Commentary on David Black: Beyond the Death Drive Detour - How Can We Deepen Our Understanding of Cruelty, Malice, Hatred, Envy and Violence?

Any thoughtful reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle amply confirms David Black's conclusion: the properties of the death drive as postulated by Freud in 1922 bear no relationship to the drive theory of psychoanalysis because, as David Black notes with admirable economy, ‘The return of organic matter to the inorganic state does not make a demand on the mind for work; it happens reliably with or without the mind's participation’. Similarly David Black points out the difficulties with an indirect route to the death drive originating in Freud's earlier neuroscientific training as expressed in ‘A project for a scientific psychology’, which to my mind, in disagreement with David Black, is a minefield rather than a seed-bed of ideas. And one is relieved to find that he quite rightly rejects what he calls indirect affective roads to the death drive which reduce Freud's motivation to his feelings at the time - World War I, the dangers to his sons Martin and Ernst, his weariness with life or, even and intriguingly, his feelings about the loss of Jung just before World War II. When coupled to his analysis of the subsequent development of the death drive as a metaphor for human destructiveness rather than as a biological reality, I think we are in a position to recognize with him that the death drive was in fact a detour.

I think this is an important advance in our debates. It would certainly seem that we should stop thinking in terms of a death drive but directly in terms of destructiveness. We should stop teaching the death drive in our trainings. And we should recognize, with David Black, that the death drive was a detour of historical interest, but is no longer of real psychoanalytic interest. As David Black concludes, ‘The death drive, as such, probably merits no future in psychoanalytic thinking’.

If we leave the distractions of the death drive behind us, we are then left