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The Death Drive: Psychoanalysis and Self-Destruction

Explore the controversial and ominous concept of the Death Drive in this thought-provoking course, offered by the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Delve into Freud's theory and its impact on psychoanalysis, philosophy, art, and society. Discover whether the Death Drive can shed light on our present moment and uncover possibilities beyond pessimism.

  • All levels
  • 21 and older
  • $335
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions

Start Dates (0)

  • $335
  • Online Classroom
  • 12 hours over 4 sessions
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Class Description

Description

What you'll learn in this lecture class:

“The aim of all life,” observed Sigmund Freud in 1920, “is death.” A century later, the so-called Death Drive remains perhaps the most controversial, misunderstood, and ominously relevant of all the intellectual legacies of Freudian psychoanalysis.

Freud first formulated the idea of a Death Drive (or Death Instinct) to grapple with nightmares both figurative and literal:

  • The carnage of World War I, which represented a bloody rebuttal of the European Enlightenment project.
  • And the symptoms of shell-shocked war veterans, whose acute suffering undermined prior psychoanalytic assumptions about the mind’s reflexive pursuit of pleasure.
The theory of the Death Drive not only compelled Freud to radically overturn his own doctrines, fragmenting contemporary psychoanalysis into a series of bitter quarrels, but also became a generative flashpoint for subsequent decades of psychoanalysts, philosophers, artists, and social critics. But what is the Death Drive? Are humans prone to self-destruction, both individually and collectively? And, regardless, does the concept still have value descriptively and philosophically, as a way of understanding tendencies in modern history and contemporary life?

In this course, we will explore the origins, peregrinations, and contemporary relevance of the Death Drive. Starting with Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we will contextualize the theory’s emergence within the context of Freud’s revised drive theory and his clinical encounters with those suffering from what we now call “post-traumatic stress disorder.” We will then track the various adoptions, reconfigurations, and rejections of the concept by psychoanalytic theorists like Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, André Green, and Jacques Lacan, and unpack its relation to their accounts of obsessional behavior, sadism, masochism, aggression, and suicidality. At the same time, we will explore how the Death Drive concept has catalyzed provocative new ways of looking at political and cultural phenomena, from the rise and durable appeal of fascism to the pleasures and dissatisfactions of consumer capitalism to the norms of patriarchal reproduction to the ruthless decimation of the natural world.

Studying texts and films by Norman Brown, Marguerite Duras, Klaus Theweleit, Pat Barker, Lee Edelman, Benjamin Fong, David Cronenberg, Byung-Chul Han, Frank Wilderson, and others, we will ask:

  • Can a theory of the Death Drive help explain our present moment?
  • Are its implications invariably pessimistic?
  • Or, paradoxically, might it illuminate the possibility of new solidarities and future scenarios beyond either compulsive repetition or the terminally grim?
This class is open to all and presumes no prior familiarity with psychoanalysis.

Remote Learning

This course is available for "remote" learning and will be available to anyone with access to an internet device with a microphone (this includes most models of computers, tablets). Classes will take place with a "Live" instructor at the date/times listed below.

Upon registration, the instructor will send along additional information about how to log-on and participate in the class.

Refund Policy

  • Upon request, we will refund less 5% cancellation fee of a course up until 6 business days before its start date.
  • Students who withdraw after that point but before the first class are entitled to 75% refund or full course credit.
  • After the first class: 50% refund or 75% course credit.
  • No refunds or credits will be given after the second class.

In any event where a customer wants to cancel their enrollment and is eligible for a full refund, a 5% processing fee will be deducted from the refund amount.

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research was established in 2011 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Its mission is to extend liberal arts education and research far beyond the borders of the traditional university, supporting community education needs and opening up new possibilities for scholarship in the...

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

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