Tendency Towards Dissolution
2023-04-11, 1:30 a.m.

Sabina Spielrein's (1912) discussion of the death drive in "Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being" pre-dated the conception of Freud's death drive hypothesis in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Her theory departs from Freud's in several key aspects. She does not hypothesize that the reproductive drive is central to the psyche of man, and she questions why the sexual drive holds positive and negative feelings. Her hypothesis provides an answer, that the negative feelings correspond to the destructive components of sexual instinct. She goes on to describe the death instinct within the sexual instinct. She posits that in the biological processes of reproduction, some cells die in order for others to grow and there is cellular reorganization as the male and female aspects merge. According to Spielrein (1912), sexual instinct has two opposing impulses, a destructive and a reproductive one, one may be more prominent than the other, but she acknowledges that all coming into being is the result of destruction. Sexual instinct, or the drive towards preservation of species, is expressed as the tendency towards dissolution.