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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 forms 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
Influenced by evolving Kleinian, Bionian and Freudian thought James Grotstein (1977a, b; 2000). puts forth an original reformulation of the Death Instinct. He 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 (2000) 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 palimpsest of 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, Grotstein 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” (p. 473).. Focusing on anxiety aspect of Klein’s theory, Grotstein (2000) builds on her hypothesis “that the infant experiences irruptions of the death instinct from the very beginning - as anxiety” (p. 466). Considering Freud’s, Klein’s, Bion’s, Hartmann’s and Spitz’ inputs among many others, Grotstein arrives at a position that “the death instinct constitutes the archive of the survival of the organism over phylogenetic time and the adaptive strategies it has gleaned from phylogenetic experience”. In this vein, “the death instinct […] is but another dimension of the life instinct” (p. 477). Grotstein (2000) also formulated a drive-based original hypothesis of hate as an alarm and defense in the face of traumatic encounter with the primordial anxiety of unbearable dis- order and chaos, putting forth a proposal of hate in relation to the death instinct, anger, and rage. From this point of view, hate is an advanced member of the destructive ensemble (which
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