We may regard the self-destructiveness as the expression of a ‘death instinct’ which cannot fail to be present in every vital process…some portion of the death instinct remain operative within the organism and we have sought to trace quite a number of normal and pathological processes and phenomena to this internalisation of the destructive instinct.
(Freud 1933, 107)
Furthermore, Laplanche and Pontalis make the central point: recognizing in the death instinct, “a new conceptual departure:the death instinct makes the destructive tendency, as revealed for example in sadomasochism, into an irreducible datum; it is furthermore the chosen expression of the most fundamental principle of psychical functioning; and, lastly, in so far as it is ‘the essence of the instinctual’, it binds every wish, whether aggressive or sexual, to the wish for death” (1973, 103).
While Freud is sanguine and stoical, it is clear that this orientation sees the death drive as entirely connected to severe mental illness, not least the perversions of the superego which enjoys suffering (of the melancholic, the obsessional), so much so that the more you obey it and cede to its demands, the more you feel guilty. Nowhere is this clearer today than with the increasing demand to be politically correct: the more you conform the more you have to virtue-signal as the new evolving superego clings onto you.
In addition, I have already made reference to the biological phenomenon of apoptosis – programmed cell death (Weatherill 1998, 112ff). And here it is tempting to note a biological confirmation of the specifically Object Relations’ assertion, contra Lacan and Freud, that relating is primary and biological. “Modern biological findings show that cells, on their own and isolated, die for want of signals from their neighbours to keep them alive” (117). In ordinary tissues, cells are kept alive by (chemical) communication. However, all cells are genetically programmed to die under some circumstances. This is termed apoptosis. Thus, “Protista and cancers cells are immortal – they have lost the ability to die, but their very ‘aliveness’ is death bearing” (118).