Abstract

This thesis is an inquiry into the conceptual architecture of psychoanalysis, guided by the work of Jacques Lacan. The primary objective is to make new sense of Freud's hypothesis of a primordial impulse of self-destructiveness: the so-called "death instinct." The general conclusion is to identify the dualism of the life and death instincts with the opposition between what Lacan calls "imaginary" and "symbolic" functions. The death drive is thereby moved out of a biological register and reinterpreted in terms of a tension between two basic psychological functions. What Freud conceived as an impulse toward destruction of the biological organism is recast as a conflict between the defensive structure of the ego, which is modelled on the unity of a perceptual Gestalt, and the challenge posed to ego-identity by the effects of linguistic signification, by which unconscious desire excluded by the ego finds its circuit toward expression. The "death drive" effects the disintegration not of the organism but of the ego. This reinterpretation helps provide a solution to a number of key problems that Freud's biological framing of the death drive left unresolved: It integrates the dual instinct theory with the topography of id, ego, and superego. It demonstrates the continuity of the final dualism of Freud's theory with his earlier attempts at theoretical consolidation, notably the principles of constancy and inertia and the theory of the ego- and sexual instincts. It clarifies the relation of the primal instincts to the concepts of binding and unbinding, pleasure and unpleasure. It reveals the underlying coherence between the death drive hypothesis and Freud's theories of masochism, aggressivity, anxiety, castration. It shows the death drive to be the master concept by which psychoanalysis conceives the conflict between the mute force of bodily desire and its struggle toward psychical representation. It retrieves the dialectic of life and death from abstract or mythical formulations and makes it available for concrete analysis of psychological phenomena