The death drive. A clinical concept?

The death drive does not aim at death but at a state of desubjectivation which transcends the opposition of life and death and ignores the division of the subject. It is at the root not of repetition as such but of what opposes the symboligeneous movement of repetition. It is the reverse of all castration. If it is worthy of its name drive it is because the essence of the drive has to do with loss and the impossible rediscovery. The sexual drives, par tial so far as they are objectal are in quest of forever lost objects. The death drive, total, totalising, totalitarian, is due to the subject's fundamental nostalgia for an undivided state he has never known. It is fundamentally non-violent - even if its effects can be ravaging-and its fulfills a silent necessary function in the vital balance. When it is met clinically, in its pathogenic manifestations, what are we to do with it?What can be said of it? The article first insists on the turning point of a cure: a session in which the death drive was pinpointed, thus allowing the historisation of its effects on three generations. A son is seen letting himself slide into the void under his mother's eyes: a fall into the Real exactly where the mother's position based on letting things slide, letting things go - a position which the grandmother's heart disease was not alien to - failed to be represented. A second part analyses a clinical narrative, an extract from Terre des hommes by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It demonstrates how the effects of the two great areas of the drive could be progressively disintricated and how the symbolic moment allowed them to be mixed again. The last part is devoted to a critical reading of Beyond the pleasure principle by S. Freud illustrated by clinical material.