commentary on david black: beyond the death drive detour – how can we deepen our understanding of...

COMMENTARY ON DAVID BLACK: BEYOND THE DEATH DRIVE DETOUR – HOW CAN WE DEEPEN

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF CRUELTY, MALICE,HATRED, ENVY AND VIOLENCE?

Joseph Schwartz

Any thoughtful reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle amply confirmsDavid Black’s conclusion: the properties of the death drive as postulated byFreud in 1922 bear no relationship to the drive theory of psychoanalysisbecause, as David Black notes with admirable economy, ‘The return oforganic matter to the inorganic state does not make a demand on the mindfor work; it happens reliably with or without the mind’s participation’.Similarly David Black points out the difficulties with an indirect route to thedeath drive originating in Freud’s earlier neuroscientific training asexpressed in ‘A project for a scientific psychology’, which to my mind, indisagreement with David Black, is a minefield rather than a seed-bed ofideas. And one is relieved to find that he quite rightly rejects what he callsindirect affective roads to the death drive which reduce Freud’s motivationto his feelings at the time – World War I, the dangers to his sons Martin andErnst, his weariness with life or, even and intriguingly, his feelings about theloss of Jung just before World War II. When coupled to his analysis of thesubsequent development of the death drive as a metaphor for humandestructiveness rather than as a biological reality, I think we are in a positionto recognize with him that the death drive was in fact a detour.

I think this is an important advance in our debates. It would certainly seemthat we should stop thinking in terms of a death drive but directly in termsof destructiveness. We should stop teaching the death drive in our trainings.And we should recognize, with David Black, that the death drive was adetour of historical interest, but is no longer of real psychoanalytic interest.As David Black concludes, ‘The death drive, as such, probably merits nofuture in psychoanalytic thinking’.

If we leave the distractions of the death drive behind us, we are then left

British Journal of Psychotherapy 18(2), 2001© The author 199

JOSEPH SCHWARTZ PhD is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Centre forAttachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, London. His latest book isCassandra’s Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis in Europe and America (Penguin,2000). Address for correspondence: 2 Lancaster Drive, London NW3 4HA. [email:[email protected]]

04 Schwartz (JB/D) 19/11/01 2:22 pm 99

with a clear set of problems to address around the psychology of humandestructiveness.

Our community is sharply divided on the question of human destructive-ness. In particular, I am among those who disagree sharply with DavidBlack’s view of the fundamental nature of violence, seeing rather that humanbeings have a demonstrable and fundamental capacity for violence anal-ogous to the demonstrable and fundamental capacity for language. A capac-ity is, of course, very different from the fundamental or instinctualexpression of violence. The many forms of expression of violence we canpoint to are no more fundamental to the biological organism than the exactlanguage that we end up speaking. The origin of the precise expression ofthe universal human capacity for violence is social-developmental: a neonateis no more programmed to be born expressing envy than it is programmedto be born expressing English. This is the nature of the differences betweenus. How can we begin to synthesize such divergent views?

To begin, I have never quite understood why some colleagues feel, as DavidBlack says, that ‘there is a natural tendency among decent people to drifttowards underestimating the pervasiveness of our cruelty, malice, hatred,envy and violence, our capacity to revel in destructiveness or be terrified byfears of annihilation’. Rather it has always seemed to me, looking in fromoutside the Kleinian frame, that such feelings have been overemphasizedrather than under-emphasized. I’ve often wondered whether the real ten-dency among decent people is to be far more anxious about dealing with ourdefences against taking in love while being relatively more familiar and there-fore more comfortable with the painful feelings of hate (Suttie 1988).

David Black describes this duality of approaches to the psyche well bypointing out the possible significance of the duality of drives in drive theory.‘There are a broad Yes and No in human lives, however entangled they maybe in the case of particular motives.’ As such we might say that someclinicians align themselves on the side of Yes while others align themselveson the side of No. Let us see if we can indicate a way forward out this radicalbut, I believe, superficial polarization.

Consider evolutionary approaches to understanding human violencealluded to by David Black. These seductive arguments are always with us andit is easy to understand their appeal: evolutionary arguments can explain any-thing. This is as true of the sociobiology of 20 years ago as it is of its currentreincarnation as evolutionary psychology. The disputes here are heated andrightly so (Wilson 1976; Lewin 1976; Cooke et al. 1976). When Thornhill andPalmer (2000) can succeed in persuading an élite academic publisher to publishtheir book arguing that rape exists because it confers evolutionary advantage,we know that biological determinism is alive and well in the West. Nor are theattractions of being able to explain anything in evolutionary terms confined tothe right wing of the political spectrum. Kohn (1999) has argued that socio-biology has much too much potential to be left to the sociobiologists.

