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III. Aba. Basic Propositions – North American Perspective The proposition of the late dual drive theory (Freud 1920) classified drives into life drives and death drives. The life drive (Eros) subsumed both prior categories of the sexual and self-preservative drives. The death drive (Thanatos) was a radical new concept involving an impression of “a malignant fate” or “a daemonic power” (p.20), manifesting as destructive aggression or as psychosomatic quiescence. At its deepest core the death drive was seen as aiming for a “return to an inanimate state” (p.37). In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud 1920), while positing the new duality of Life and Death drives, Freud implied the libido as a reservoir of energy for the Life drive, but he never assigned a corresponding specific energy to the Death drive which may have contributed to some later thinkers (Loewald 1971, Laplanche 1970, and others) to consider it a principle rather than an actual drive. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, there is a destructiveness consisting of a quiet erosion of life by a death-anticipating element within, one version of which is primal masochism, another that is projected secondarily outward into the objects. The destructive aggression, manifesting as violence, is here secondary to the primary death instinct, manifesting as various forms of self-destructive attitudes and behaviors. Ten years later, in “Civilization and its Discontents” (1930), the stress would be much more upon the death instinct’s destructive manifestations outwards. The death drive includes, among other things, the ‘instinctual aspect’ of the drive. Even though this distinction between drive and instinct is obscured in English by Strachey’s translation, the death drive integrates the ‘conservative’ and ‘regressive’ nature of instinct. Moreover, this model emphasizes the essential role of the repression of destructive drives in cultural development, it explains the process of internalization of aggression in what would be later known as superego, and it explains the origins and the dangers of guilt feelings. Freud’s successive formulations of Eros and the Death drive/ drive of destruction (Freud, 1920, 1930, 1939, 1940[1938]) contain an elaboration of the tendency and aim of the life drive/Eros (sexual and self-preservative instinct together) as creating and maintaining ever- greater unities, governed by the principle of binding; and the aim of the Death drive as undoing connections, to destroy, internally and externally. III. Abb. From Clinical and Developmental Observations to Psychoanalytic Theory: European Perspective Starting from traumatic states, transference, and children’s play, in all three areas Freud saw a tendency towards repetition , regardless of its pleasurable or painful implications. This tendency had a ‘blind’ or ‘relentless’ (driven) quality. This inconsistency with the pleasure principle begged an exploration if there was an aim more fundamental than the aim for pleasure, such as the aim which showed in the “compulsion to repeat”.
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