Aisling Campbell – Is the Concept of the Death Drive Essential when Speaking of Trauma
 
THE LETTER 04 (Summer 1995) pages 27-43
 
I put my title in the form of a question initially; that was because there is something about this Freudian concept of the death drive that always raises a question. Do you ‘believe’ in it or not? Do we really have to think about it, can’t we just take the rest of Freud’s writings without having to consider the importance of Beyond the Pleasure Principle? l The death drive is a point of doubt for many analysts; they can’t quite stomach it. It is a spanner in the Freudian works. It doesn’t fit in, it doesn’t work, so we try to explain it by means of Freud’s depression, his grief over his daughter’s...