Revisioning the Death-Drive: The Compulsion to Repeat as a Death-in-Life

This article presents a revisionary reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Recognizing the power of Freud's meditation on a universal “death-drive” in living organisms, it argues that Freud makes a greater contribution by strengthening the compulsion to repeat to a form of figurative death. We recall that after shattering the presupposition of a universal pleasure principle, Freud demonstrates an equally strong pain-principle. The pain-principle entails a return to an old image in the mind, just as Freud identifies Eros, the transfigured pleasure-principle, with the movement toward something new, “a different individual.” The moving backward toward old love in opposition to the moving forward to new love is an inspired narrative application of the Oedipus complex. The repetitive backward movement is a figurative death when the observing other or self encounters a deathlike affect of despair or persecution. Less persuasive because less experience-near is the concept of the death-drive. Freud writes in different voices, and the death-drive speculation is in the mode that privileges scientific speculation over other forms of thought, even as Freud shows a variety of stylistic modes for reaching the truth. Yet it is the mode that observes human interactions and transforms them to figurative narrative that moves most profoundly to the never-fully-knowable-human-unconscious. We discover the hidden motive for repetition as a return to the original rejection or rage that was a form of previous intimacy. The genre that these figurative narratives take is close to literary romance, and death, or the special suffering that Coleridge evocatively termed “life-in-death,” is the hidden object of its dark quest.