Response to Holm-Hadulla

Dear Editor,

I want to thank Holm-Hadulla for this interesting contribution and I certainly agree with the well-expressed conclusion: “It seems reasonable to go on working on the dialectics of construction and destruction in conceptualizing the death drive, as Melanie Klein has done”. There remains, however, a misunderstanding and also a disagreement. First the misunderstanding: nowhere in the paper do I suggest that Faust is all good, that the division in Goethe's epic poem is between Faust on the one side representing good and Mephistopheles on the other representing bad. Amongst Faust's most famous lines is “two souls dwell within my breast” - of course a highly overdetermined statement with a multitude of meanings. However, I take this line to be, in part, an expression of exactly this dialectic: the soul that is drawn to earth could perhaps be understood as the one that accepts the struggle and limitations of earthly life; the other that longs for pastures high above seeks to escape these limitations and hungers for omnipotence (there is a close link I believe between destructiveness and the longing for omnipotence). One could also consider the whole epic poem as an interior journey, where Mephistopheles and Faust are internal figures.

Faust's fall into destruction I understand as his succumbing to the lure of omnipotence, and here Mephistopheles acts as the seducer (there is a similar structure I believe in Wilde's Dorian Gray where Dorian is lured by Basil into a world of terrible destruction, with no redemption (see Bell, 2006)). But in order for this takeover to occur both Faust and Dorian must have already within themselves something of this force, for without this soil the evil could not germinate.

And now the disagreement. I do not think it is right to say that evil can be a creative principle; this seems to me to be confused. It is true that evil/destructiveness are inalienable aspects of our being. It is also true that our confrontation with these aspects