Impasses do segundo dualismo pulsional freudiano

Abstract

With the impossibility of sustaining the first dualism, Freud was faced with the threat of having to admit a drive monism. However, Freud always considered fundamental to assume a dualism. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), when reflecting on the relationship between the repetition compulsion and drive activity, he gets the concept of the death drive. In opposition to this new drive class, Freud presents the life drive and, thus, replaces the first drive dualism. Both drive classes would act with the emergence of life from inorganic matter. While the death drive would return to the inorganic state, the life drive would make the life more complex, making the death of the organism harder. However, the second dualism hypothesis presents a number of difficulties which begs the question if Freud was able to sustain this. In his work of 1920, he recognizes that the new drive dualism does not present the same degree of certainty that the previous steps of the development of his theory of drives. The objective here is, first, to analyze the theory presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and discuss some of the main problems present in Freud's argument. Then we analyzed the hypotheses developed by Freud regarding the two drive classes in later works in order to analyze how he can sustain the primarity and independence of the two drive classes in the remaining of his theory. We conclude that the impasses in the text of 1920 are not fully solved and we try to point out the main issues that remain open in the Freudian theory about the second drive dualism.