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of a psychic force that opposes life and development, and in particular opposes thought, seems to me to have very substantial grounds empirically and has provided a compelling theoretical framework for understanding a profound duality that governs psychic life. The life and death drives may be thought of as powerful ever-present tendential forces in the mind….At the core of Freud is his tragic vision of humanity; the inescapable struggle between the life and hatred of life, between thinking and hatred of thought. I suggest the concept of the death drive expresses that tragic vision in its mature form.” (Bell 2015, p. 423).
IV. DEVELOPMENTS IN NORTH AMERICA
Freud’s (1920, 1923, 1926,) revisions of theory provided the impetus for rethinking ideas about the unconscious and the drives, particularly in North America where many ego psychologists emigrated during the 1930’s. Heinz Hartman, Ernst Kris and Rudolph Lowenstein further elaborated aggression as a distinct drive operating according to the pleasure principle rather than beyond it. Its aims can include mastery as well as destruction, and its role in the building of psychic structure has been emphasized (Hartman, Kris and Lowenstein 1949). For many of these North American analysts, writing during the 1940s and 50s, the increasing significance is given to experiences with people in the child’s environment, and to new sources of unconscious contributions to transference activity. Considering mounting influence from Budapest and Berlin and later from the British Middle School analysts and the early Kleinians , contemporaries of Hartmann continued the object relations’ discussion by giving greater depth to the conscious and unconscious aspects of very early developmental periods. Edith Jacobson (1964) investigated the self and object worlds, and Margaret Mahler (1963; Mahler et al. 1975) provided the classic formulations of separation- individuation later revisited by Stern (1985). Attention was directed to the impact of the pre- Oedipal period of childhood on later development, as well as to the ways in which external controls, deriving in part from the child’s transactions with the parents, are internalized. Jacobson (1964) made a special contribution to the drive theory. She postulated that undifferentiated instinctual energy develops into libidinal and aggressive drives “under the influence of external stimulations” (1964, p. 13). Frustration and gratification, laid down as memory traces of childhood conflicts organize these affective experiences into each individual’s personally tailored pleasure - unpleasure spectrum, with personal upper and lower limits. This new ego psychological model allowed for a clearer picture of the evolution of the self and object representations thought to be present in all three psychic agencies (Id, Ego and Superego). Ego Psychology changed as theorists insisted on clinical findings to support metapsychological assumptions. This new era was signaled by the Jacob Arlow and Charles Brenner (1964) monograph, in which they collapsed the metapsychological perspective under
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