BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
Between 1919 and 1921, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War Freud outlined his theory of the Death Instinct; written in the shadow of the great slaughter of trench warfare. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ Freud, who had been struggling to understand the tenacity to which some patients had clung to their illness, posited another force at work both destructive and antithetical to life, working to counter the narcissistic pleasures of being alive. As theory this always rung true for me, chiming with my own professional experience and sometimes the internal rhythms of my own heart.
Recently I have had conversations with several intelligent and thoughtful people respecting global warming, in which we talked about the Gaia hypothesis, an understanding of the world as a living organism, albeit one now heavily infected by a parasite, the species homo sapien. If it is to survive it will need to develop a way to respond to this infestation, in short to either get rid of us altogether or certainly radically cull our numbers.
When I gave my opinion that I thought our days as a species on the planet were probably numbered, this view was accepted, indeed accepted almost cheerfully. One person said that she felt the Earth would be much better off without us.
This has set me thinking and, to mix up my theoreticians, to wonder if in our collective unconscious there is not at work a death instinct that has now rejected the sunny uplands of progres in favour of the dark night of collective suicide.
Recently I have had conversations with several intelligent and thoughtful people respecting global warming, in which we talked about the Gaia hypothesis, an understanding of the world as a living organism, albeit one now heavily infected by a parasite, the species homo sapien. If it is to survive it will need to develop a way to respond to this infestation, in short to either get rid of us altogether or certainly radically cull our numbers.
When I gave my opinion that I thought our days as a species on the planet were probably numbered, this view was accepted, indeed accepted almost cheerfully. One person said that she felt the Earth would be much better off without us.
This has set me thinking and, to mix up my theoreticians, to wonder if in our collective unconscious there is not at work a death instinct that has now rejected the sunny uplands of progres in favour of the dark night of collective suicide.
