Freudian Theory

Freudian theory is a covering term for work in a variety of fields that use key components drawn from Sigmund Freud's conceptual framework. It is not obvious just how Freudian a theory has to be in order to qualify. Freudian theory is linked to the themes of death and dying through Freud's later work, in particular Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in which he advanced and then developed the controversial claim that humans have a death instinct (Todestriebe).

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) Freud had little to say about death. In this book Freud treats dreams as representations of the fulfillment of wishes and holds that this provides a pathway toward an understanding of the unconscious. The wishes that are fulfilled in dreams are taken to be, in many cases, sexual in nature, albeit their sexual content tends to be latent or disguised. Wishes are fulfilled in dreams because they cannot be allowed to dominate waking life. In this way, desires of a problematic sort are held in check. However, the relation between desires and constraint or repression is a complex one. We are more likely to have our desires gratified if we can at least delay their fulfillment. Our lives are structured by a pleasure principle and a reality principle, with the latter constraining the former. The reality principle tolerates delays and can redirect our energies into other channels. Dangerous or socially unacceptable desires are repressed and resurface in other guises.

Patterns of repressed and concealed desire become sedimented during infancy and then exert an influence in later life. Most notoriously, a normal pattern of sexualized male attachment to the mother and rivalry with the father can shape an entire life. Explanations of this sort focus upon personal history. They appeal to the idea that humans are the product of their past. That is, they appeal to prior causes rather than end states. Part of the role of therapy is to exert some control over the often unacknowledged influence of the past by bringing it to light. Insofar as death lies in the future, this approach leaves no room for death to play a significant role. Desires of a sexual nature become sedimented in infancy because infants are (in some broad sense) already sexual beings. Desires concerning death cannot do so because children, according to Freud, have no real grasp of death. Children equate death with someone having “gone away.” For death to become significant, it would have to amount to a return to some prior condition.

The Death Instinct

Whatever the limitations and problems of Freud's early approach, the idea of the unconscious opened up an important possibility. If our mental life is not transparent, then we may be covertly drawn toward death even while consciously professing hostility and alarm at the prospect. There are some indications that Freud was already leaning toward this view prior to World War I. Immediately after the conflict he published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he claimed that the pleasure principle and the reality principle were not deeply opposed to each other because both ultimately operated in the service of the reduction of tension. Both were geared toward the same end.

...