Death instinct and “beyond the pleasure principle”: a discussion between Sabina Spielrein and Gilles Deleuze

Abstract

In an article of 1912, Spielrein presents ideas that will become fundamental to Freud in 1920: the death instinct and the assumption that there would be a more primitive psychic operation than the one governed by the pleasure principle. In the late 1960s, the philosopher Deleuze relies on Freud's arguments (more specifically on the 1920’s essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle) to conceive the death instinct as a transcendental principle. The aim of this article is to bring together Spielrein and Deleuze, who are connectedthrough the concept of the death instinct precisely at the point where they seem to most distance themselves from Freudian conceptions. Although they develop their ideas in dialogue with Freud, both Spielrein and Deleuze diverge from him by insisting on the proposition of an impersonal unconscious and on the dissolution of the self as the foundation of creation.