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.
In 1920 Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, introducing in chapter 6 the idea of the “death drives” (Freud, 2024a). It was also the first introduction of what is called the second topography, which he elaborated in 1923 in The Ego and the Id (Freud, 2024b). Freud worked from March 1919 until July 1920 on the text. Two versions of the text are available so we can follow the development of Freud's thinking. A critical edition was published in 2013 (May & Schröter, 2013; Pigman, 2014) where both texts are analyzed and placed in context. The publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and especially the introduction of the death drives, had a profound impact on Freud's followers. In the following years this second topography was partly adopted, partly reinterpreted, and made easier to understand because Freud himself was also (re-)interpreting his idea.
The multiple death drives were gradually condensed into a single death drive, which stood for aggression as a primal drive. This was the position Melanie Klein took, arguing that the infant “hates” its caregivers and must find an acceptable solution for this drive. Not all analysts adopted this perspective, however. Bowlby, influenced by ethologists such as Lorenz and Tinbergen, famously disagreed with this position, claiming that it was better to observe the behavior of infants directly rather than to infer their mental life from the analysis of adults. He proposed an attachment drive as primal drive (Steiner, 2018). Ulrike May describes the change in psychoanalysis between 1920 and 1925 as the “Abandonment of the primacy of the sexual” (May, 2023). Libido/Sexuality had to share first place with aggression, perhaps even taking second place. This modification in Freud's perspective may reflect the enormous cultural changes that took place in Europe in those years: The world that Freud knew did not exist anymore, the Austrian empire was broken, and an unprecedented amount of aggression had taken place in a sup