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.
This is an attempt to present in a brief paper views that have been germinating over a long period: the ideas are based on the work of Freud, Klein and Bion.
I would like, from the outset, to state that it is my belief that the impact of the life and death instincts on the human mind are so powerful and overwhelming, and require such defences to cope with these forces, that our capacity to understand them is limited and distorted. I also believe that the provision of human object relationships makes it more possible to understand these forces, to contain and be aware of them and thus to enable the achievement of some awareness of the truth about life and death instincts. At the same time, these object relationships are themselves subject to the forces of life and death and thus distortions of understanding take place, initiated both by the power of the impact of the infant on the mother and of the mother on the infant. This applies also of course to subsequent relationships. I hope in the course of the paper to be able to throw some light on both these problems – the limits of understanding, the need for a relationship to improve understanding, and how that relationship can be influenced, and indeed, corrupted, by defences coping with life and death instincts.
I shall start with a condensed view of Freud’s work, partly for historical interest and partly because I find his structural formulations a necessary foundation on which to build my thinking. Freud did in fact link his structural views with an object relationship theory, and, as we know, Melanie Klein made the object relationship central to her thesis.
It seems to me useful to consider the scientific climate at the time when Freud presented his views on the death instinct. I find it difficult to read ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ without feeling that Freud considered his
ideas on the life and death instincts to be enormously important. Although he prefaced his views by saying that ‘it is a far fetched specula