Psychoanalysis, thermodynamics and the matter of scarcity: A genealogy
of Freud’s death drive hypothesis
Abstract
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introduced the death drive
hypothesis, according to which “the aim of all life is death”. I trace
the genealogy of this hypothesis 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. Secondly, I retrace the history
of the concept of energy and of the formulation of the laws of
thermodynamics in the nineteenth century. Energetics and thermodynamics
are shown to have been important to the Freudian economic dimension.
Further, I show that for nineteenth-century scientists, the concern for
energy reflected a socio-economic 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.