You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Sir
I am writing regarding Michael Feldman's article, ‘Some views on the manifestation of the death instinct in clinical work’ (IJP, 81:53-65). The controversy regarding whether or not there inheres in the human an ‘instinct’ which impels the organism towards either life or death is not likely to be settled quickly. Psychoanalysts cannot agree among themselves, let alone with ethologists, on its presence or definition. But there are reasons to suppose that the apprehension of such a phenomenon has been accurate. Millennia-old traditions upon which important and useful systems of therapeutics are based, such as the theory of Dualistic Monism, assert that the energy which enlivens us, alternately called chi, ki or qi, has a positive and a negative expression. These positive and negative expressions are constantly converting into one another. In this theory, significant imbalance in the divergent possibilities is sickness.
Kleinians have always found the concepts of life and death instincts useful. They have served to organise clinical impressions and as a shorthand reference to indicate the transcendent inclination in a patient either consistently or at a particular moment. The poles on the continuum between the inclination towards life or towards death can be seen as corresponding to the poles on the continuum between order and entropy, the latter divergence being known to exist in material entities. So it seems reasonable to retain the use of the language and the concepts.
I am taking issue with Feldman's postulation that the aim of the death instinct is not literally to annihilate. I heartily agree that: ‘what is often more clinically compelling is the extent to which certain patients … attack and distort their capacities for perception and judgement’ and that the lives of the patient and his object are not snuffed out ‘but [are] severely reduced and undermined’ (p. 54) in whatever way possible. However, the strength of the opposing tendencies results in a vector