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For Spilka ,”the death drive and the ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ imply in Freud a leap into the understanding that the human conflict cannot be understood in terms of an animal rationality revolving around the aim of survival… Freud reduces the importance of the unbinding–binding – which he did appreciate in play and traumatic neuroses – and instead, he refers to the specificity of a repetition beyond the pleasure principle in connection with the return of the drives that never had the chance of realization and which, for this reason, have no mnemic trace (memory) of satisfaction” (2008, pp.163-167, emphasis and explanation in parentheses added) VI. B. FURTHER REVISIONS AND REFORMULATIONS IN ARGENTINIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS Historically, revision and reformulation of the psychoanalytic hypothesis of the death drive were undertaken by Terencio Gioia (1977), with related commentaries by Ángel Garma, Carlos A. Paz, Willy Baranger and Benzion Winograd (1977). 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 focusing on the correlation between love and death, rather than separating them. 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
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