The Death Drive Revisited: A Relational Psychoanalytic Perspective - The Site Conference 05.10.2024 скачать в хорошем качестве

The Death Drive Revisited: A Relational Psychoanalytic Perspective - The Site Conference 05.10.2024

In this presentation at the SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis Conference, I revisit Freud's controversial concept of the death drive from the perspective of contemporary relational psychoanalysis. The death drive, first introduced in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), posits an innate human drive towards destruction, chaos, and the dissolution of life that counters the creative force of the sexual libido (Eros). Despite its profound explanatory power, the death drive has been subject to widespread criticism and revision due to its speculative metaphysical nature. I argue that the death drive can be productively re-conceptualised through a relational psychoanalytic lens as a destructive force emerging from and impacting human relationships and intersubjectivity. I explore the relational origins of the death drive in failures of empathic attunement and recognition in early attachments, its defensive functions in warding off vulnerability and mourning, its enactments within therapeutic dynamics and transference, its role in pathological personality structures like narcissism, borderline states, and psychosis, and its manifestations in the intergenerational transmission of trauma.