Boothby, Richard. Death and Desire. 1991.
Freud dubbed the repetitive insistence of such behaviors der Wiederholungszwang the “repetition compulsion.” The mystery presented by the repetition compulsion came down to this: How and why, contrary to the rule of pleasure that Freud took to be the fundamental law of psychic processes, is the ego deliberately subjected to pain? 73
a specific will to mistreatment of the ego for its own sake … The repetition compulsion represented, in effect, a compulsion of the patient to torment his own ego. It indicated the activity of a “primordial masochism.”
Only a biological explanation seemed capable of accounting for the primordiality of the power at work in the repetition compulsion. The fact that this power was capable of overriding the fundamental principle of pleasure suggested the activity of an absolutely elemental force, even more primitive than the erotic instincts. Opposite the life instincts, there must exist a second, more basic class of instincts.
If, as Freud suggested, the death drive evidences its essential character in repetition of the trauma, then we are led to suppose that the essential activity of the death drive involves the infusion of fresh quantities of energy into the psychic apparatus, resulting in an unpleasureable increase in psychic tension. Adopting this view, we can make sense of the title of Freud’s book. The death drive is said to be “beyond the pleasure principle” because the death drive increases rather than decreases psychical tensions and thereby constitutes a source of unpleasure internal to the psychic apparatus.77
Given this initial association of the activity of the death drive with increase of psychical tension, it comes as a complete surprise to find the death drive characterized toward the end of Freud’s book in precisely opposite terms. As an impulse toward return to an inorganic state, the death drive is thought to constitute a drive not toward increase but toward reduction of tensions to an absolute minimum. It is this tendency toward reduction of tensions to zero that warranted identifying the death drive with a “Nirvana principle” (SE, 18:56). What has happened to the original association of the death drive with traumatic increase of tension? We seem faced with an contradiction inhabiting the very heart of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death drive is first identified with a traumatic increase, then with maximal decrease of tension.2 What has made this inversion possible? 77
It has long been a source of perplexity to many commentators that Freud’s identification of the death drive with the Nirvana principle makes the force of the death drive almost indistinguishable from the workings of the pleasure principle. Both the Nirvana and the pleasure principles seek to diminish tensions through the reduction of excitations to zero or, failing that, through the maintenance of a constant level of excitation. Are the death instinct and the pleasure principle one and the same? 78