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VI. Ba. Terencio Gioia Gioia reviews and revises the development of the Late drive theory via ‘dialogue’ with Freud’s writings, noting that Freud himself recognized that the dualistic theory of the Life and Death drives is a speculative hypothesis: “What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead.” (Freud 1920, p: 24). In his close reading of Freud, Gioia follows Freud, when he writes “We started out from the great opposition between the life and death instincts. Now object-love itself presents us with a second example of a similar polarity - that between love (or affection) and hate (or aggressiveness). If only we could succeed in relating these two polarities to each other and in deriving one from the other! From the very first we recognized the presence of a sadistic component in the sexual instinct. As we know, it can make itself independent and can, in the form of a perversion, dominate an individual’s entire sexual activity. It also emerges as a predominant component instinct in one of the ‘pregenital organizations’, as I have named them. But how can the sadistic instinct, whose aim it is to injure the object, be derived from Eros, the preserver of life?” (Freud 1920, pp. 53-54). Gioia wonders what made Freud not continue investigating the correlation between love and death and to redirect them together instead. Gioia works further with Freud’s self-reflections, such as: “It may be asked whether and how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in these pages…. I do not dispute the fact that the third step in the theory of the instincts, which I have taken here, cannot lay claim to the same degree of certainty as the two earlier ones - the extension of the concept of sexuality and the hypothesis of narcissism.” (Ibid, p. 59). Through close reading of such passages, Gioia (1977) continues questioning Late drive dualism in Freud. He finds “internal logical contradictions, very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome” (Giola 1977, p.287). One of them results from the fundamental theoretical basis for the hypothesis that the death drive consists of “the conservative character of instinctive life” and, at the same time, from claiming that in the case of one of the components of the drive dualism– the life drive – “we cannot apply this formula” (Freud 1940, p. 149). Among other contradictions, Gioia finds Freud’s statement that death drive responds to the Nirvana principle, while the life drive is founded on the qualitative modification of the pleasure principle, the already mentioned principle of binding and, at the same time, being forced to recognize that the achievement of one of the aims of the expressions of the unmerged death drive and the state of pure destruction, is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of pleasure. Gioia expressed the disagreement of many Argentinian analysts of his time with the unanimously supported theories of aggressiveness when he wrote that harmful conditions are not necessarily the result of a univocal wish, but rather the interplay between the conditions of existence and the intentionalities of the subject, which one can assume are always primarily
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