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phase with verbalizing “no” and breaking things; the first genital phase with “rough and tumble play”; and the mature phase with the ability to hit and kill others (hostile destructive type) and ambition (nonhostile non-destructive type). These nodal biological phenomena are perceived, remembered, and then integrated with pleasure and with the images of connected persons. The two drives are much intertwined (Raphling 1998). Blackman avers that psychoanalytic diagnosis always involves assessment of ego functions, ego strengths, object relations, and superego development. He points out that although everyone experiences conflicts, which include drive elements, superego (Beres 1958, Brenner 1982a, b; Bernstein 1983, Blum 1985, Milrod 2002), affects (Brenner 1979, 1991, 2006), reality, and defense (Cooper 1989), individuals with severe pathologies also harbor deficits in reality testing, integration, and abstraction (Bellak, 1989), as well as object relations (Kernberg, 1975). In such cases, drive factors, defenses and compromise formations are insufficient for diagnostic purposes. However, in ‘neuroses’, where ego functions, ego strengths, object relations, and superego are relatively intact, based primarily on structural conflict and maladaptive compromise formations, the assessment of libidinal and aggressive drive wishes form one important component of the assessment (also see Waelder 1936). (See a separate entry EGO PSYCHOLOGY) IV. Ff. James Grotstein: Example of North American Post-Bionian Perspective On Death Instinct In his Post-Kleinian, Post-Bionian and Post-Freudian reformulation of the Death Instinct, Grotstein (1977a, b; 2000) theorizes that the ‘epistemophilic instinct‘, the libidinal instinct, and the death instinct are three facets of a unitary, isomorphic life instinct , whose function is to keep individuals and groups alive. Grotstein’s contention is that the death instinct is a viable concept for psychoanalytic theory. It represents a portion of a larger inherent-instinctual principle, which has been “programmed” into the DNA of our chromosomes—both literally and figuratively. In this sense, the death instinct may, perhaps, be better termed the inherent, undifferentiated defense organization in its inchoate form (Grotstein, 1977a, 1977b). Its emanations, warnings, impulses (so called ‘aggressive drives’) are but RNA messengers dispatched from the DNA template to warn the organism of dangers in the external world and the internal milieu and to institute defensive tactics and strategies against them. The death instinct template contains the history of the terrors all living and extinct organisms have endured. Current experiences resonate with the “wisdom” of this inherent template in order to evoke the signal of terror or danger in the organism. Organismic panic is thus the first inchoate response of the organism to danger. Maternal containment allows for the maturation of organismic panic into specific signal anxiety, which can more clearly specify the individuality of the danger and anticipatorily cope with it. In this context, he theorizes, Spitz’s (1965) stranger anxiety is one of the first forms of the death instinct; the “stranger” evokes the frightening experience of the possibility of a predator in the infant’s mind.
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