Freud's Death Instinct And Rank's Libido Theory

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud holds the Nirvana principle to be the dominant tendency of life. By the Nirvana principle he means the striving to remove or keep constant the inner tensions due to stimuli. (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, p. 55.) And Dr. F, Alexander has recently shown (Imago IX, p. 35) that in the Buddhist mystics' way to Nirvana, this primitive tendency can be observed at work. The Buddhist monk who has renounced adult sexual love, proceeds to withdraw his interest from the whole external world in the first stage of his journey to Nirvana. After this introversion of libido, the monk sinks into a melancholic phase, by turning upon his own body the hate and disgust he had previously felt for the outside world. When the monk has broken down these sadomasochistic barriers to the flood of self—love, he regresses to the next stage of positive narcissism. This is marked by a sensation of pleasure in every part of his body, immersed as it were, in a pool of delight. After the catatonic phase is overcome, the monk sinks beyond the pleasure principle to the entrance of Nirvana itself. In this primitive state of apathy even the body ceases to be an object of love. The mind merely registers an endless succession of events in time. The vague feeling of contentment and the awareness of repetition presumably approach as closely as possible to the state of the child before birth. Alexander thinks that the primary erotism may be centered in the umbilical cord and the course of the fetal blood; and it is clear that the mystics' belief in a World Sound, their repetition of the word OM, their control of the breathing process and their postures might well symbolize such a regressive desire. Moreover, the mystics' experience of bodily pleasure exactly describes the state of autoerotic sensibility with which Hollos and Rado suppose the whole fetal body to be charged.

In his book on the Trauma of Birth, Rank has recently published some results of his penetration into hith