[lbo-talk] Re: RIP, Dr. Fraud, death drive

[RE]

I've always thought the idea of a death drive to be speculative and, worse,
a way of throwing in the towel on a difficult patient.  But recently I read
Thomas Ogden's "Matrix of the Mind," in which he argues that it might be
thought of as the mobilization of inborn responses to attack/reject what is
externally noxious/disturbing against one's own experience of
needs/impulses.  In other words, fight responses are directed inward, the
patient attacks anything that moves them out of stasis.  (This reminds me of
Buddhism.)  Why they would resort to such a self-annihilating response, as
opposed to something more finely-grained, is the big question, but for me
it's given the notion some life, so to speak.

Bion -- whom Ogden draws on -- tried to talk about a point in psychological
functioning where raw, organic impulses are given representation, and how
that process of representation might be attacked at a fundamental level.

And then there's Bert Karon, who has raised the idea that catatonia might be
a mobilization of something like a freeze response that you see in lower
animals.  Resonant with this, back in the 50s Robert Knight published a
great case report on a fellow who had pulled out of a prolonged catatonic
episode and could talk about what he was thinking, which essentially was the
conviction that if he moved his terrible rage would destroy the world.
(Recalls Anthony Perkins' final scene in Psycho, though Perkins was afraid
of being destroyed himself).

What this suggests to me is that a death drive (deriving from a cellular
entropic process as Freud speculated) doesn't exist as such, but rather that
primitive life-preserving functions can be employed in a self-annihilating
way, at least at times with an explicit protective intent.

And this is also to say that there's been a lot going on in psychoanalysis
since Freud, just as there's been a lot going on in Marxism since Marx.
Randy


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| But in a clinical setting, I just don't get how you would operationalize
the interesting points of Freud's work--ie pre-Oedipal object choices, the
death drive, etc. Moreover, I don't know that you'd want to, except in rare
cases. (Again, it's also because they would have so little purchase in a
culture in which those ideas are so constantly treated as given.) My brief
encounter with contemporary psychiatry taught me, in fact, that 5 sessions
with a therapist who's a good listener and a short stint on Paxil were
probably a lot more helpful than drawn out analysis would have been.
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| Christian
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