Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being (1912)
Everything dumb in psychoanalysis is usually corrected by a woman. Or, as in the case of Sabina Spielrein, this is reversed: her work is reappropriated, revised and then forgotten. The oft misunderstood and notorious concept of the death-drive, confounder of psychoanalyst and philosopher alike, was originally proposed by Spielrein in her brilliant paper Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being (1912). Freud cites her in footnote in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): “a considerable portion of these speculations have been anticipated by Sabina Spielrein…in an instructive and interesting paper which, however, is unfortunately not entirely clear to me.” Were we uncharitable to Freud we might conclude that what is not entirely clear is feminine sexuality itself: that’s fine; I’m not very clear on this either. And yet it may be supposed that it is precisely what the whole of the psychoanalytic enterprise revolves around—if we were being honest; caveat lector.* It is just such a world-bewildering supposition that Spielrein makes clear; as does Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Helen Deutsche, Julie Kristeva, Avgi Saketopoulou, and many others… Is this a clue?
At once Spielrein anticipates in her whirlwind paper a number of concepts that would come to orbit the sexual death-drive in the greater psychoanalytic field. Here we find in germ form: primal fantasy, oceanic feeling, the nondual unconscious, extimacy, the thing, maternal eroticism, the enigmatic message, overwhelm, generative traumatism and so on. She was 26.
The death-drive is prefigured here as a negativity and a revulsion built into sexuality. But it is an ego-destruction that gives rise to life. This as opposed to Freud’s rather more gloomy post-war death-drive of 1920, in which the “aim of all life is death” (this statement has always struck me as indifferent as it is unprovable; one might just as well say that the aim of the planet is to be swallowed up by the sun). Spielrein’s death drive is rather more maternal; what Kristeva will call in time the mother’s “passionate masochism.” For Spielrein the mother is the “dark problem:”
The sea (the ‘Mother’) into which the subject advances is the dark problem, the condition in which there is no time, no place, no opposites (above and below). It is undifferentiated, potentially creative, and, hence, an eternal living entity. The image of the sea (Mother) is also simultaneously the image of the depths of the unconscious that exists outside time, the present, the past, and the future. In the unconscious, all places merge with one another (at the source) and the opposites have the same significance. In this Great Mother (the unconscious), each differentiated image will be dissolved, i.e., it will be transformed into an undifferentiated state.
I would be remiss if I did not state the importance of this paragraph in my own psychoanalytic trajectory. Were there a doorway through which I had entered the garden labyrinth of psychoanalysis, this is it. A journey since that has traveled continually under the star of Spielrein’s oceanic feeling; I am indebted to her.
Likewise, revisiting this essay, I am surprised that my current thesis project, Nonduality in Freud, is prefigured here, as if she had planted a seed in me…here she is on the “dividual:”
“I have come to the conclusion that the chief characteristic of an individual is that he is ‘dividual’. The closer we approach our conscious thoughts, the more differentiated our images; the deeper we penetrate the unconscious, the more universal and typical the images. The depth of our psyche knows no ‘I’, but only its summation, the ‘We’.”
* Note: Freud will hint at this supposition at the end of Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937) where he wonders if the “repudiation of the feminine” is not some kind of psychological bedrock.
