A caricature (Ѻ) of Freudian death instinct theorist Frank Sulloway, by artist David Levine, for the 1996 The New York Review of Books article “The Roots of Radicalism” by Jarad Diamond, in review of Sulloway’s new book Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, on why Theodore Kaczynski becomes a “driven serial murderer”, whereas his brother, who shares half his genes, becomes normal. (Ѻ) |
“Psychology, too, felt the impulse of thermodynamic ideas, which lurk behind such concepts as libidinal energy, affect charge, and arguably, the death instinct. The lines of debate between those who do and those who do not find the second law behind Freud’s death instinct are admirably drawn by Frank Sulloway (Freud: Biologist of the Mind, 1979).”
“Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct to seek to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. The phenomena of life could be explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of these two instincts.”
“The theme of death, [that I] have stumbled onto [is] an odd idea via the drives and [I] must now read all sorts of things that belong to it, for instance Schopenhauer.”