und Summaries (PDF-Download, 27 kB) - Frommann-Holzboog

ganisation des destruktiven Narzißmus zur Organisation der Hitlerdiktatur eröffnet
Perspektiven kollektiver Veränderung.
Summary
The Explanatory and Clinical Usefulness of the Concept
of Death Instinct. Discussion of Clinical and
Theoretical Examples of Some of Its Representatives.
In order to assess the usefulness of the concept of death instinct some clinical and
theoretical examples of Freud, Segal, Bion, Rosenfeld and the author are
discussed. In short, it became clear that Freud’s third theory of the instincts is best
understood if taken as basic information theory, dynamically open to the future.
Its »fusions of instincts« and »defusions« first had to be detected and understood
as they have to be clinically detected in the future. They were key concepts
without content, tasks in itself. In Freud’s hypothesis about the beginnings of life
as much as in his ideas about the future of mankind one can find the expression of
a phenomenon which Hanna Segal described in one of her clinical examples:
Under benign circumstances the confrontation with the death instinct mobilizes
the life instinct. Clinical examples of Segal, Bion, Rosenfeld are discussed. Two
main results of the discussion deserve mentioning: a discrimination of frustration
aggression from unlimited auto-destruction after nameless dread. This annihilation
dread activates the psychic death drives as attacks on linking. Frustration
aggression, in contrast, belongs to the life instincts, is aggression in the service of
development, averting premature death. Rosenfeld’s »destructive narcissism«
is an example of »fusions of instinct«. His comparison of the organisation and
intentions of destructive narcissism with the organisation and intentions of the
German Nazi state organisation and intentions opens areas of understanding of
collective destructiveness, as it opens perspectives of collective mental change.
8