Dear Walter,

I think there are two major reasons for this. The first is that in Freud's model aggression is usually regarded as subservient to sexual aims and, in this sense, is usually equated with powers of mastery that work to achieve sexaul aims. This gives temporal prioity to sexuality over aggression in most of Freud;'s model. At the same time it was not until very late in Freud's life that he opened to the position that there can be distinct aggressive as well as sexual instincts. This was after he had introduced the idea of a death instinct, itself created to make a place for aggression because powers of mastery need to reconfigure reailty to satisfy sexual aims and such reconfiguration is in the sprit of the annihilation or death of what aggression acts upon.. Psychodynamically, this probably reflects Freud's strong attachment to his mother and ambivalent attachment to his father, the former associating to sexuality and the latter to aggression.

A second reason for the trend you cite is the human disinclination to recoil from images and ideas of death and its assocaite aggression which, in the unhealhty case, leads to destructiveness rather than adaptive mastery. This is not so much about naricssim as the nature of death anxiety aitself.

"Psychodynamically, this probably reflects Freud's strong attachment to his mother and ambivalent attachment to his father, the former associating to sexuality and the latter to aggression."

I do not agree with this interpretation, as it seems reductionistic to me. It

(a) neglects that a theory does not 1:1 reflect the psychodynamics of its author (if it does so at all), and

(b) the 'Todestrieb' (death drive) has so much more to offer – especially for understanding repetitiveness in destructive life courses but also when trying to conceptualize 'normal' psychic mechanisms, especially when put in analogy to textual/language functioning. It is not a surprise that the death drive theory has flourished in France, where psychoanalysis is embedded in a more intellecutal/language/philosophic movement as in other countries.

As Anthony pointed out, there are still debates on whether death instincts are 'original' (biological or symbolic) or a reaction to (too many) frustrations in life – in the first case, the death drive is necessary, a basis for all life and only in its 'acted out' form just destructive; in the second case it often gets interpreted as the last chance of trying to stay alive, trying to get rid of 'energy' that cannot be intrapsychically held anymore etc.

I think that it is extremely important to contextualize the use of psychoanalytic terms: Are you looking at them in order to understand a patients life / symptom?

Are you using them for anthropological theories? Language theories? Theories of awareness, thinking etc.?

Are you trying to shed light on them using Freuds Metatheorie? Psychodynamically (where one cannot seriously work without economical aspects)? Structurally (which was mainly Lacan's field)? Etc.

Psychoanalysis is (a) a clinical theory, (b) a theory on 'healthy/normal' psychological functioning and ( c) an anthropological /cultural theory, as which it can comment on cultural products as movies, art and also on the basis/ necessary precondition of culture, which for many seems to be language.

Each of it has its own discourse – different thinking patterns, different term connotations etc.

Dear Anthony and Dragica, thank you for answer my question...

I appreciated both answers. However, I tend to agree a little bit more with Dragica...

Well, I will try to construct my question in another way:

As we know, since that Freud assumed the idea of a dualism between death drives and life drives, he persevered in such conception until his death, strongly opposing to any insurgent idea in favour to a drive monism. However, his effort to sustain such drive dualism within the psychoanalytic field seems not have taken effect. The idea of a drive monism seems to have gained terrain with the advent of the work of Lacan, for whom the life drives are seen as a manifestation of the death drives... In order to illustrate the drive monism assumed by Lacan, some theorists often use the comparison with a Möbius strip, a mathematical surface on which is not possible to choose two different orientations (to inward or to outward)...

So, my question here is why Lacan's drive monism has gained the simpathy of more adepts than Freud's drive dualism? Are there some theoretical reason behind this fact?Or it is only a question to sympathise with one or other viewpoint?

The motivation to my question is because I used Freud's drive dualism as a source of inspiration for a mathematical model to be used in suicide rates analyses (publications available here on RG).

I can give you no definitive answers, but I have to complicate the scenario.

From an historical-clinical point of view, the death drive is how Freud ended up explaining the problem of masochism (see Freud's paper with that title), which is something he struggled all his life long with. This is the problem of why a person remains attached to something that makes him/her suffer, even if Freud's pleasure principle would need that that person moved towards pleasure, not pain.

Now, he did not end up with a definitive answer, but made the hypotesis that an "original death drive" could have something to do with that (movements towards pain, suffering, eventually physical or psychical death...).

To my knowledge, the psychoanalytic community today is divided between those who believe that that person does not seek pain, but is somehow "attached to pain" for many different reasons (primarily Ferenczi's 1932 theory, and then Attachment theory, Lacan, an so many others...) and those who believe that there is an original, primary drive to seek pain, suffering, destructivness towards mental associations, destructivness towards human relations, destructiveness towards oneself, and so on... . These are, for example, the Kleinians, who believe that a good psychoanalysis should find these (concealed) destructive drives and "temperate" them. For some of them even an hearth attack is the result of this innate destructiveness, and eventually we will all die (psychically in depression, and physically with the death of the body) when the death instinct will get stronger than the pleasure principle.

This is not a complete description, of course, but I think it can be useful for the discussion on this very interesting matter.