Chapter 6 Manifestations of the Death Instinct in the Consulting Room

In 1930 Freud wrote:

Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. The phenomena of life could be explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of these two instincts. It was not easy, however, to demonstrate the activities of this supposed death instinct. The manifestations of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It might be assumed that the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof. A more fruitful idea was that a portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self.

In her discussion of the conflict between the life and death instincts, Segal (1997), closely following Freud’s model, points out that the individual can respond to needs in one of two ways:

One, to seek satisfaction for the needs: that is life-promoting and

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leads to object seeking, love, and eventually object concern. The other is the drive to annihilate: the need to annihilate the perceiving experiencing self, as well as anything that is perceived.

Freud envisaged a primary drive that remains mute and hidden, silently driving the individual towards death. The gratification of this basic instinctual drive would be the annihilation of the self. However, the clinical phenomena he encountered forced him to postulate that this drive was always partly ‘fused’ with the