200 BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY (2001) 18(2)

04 Schwartz (JB/D) 19/11/01 2:22 pm 00

These debates can be quite technical involving specialists from physics,statistics, molecular genetics, evolutionary biology and anthropology – atexture that can get lost in popularizations. When Steven Pinker (1997,p. 509) polemically asserts that war is an ubiquitous feature of all humansocieties, dismissing contrary views as the ‘romantic nonsense’ of unin-formed intellectuals, he ignores the contrary anthropological views so vividlysummarized, for example, by Jean Auel (1995). In so doing he sacrifices hisintellectual integrity and ends up simply pandering to the genetic funda-mentalism endemic in modern Western societies (Schwartz 1997). Surely wecan do better than this.

What we do as clinicians is listen and talk in a highly structured settingthat eases access to the human inner world. After 100 years of clinical experi-ence I think the basic outlines for a psychological understanding of humanviolence are actually in place.

I believe that Klein was dealing with the effects of problematic objectrelations which can lead to serious difficulties when the toddler approachesthe psychic task of separation. In one of the worst case scenarios, such diffi-culties can include the last item in David Black’s eloquent list – annihilationanxiety. This terrifying emotional state where one can feel oneself dissolvinginto the abyss is an indisputable fact of clinical experience. But, as I haveargued elsewhere (Schwartz 2000), in the 1920s there simply weren’t thetheoretical resources available to understand the fundamental significanceof the separation anxieties that Klein reported observing in children. Insteadof being able to locate separation anxiety as a consequence of a failedrelationship, a far too profound step at the time when parents were observedto be ‘mild as milk’, what was to hand was Freud’s death drive, and thesubsequent detour that David Black describes so well.

As in any human exploration of the world, Klein was not the only one tosense that something of absolutely fundamental psychological importancewas going on between infant and parent. Fairbairn (1946) was responding tothe same reality of the consequences of failed relationship when he postu-lated his famous rule: the human being is object seeking not pleasureseeking; pleasure seeking is a deterioration of object relations. Spitz (1965)was responding similarly in his study of the effects of lost objects he calledhospitalism. Bowlby (1973) was responding similarly in his exploration ofattachment and loss from an ethological point of view, and Eichenbaum andOrbach (1983) were examining the specific gender issues which create prob-lematic relationships leading to difficulties in separation. In the meantimeWilliam Alanson White (1935) and Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) weredeveloping the interpersonal strand of psychoanalysis, the US version ofobject relations which has led on to the modern relational approachesexemplified in the work of Stephen Mitchell (1988), while Stern (1985) andTrevarthen (1993) have added their fine-grained analysis of infant behaviourto show how related infants are from birth. All these workers in our field

JOSEPH SCHWARTZ 201

04 Schwartz (JB/D) 19/11/01 2:22 pm Page 201

from Klein onwards have responded to the same feature of the world evenif they understood it differently.

Psychoanalysis has made a discovery of major significance: human attach-ment relational needs are as fundamental to human development as are theneeds for air, water and food. If our relational needs are not met in a goodenough way we are at risk, in one of the worst case scenarios, of the terrify-ing experience of the annihilation of a self that never quite got going. Out ofthis can come violence and aggression. A major defence against annihilationis violence towards self or violence towards others.

We do not have to jump ship for the life raft of genetic theories. We haveinstead a far more interesting framework that tells us to look for our under-standing, not over evolutionary time scales which can answer every questionabout human life except the important ones, but over the time scale of theindividual human life, in particular, at the damage caused by uncontainedseparation anxiety stemming from a failure to meet the fundamental humanneed for relationship.

Hinshelwood (personal communication, 2000) has raised a fundamentalobjection to locating violence and its corollaries as a consequence of failedobject relationships. Following Bowlby’s terminology he asks, if there can bea biological need for attachment – a biologically based attachment system,why can there not be a biologically based anti-attachment system where onewould locate, in David Black’s framework, ‘violence as one of the funda-mental modalities of human motive’?

Yes, this could be true. But is it? Here is where, I believe, we tend to failas an intellectual community. We tend to avoid such fundamental questionsrather than finding ways to engage with them with a view to advancing ourunderstanding of the world.

