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Dear Editor
I read with interest David M. Black's review of the concept and the commentary by Joseph Schwartz (Black 2001; Schwartz 2001). Although the Editorial Board have indicated that they will invite further response to this debate in future issues, it was a pity that a commentary was not sought that provided a contrasting view, to encourage the reader to form their own conclusions.
Both Black and Schwartz argue their case at a metapsychological level, questioning the way through which Freud first introduced the concept. Black, as a result, concludes that ‘the death drive, as such, probably merits no future in psychoanalytic thinking’.
Schwartz fully endorses Black's conclusion, saying that ‘we should stop thinking in terms of a death drive but directly in terms of destructiveness’ and, forcibly, adds that ‘we should stop teaching the death drive in our trainings’. However, Schwartz enigmatically ends his article with ‘And so we come to clinical cases’. Yet, what is striking in both the critique by Black and the endorsing commentary by Schwartz is indeed the absence of any clinical material to support their thesis of abandoning the death instinct.
Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) point out in their detailed review of the death instinct that a dualistic tendency is fundamental to Freudian thought. The introduction of the death instinct added another dimension when confronted with the ambivalent nature of communications from people in very disturbed states of mind. This is aside from considering its operation as a universal phenomenon.
The theoretical value of the concept in understanding clinical phenomena perhaps explains why Freud should end up writing so strongly to endorse the notion from its original speculative foundations. He writes:
To begin with, it was only tentatively that I put forward the views that I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way. (Freud 1930, p. 119)
As a pract