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Dear Editors,
The article by Professor Otto Kernberg (2009) is a brilliant analysis and synopsis of the concept of death drive and aggression in the history of psychoanalytic research. In it, I've found a fascinating synecdochic parallelism worth to be mentioned shortly.
Prof. Kernberg mentions the controversies raised by Freud's monumental discovery of the struggle between libido and death drive, erotic impulses and aggression. He points out that it was “Freud's stress on the infantile sexuality” as early as 1905 that has raised “opposition and efforts of denial” against this theory. Interestingly, it was one of Freud's first-minute students and co-thinkers, Alfred Adler, who initiated a controversy at the Wednesday Society, by proposing an alternative to the sexual drive: the aggressive drive (Adler, 1908), which initially has not been integrated into the theory of the early group of psychoanalysts (Adler, 1930), but first became a self-fulfilling prophecy, which led to the group splitting into two: Psychoanalysis and Individual Psychology in 1911.
In his article, Prof. Kernberg gives us a delightful explanation of this group-splitting process. When the efforts to calm down the group's anxiety fail, they show a tendency to “the division of the group itself, or its perception of the surrounding social environment, into an idealized and persecutory one, with active aggression directed against what is perceived as the hostile segment of the world in order to protect the perfection and the security of the ideal group” (p. 1017).
Finally, in 1920 Freud was able to integrate the aggressive drive into a broader concept of Psychoanalysis by omitting references to Adler's original priority in this field. Conversely, Adler gradually destroyed the significant other in his theory, by removing all references to Psychoanalysis.
Indeed, the history is full of anecdotes of tensions between the two groups. The split seems more intense in the United States and less dominant in Europe, w