The Death Instinct

Apparently, Freud himself proposed something that hinted in the direction of a true explanation of (psychic) repetition -- the Death Instinct.  I found this suggestion a bit surprising, but then I haven't read enough Freud to know where and why he introduced the Death Instinct.  I only vaguely remember that it played some role in Civilization and Its Discontents, which was already a late book pretty far afield from psychological case studies.  But apparently it was introduced to account for repetitive phenomena in his aptly named Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 

Not knowing a lot about Freud's theory, I found this section that introduces the Death instinct (pg. 15-19) to be tough sledding at first.  It does seem interesting to ask why schizophrenics and other psych-ward types often have repetitive and obsessional gestures and phrases.  As per the last post, we might look here for understanding how our own "normal" habits work.  But how repetition is related to death is related to masks was not immediately apparent.

I found the way in was through trying to make sense of these counter-intuitive claims:

I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. I repress, because I can live certain things or certain experiences only in the mode of repetition. I am determined to repress whatever would prevent me from living them thus: in particular, the representation which mediates the lived by relating it to the form of a similar or identical object.

These lines are meant to jar our sense of paradox.  We normally imagine that we repress some painful childhood incident because we don't want to remember that pain.  Forgetting the incident dooms us to repeat it though, since what has really been lost is not the incident itself, but just our conscious reckoning with it.  Subconsciously, it continues to influence our behavior and we end up repeating the same situation.  This is the sort of thinking we use to explain why children who were beaten by alcoholic parents go on to themselves become alcoholics who beat their children.  

How could this story be reversed though?  The opposite direction doesn't seem to make sense.  I forget because I repeat?  Think about what actually happens on the inside of this experience though.  Think about your own experience of repression and forgetting and not the experience of someone lying on your therapeutical chaise.   What actually seems to happen when we repress is that we encounter a situation that somehow triggers the same response we had to an old one.  If we are very conscious of exactly how this triggering works and exactly how it drives our feelings, we may remember what happened, and connect that past trauma to the present moment.  But mostly we're not.  Conscious that is.  What we actually do is try to spare ourselves the memory of that earlier pain by blocking out the similarity between the past and the present.  In other words we try to live the present as if it were for the first time even though this dooms us to repeat exactly our earlier response to the trigger.  The repression is a way to disconnect the past from the present.  We repeat because we want to repress, not because we've just accidentally forgotten what happened, or somehow don't happen to consciously realize that the same thing is happening again.  

Freud noted from the beginning that in order to stop repeating it was not enough to remember in the abstract (without affect), nor to form a concept in general, nor even to represent the repressed event in all its particularity: it was necessary to seek out the memory there where it was, to install oneself directly in the past in order to accomplish a living connection between the knowledge and the resistance, the representation and the blockage. We are not, therefore, healed by simple anamnesis, any more than we are made ill by amnesia. Here as elsewhere, becoming conscious counts for little. The more theatrical and dramatic operation by which healing takes place - or does not take place - has a name:. transference.

In order to really remember and process the past, in order to live the present as a repetition, we have to work through a reenactment of it in what is essentially a little theatrical procedure.  If we repeat in an effort to forget, we can only remember through repetition as well.  This is the only way we can understand how the triggers of the present and past are related and how they set into motion the same mechanism or process of our response.  

The mechanism here is us though!  Our very selves and identity.  Our habits and patterns.  Which immediately opens another question that hides behind our adult repressions -- why was the original memory so painful?  Why did we experience it this way to begin with?  Should we think that even the "original" feeling was a repetition designed to help us forget something even further back?

For when Freud shows -beyond repression 'properly speaking', which bears upon representations -the necessity of supposing a primary repression which concerns first and foremost pure presentations, or the manner in which the drives are necessarily lived, we believe that he comes closest to a positive internal principle of repetition. This later appears to him determinable in the form of the death instinct, and it is this which, far from being explained by it, must explain the blockage of representation in repression properly speaking.

 This even deeper question leads us in the direction of evolution, and towards the question of how evolution invented pleasure for its own purposes of survival.  But is this why experience needs to feel any way at all?  Sociobiology has a tendency to graze this question without really investigating it.  We fear non-conformity because for our ancestors being ostracized from the group meant death.  Sex is fun because we're really just vehicles for our genes to replicate.  These only sound like explanations.  They don't tell us why there would be anything like fun to begin with.  In this sense I can see how we are in need of something kinda weird like a Death Instinct, or at least something that would truly be beyond the pleasure principle because it need to found it.  As Nozick once said of the tricky question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" -- if you think you have an answer, you probably didn't understand the question.