we should be suspicious of neuro-psychoanalysis, interesting as it is qua science, because it is the opposite of psychoanalysis proper. Lacan saw that the domain of the Real – the domain of death – is extended by means of science. Miller echoes this concern as he parodies Heidegger by proposing that the analyst should be “the shepherd of the Real”.3 ((http://www.congressoamp2016.com/bibliofalante/Bibliofalante/assets/common/downloads/page0241.pdf)) The reference to Heidegger is: “Man is the shepherd of being. It is in this direction alone that Being and Time is thinking when ecstatic existence is experienced as ‘care’.” (Heidegger 1978, 234). The editor of Basic Writings, Farrell Krell explains care in this Heideggerian sense as being involved with “one’s birth, life and death, projects, inclinations, insights, illusions – awareness of my proper Being” (ibid 223), all of which are foreclosed by the scientific method and capitalism in their deracinating effects. At the same time, new scientific discoveries, new technical discoveries right up to the iPhone are surely examples of scientific desire pushed to the extreme; we call them break-throughs!
However, with a slight shift in parallax, the death drive becomes just mundane pathology, the foundational basis for mental illness. We could not miss the critical parallax between two versions of the death drive. The heroic / tragic / ecstatic alluded to above; the one favoured by Freud and Klein that sees the death drive in quasi-scientific terms, as an extreme of the drive leading to violence, dissolution and the silence and peace of the inorganic, or at least mental torpor, unless it is redirected by the life drive into ordinary aggression. This utterly common-sense notion of the death drive, observable every day, has great clinical relevance (Segal 1993). For Freud, the death drive is linked with biology as every organism retains a desire to return to the inorganic state, to rest in peace, as we have noted. Or, as a destructive / self-destructive impulse beyond ordinary assertive aggression, a kind of narcissistic rage, a compensatory omnipotence, so visible in our post-Oedipal times in any city centre.
As Freud makes clear: