? Christian morality? - In no case, nothing in me now contradicts her. Shame? - May be. But do I have anything to be ashamed of? Is it mine?

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5. Psychoanalytic revolution

What is thanatos?

Thanatos in philosophy

Thanatos in psychology

Eros and Thanatos according to Freud

Thanatos - mythology

Who is Thanatos?

Thanatos and Hypnos

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Leo Tolstoy 1898

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Death Attraction

The concept of “drive” in psychoanalysis

Classical dualistic theory of drives by S. Freud.

Development of the death drive theory

Modern concepts of the death drive

Thanatos - god of death in mythology

What is thanatos?

Thanatos in philosophy

Thanatos in psychology

Eros and Thanatos according to Freud

Thanatos - mythology

Who is Thanatos?

Thanatos and Hypnos

Chapter 9 Attraction, libido and narcissism

9.1. History of the formation of ideas and concepts

9.2. Eros and Thanatos

9.3. The fate of desires

Part 4. Non-clinical problems of psychoanalysis

Chapter 17. Eros and Thanatos

Repetition compulsion, life drive and death drive

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