a high degree a drive [‘Triebhaft’] character” (1920g: 35). At the same time he makes it clear that the repetitions in question – particularly the child’s repetition of the mother’s departure – are precisely the means of binding the traumatic, “freely mobile” excitation of the drives, i.e., what he had already said in section 4, and which I flagged as requiring explanation, about repetition as somehow establishing sufficient “quiescent cathexis” to bind a breakthrough of excitation from outside, but here applied to excitation from within, i.e., to drives. Now, if the compulsion to repeat exhibits “to a high degree a drive character” and it binds drives, we have a drive that binds a drive. Are we to understand that the drive binds itself?
Leaving the question open and advancing with Freud, we finally come to the death drive. Having evoked once more the repetition by the human individual of early experiences (first partings from the mother, Oedipal disappointments), Freud waxes lyrical and, admitting that what he is about to say may “give an impression of mysticism or sham profundity” (1920g: 37), makes the extraordinary leap from these very early experiences in the ontogenesis of the individual to something much, much earlier – to a period before the appearance of any life on Earth, and to the claim that the repetition compulsion is nothing less than an urge to return to the inorganic state. This is the death drive. Freud writes:
The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first drive came into being: the drive to return to the inanimate state.
(1920g: 38)