THE PRE-WORLDLY PAST ON NOSTALGIA IN FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

• Published in: Philosophy today (Celina) 2010, Vol.54 (Supplement), p.69-73
• Main Author: CULBERTSON, Carolyn
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939); Lacan, Jacques Marie Emile (1901-1981); Metaphysics; Mind and body. Personal identity; Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900); Philosophy; Psychoanalysis; Tragedies; Writing
• ISSN: 0031-8256; 2329-8596
• DOI: 10.5840/philtoday201054Supplement49

Furthermore, one might consider the death drive in Freudian psychoanalysis to render problematic the innate-historical distinction. Since the death drive names the human's turning away from the future, converting whatever in the present might open on to it back into the past, clinging to a lost time, contracting temporaUty into the rote repetition of one moment, it also points to the loss of a historical way of dwelUng. For this reason, it is insufficient, as far as I can see, to understand the death drive simply as an atemporal structure. [...]insofar as psychoanalytic treatment and other social interventions can affect the course that the death drive takes, it would seem that it is preserved in part through factors of human comportment that are transformable. [...]exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexis), timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality - these are the characteristics which we may expect to find in processes belonging to the system Ues." Derrida claims in "Freud and the Scene of Writing" that Freudian concepts "without exception, belong to the history of metaphysics, that is, to the system of logocentric repression" (197). Because Freud talks about the "conservative nature of living substance," we would be wrong to suggest that, while the instinct for self-preservation is universal among living things, the death drive is a peculiarly human ilk.