Driving Death Away: Death and Freud's Theory of the Death Drive

The issue of death has long been neglected within psychoanalysis. Several authors have pointed out that since Freud, psychoanalysis has continually failed to integrate death and death anxiety within its wider perspective (Becker, 1973; Brown, 1959; Hoffman, 1998; Klein, 1948; Lachmann, 1985; Lifton, 1979; ; Piven, 2004; Rank, 1945; Razinsky, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c; Searles, 1961; Yalom, 1980). The origins of this oversight or, occasionally, active rejection can be traced to Freud's formulations—both surreptitious and explicit—that death cannot be represented in the unconscious and that death anxiety is secondary to other issues. These tendencies, both implicit and explicit, have continued to resonate throughout the vast majority of analytic literature. It is claimed, however, that one exception to this overall trend is the death drive theory, which supposedly places death at the center of the analytic perspective. This claim, often communicated to me personally and cited as an argument against my claim that the analytic tradition has neglected death, also occasionally appears in the literature (Bolivar, 1993; Brown, 1959, pp. 87-109; Carel, 2006; de M'Uzan, 1977, pp. 49-63; Eigen, 1995, pp. 280, 286; Eissler, 1955; Gabel, 1974; Mills, 2006; Parat, 1998, pp. 1839-1845; Piven, 2004, pp. 153-85; Pontalis, 1977). Freud's three most important biographers clearly see the theory of the death drive as Freud's personal solution to the question of mortality (Gay, 1988, p. 394; Jones, 1957, pp. 301-302; Schur, 1972, pp. 344, 373). For Gay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle demonstrates that the reason for Freud not publishing his book on metapsychology was that his ideas until then “had not had enough about death in them,” and that Freud “had not integrated what they had to say about death