Join us in this installment to hear from David Lichtenstein and Panos Aloupis discuss issues revolving around the death drive.

On the death drive

Panos Aloupis

Drives do not exist, but it was necessary to invent them. In his 1932 lectures on psychoanalysis, Freud points out that τhe theory of drives is our mythology. (Freud, 1933a, 101).

The concept of the drive is always twofold in Freud. In the original model, the ego drives and the sexual drives stand in opposition to one another, the former oriented toward self-preservation, with the ego as their central axis, and the latter oriented toward the object, which is approached through the tools of psychic sexuality.

But then came the hard times, the war, the deaths and conflicts, and hearing about the trauma from Freud prompted him to define the second model of drives. It is almost impossible to understand masochism—a fundamental element of human existence—without the concept of a drive characterized by aggression and destructiveness toward the object, inherent in primal nature. The second drive theory, therefore, encompasses, on the one hand, the life, sexual drive and, on the other hand, the death or destruction drive. In this sense, masochism constitutes their eternal entanglement.

After World War II, psychoanalytic practice and theory engaged with the forms of traumatized narcissism, a shift that Freud himself had made, where defences are raised against the blows of destructiveness and, on the other hand, utilize the death drive to restore a silent calm. In recent years, particularly following the terrorist attacks of 2001, the concept of trauma has permeated clinical and theoretical approaches, reviving the question of the existence and functioning of the death drive, perhaps through processes similar to those that led to its emergence in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Our era, alongside undeniable progress, has experienced and continues to experience phenomena of disruptive conflicts, where denial and rejection constitute dominant individual and collective defence mechanisms. In these cases, sexuality becomes a transgressive ally of the death drive, with human lives and culture as collateral victims. Let us hope to soon rediscover the intricacies of Oedipus’s intensely impulsive, scandalous tragedy.

WHO DRIVES?

To Drive or be Driven Or Death Behind the Wheel

David Lichtenstein

A question remains unclear to me about the psychoanalytic drives and the psychoanalytic subject: Does the subject drive or is the subject driven?

If we insert the qualifier ‘unconscious’, the question becomes: Does the subject unconsciously drive or is the subject unconsciously driven?

And to focus it on the Death Drive: Does the Subject unconsciously drive towards death or is the Subject unconsciously driven by death?

If the former, the Death Drive is an inherent and formative feature of the Subject as such. The Subject as understood in psychoanalysis drives toward both life and death, toward both the object and the nothing. The drive of the subject is not only toward the object but also an eternal return toward the origin, toward the source, toward death.

If the latter, then the Death Drive acts upon the Subject. We are subjected to it and suffer the trauma of death in its various forms: the anxiety of finitude and annihilation, the deadly threat of the other, of history and of violence. The encounter with death drives us.

What are the clinical implications of the one position or the other?

Panos Aloupis: MD, PhD; psychiatrist and psychologist, full member of the Paris Psychoanalytic society (SPP), correspondent member of the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Society (HPS), Faculty member of Pulsion, Training – supervising member and Head of the Paris Psychosomatic Institute (IPSO Pierre Marty), member of the editorial committee of the Revue française de Psychosomatique. Last paper: ALOUPS P. (2026b) Discussion of self-harming from a French psychoanalytic perspective in The body and compulsion from infancy to young adulthood (Dir. Ch. Anzieu-Premmereur, M. T. Brady, Ch. Franckx, F. R. Gomez), NY, Routledge, 152-157

David Lichtenstein, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and psychologist in private practice in New York. He was a founding member of the Group for a Radical Human Science (1979) and The Après Coup Psychoanalytic Association (1985). He is currently teaching at The Inst. for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), NYU PostDoc, The Psychoanalytic Inst. of Northern Cal., and Pulsion (NY), as well as independently in New York. He was the founding editor of DIVISION/Review, co-editor of The Lacan Tradition (Routledge,2018), and author of articles and reviews.