Psychoanalysis, thermodynamics, and the matter of scarcity: A genealogy of Freud’s death drive hypothesis

Abstract

In his 1920 essay, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud (1920/1955) introduced the death drive hypothesis, according to which “the aim of all life is death” (p. 38). I shall not discuss the truth value of this hypothesis here; instead, I trace its genealogy in order to understand it as a moment in the history of modern Western societies. First, I present Freud’s metapsychology, and in particular its economic dimension, the death drive being central to this dimension. Second, I retrace the history of the concept of energy and of the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics in the 19th century. Energetics and thermodynamics are shown to have been important to the Freudian economic dimension. Further, I show that for 19th-century scientists, the concern for energy reflected a socioeconomic preoccupation with the matter of scarcity. Lastly, I argue that Freud’s relationship to energy, as expressed in the death drive hypothesis, also reflected a certain relationship of Western countries to scarcity in the era of the second industrial revolution.