Self-Destructiveness as a Power Move

A New Angle on Aggression Turned Inward (Vol. 6; Issue 1)

Human self-destructiveness, causing grief since the earliest history of homo sapiens, evades clear understanding. Sigmund Freud’s (1920) first theory of motivation, namely that we are driven by the “pleasure principle,” failed to explain it. The concept worked until considering suicidal persons or those who made superficial cuts on their forearms. These caused Freud and his colleagues to wonder:

Why kill or injure yourself if motivated by the wish for enjoyment?

Freud (1930), therefore, proposed the idea of a death drive, still popular in some circles. It is a ridiculous idea (Karbelnig, 2023). He believed we are somehow driven to return to the inorganic, unwittingly channeling the Genesis (3:19) story in which God tells Adam:

For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Freud believed such a death drive explained various types of aggression. If roiling excessively in the unconscious, it might be directed at the self. Or, it might be directed outward. He thought war resulted from splitting (black-and-white thinking) and projection, i.e., the enemy is bad.

Foreshadowing what would later become of this absurd idea, Freud himself hesitated to adopt the construct. He accepted aggression as foundational. He understood it conflicted with the pleasure principle. However, he equivocated about reducing it to a death drive. In a letter to his colleague, Ernest Jones, Freud (1935) called the idea “groping speculation … “until one has something better” (p. 741).

Several theories, all of them exceeding the level of “something better,” emerged in the mid-20th century (Karbelnig, 2023). The object relations theorist R.W.D. Fairbairn (1940, 1952) was one of the first psychoanalysts to reject the idea of the death drive. He knew it conflicted with the basic tenets of evolutionary biology; he believed it failed to explain aggression of any type. Like Carl Jung (1915), Fairbairn thought we are motivated solely by Eros, namely the drive to stay alive. Libidinal energy from Eros, a correlate of electricity, can become misdirected due to trauma or other factors. Aggression, then, is a perversion of Eros.