THE DEATH INSTINCT: SIGMUND FREUD & MELANIE KLEIN
 

Often represented as an obscure idea, the death instinct is one of the simplest concepts. It means that our bodies are continually in the process of "falling apart," or breaking down, or disintegrating if you will. No matter what regime we use to maintain our physical health, our bodies are in a continual process of deterioration. This process occurs on the cellular (biological) level, but is psychically represented. The death instinct constitutes a bridge between the physiological and mental levels of existence. 

People prefer to imagine that death is what occurs after contracting a fatal disease, suggesting that if one did not become ill one might live forever. Freud’s concept of the death instinct draws attention to the fact that our bodies are continually breaking down. As organisms, we inevitably move toward their demise.

Richard Koenigsberg

SIGMUND FREUD & MELANIE KLEIN ON THE DEATH INSTINCT

Freud conceived of human existence as a struggle of “life against death.” He observed that while organisms possess a life instinct working to “preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units,” living creatures also possess a death instinct, an internal force working to “dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic states.”

In other words, we constantly struggle to hold ourselves together--hold things together--even as we resist our tendency toward "falling apart." 

While the aim of the life instinct, Freud says, is to "establish ever-greater unities and to preserve them thus,” to “bind together”—the aim of the death instinct is to “undo connections and so destroy things.” In the multicellular living organism, the libido meets the death instinct working to “disintegrate this cellular being and bring each elemental primary organism into a condition of inorganic stability.”

Even as we wish to die, to give up the "spear-chuckin' scene," our libidinal energy rises up and compels us to "keep on, keepin' on." 

The life or sexual instincts active in each cell, Freud theorized, “take the (other) cells as their object.” They “partly neutralize the death instincts in these cells,” thus preserving their life. The life instinct, in short, acts to force or hold together “portions of living substance” within each organism, neutralizing that other force working to “disintegrate the cellular being.” The life instinct  prevents the organism from falling into a condition of “inorganic stability.”

Melanie Klein hypothesized that anxiety arises from the “operation of the death instinct within the organism.” The death instinct evokes fear of annihilation, which takes the form of a feeling of persecution. In other words, we don’t experience death as coming from within. Rather, we push or project the death instinct outward—so that fear of death returns as paranoia. The struggle to defeat death  transforms into a struggle to defeat dangerous objects in the external world.

We want to give up the ghost; to give up. The inner forces working toward collapse cannot be dealt with directly. So we project our wish to die outward, onto objects in the external world that become "containers" for our death instinct. These are the "enemies" that we love so much. That is, we love and need our enemies because now we can do battle against death by struggling against objects in the external world that seem to want to oppress us or cause us to become weak or destroy us. Paranoia enables to fight--to "engage in battle," whereas we have no recourse to the death instinct operating within.

Just as the ego attaches the death instinct to objects in the external world, Klein says, so does the ego attach to objects in the external world that become “representatives of the life instinct.” By virtue of gratification received by the good object, the organism repeatedly “breaks through states of disintegration.” “Good objects” in the external world become a bulwark against destructive or bad objects.

We listen to a great piece of music. It might be a Beethoven symphony. The piece of music constitutes an externalization of our own life instinct. Beethoven inspires us with his heroic symphonies. We resist our temptation to fall apart or to die. We are lifted out of the morass. Music as a struggle against the death instinct.

Klein’s theory, like Freud’s, evokes a world where bodies struggle against the tendency to fragment or fall apart. Like Freud, Klein conceives of the struggle to master death as the central theme of existence, observing that the ego displaces the internal struggle into the outer world.

Just as the death instinct is projected outward, leading to the creation of bad objects, so Klein believed that human beings externalized the life instinct to create “good objects.” The struggle of “life against death,” therefore, initially a conflict occurring within the organism, is transformed into a struggle between good and bad objects in the outer world.