David Black has likened Freud’s use of the death drive (an impossibilitybiologically) to the use of the square root of minus one ‘an impossiblenumber’ to get results in mathematics. His analogy can be developed in aninteresting way.

The discovery in the seventeenth century of the usefulness of the squareroot of minus one was so mystifying that these numbers were called imagin-ary numbers. So it was with the mystery of the death instinct. In the case ofmathematics, in the nineteenth century, it was realized that the imaginarynumbers were in fact an interesting and useful extension of the numbersystem. Whereas the real numbers were an extension of counting to includenumbers that would locate a point anywhere along a line, the imaginary orcomplex numbers were an extension of the number system to includenumbers (actually number pairs) that could locate a point anywhere in aplane. We move historically from an analogy/simile of impossibility to ananalogy of extension.

How then might we extend our system of thinking in useful and produc-tive ways? We can radically extend drive theory to include a death drive. We



can radically extend our list of basic human needs to include a need forrelationship. We can radically extend Bowlby’s concept of a biologicallybased attachment system to include a biologically based anti-attachmentsystem (Hinshelwood, personal communication, 2000). Now what?

The mathematicians of Western Europe in the nineteenth century, in aclimate of triumphal optimism where anything might be possible, immedi-ately tried to generalize the number system further. What I find interestingabout these attempts is that they found that four and only four numbersystems were possible – the reals, the complex numbers which were pairs ofreal numbers, the so-called quaternions, discovered by the Irish mathema-tician William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865), which were pairs of complexnumbers, and the so-called octonions or bi-quaternions, discovered by theEnglish mathematician William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879), which werepairs of quaternions. But that is it. Four and only four number systems arepossible (Grojnowski, personal communication, 2001). If one wants tospecify points in a three-dimensional space you can’t do it with a numbersystem.

The moral of the story is that not every extension is possible. The exten-sion of the psychoanalytic concept of drives to a death drive does not work.Similarly, I think we can rule out genetic solutions to the problem of under-standing human destructiveness. If we want to create a deeper understand-ing of human destructiveness we need to have a deeper psychologicalunderstanding of our clients. And so we come down to cases.

References Auel, J.M. (1995) The Clan of the Cave Bear. London: Coronet.Bowlby, J. (1973) Attachment and Loss. Volume 2, Separation: Anxiety and Anger.

Harmondsworth: Penguin.Cooke, A., Cooke, J., Fuller, M., Griffiths, D., Orbach, S., Schwartz, J. & Young, R.

(1976) The new synthesis is an old story. New Scientist 70: 346–348.Eichenbaum, L. & Orbach, S. (1983) Understanding Women. Harmondsworth:

Penguin.Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1946) Object-relationships and dynamic structure. In Fairbairn,

W.R.D., Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, 137–151. London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1952.

Kohn, M. (1999) As We Know It: Coming to Terms With an Evolved Mind. London:Granta.

Lewin, R. (1976) The course of a controversy. New Scientist 70: 344–345.Mitchell, S.A. (1988) Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis. An Integration. Cam-

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Pinker, S. (1997) How the Mind Works. London: Allen Lane.Schwartz, J. (1997) The soul of soulless conditions? Accounting for genetic funda-

mentalism. Radical Philosophy 86: 2–5.Schwartz, J. (2000) Cassandra’s Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis in Europe and

America. London: Allen Lane and Penguin.Spitz, R.A. (1965) The First Year of Life. New York: International Universities Press.Stern, D.N. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books.Sullivan, H.S. (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (eds Helen Swick Perry

JOSEPH SCHWARTZ 203


and Mary Ladd Gawel), with an introduction by Mabel Blake Cohen. New York:Norton.

Suttie, I.D. (1988) The Origins of Love and Hate. London: Free Association.Thornhill, R. & Palmer, C.T. (2000) A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of

Sexual Coercion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Trevarthen, C. (1993) The function of emotions in early infant communication and

development. In Nadel, J. and Camaioni, L. (eds), New Perspectives in Early Com-municative Development. London: Routledge.

White, W.A. (1935) Outlines of Psychiatry, 14th edn. Washington, DC: Nervous andMental Disease Publishing Co.

Wilson, E. (1976) Sociobiology: a new approach to understanding the basis of humannature. New Scientist 70: 342–344.



commentary on david black: beyond the death drive detour – how can we deepen our understanding of...

Documents