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© The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2010Volume LXXIX, Number 1

BEING AND THE DEATH DRIVE: THE QUALITY OF GREEN’S THINKING

By Henry F. SmitH

Keywords: André Green, D. W. Winnicott, reflecting back, split-ting, being, guilt, drive theory, time, self-punishment, omnipo-tence, death instinct, death and dying.

The articles in this issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly are not grouped by theme as they have been in recent issues, but if they were, it would be tempting to title the issue “Analysts Thinking,” or perhaps “Analysts Rethinking.” Each author thinks out loud about his or her experience with theory and with clinical work in so detailed a way that they cannot help but question received wisdom; they must challenge old ideas by virtue of their personal involvement with the material at hand. In that sense, to paraphrase Freud’s comment about finding an object, every true thinking is a rethinking, and in the process we inevitably learn more than the author set out to teach us. This applies to all the papers in this issue.

Nowhere is it more evident, however, than in the first article, André Green’s controversial “Sources and Vicissitudes of Being in D. W. Win-nicott’s Work.” This paper is the latest in Green’s careful study of Win-nicott, and as he tells us, Winnicott’s writing “may be disquieting even today if we examine at close scrutiny its mixture of contradictions, short-comings, and intuitions of genius” (p. 34). Due partly to Green’s “close scrutiny,” partly to his passionate engagement with Winnicott, partly to the clarity of his discourse—in which he seems to hone everything to its essence—but primarily due to Green’s personal way of thinking things through, we understand some aspects of psychoanalysis that it seems we never quite understood before.

Henry F. Smith is the Editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

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Green’s explicit topic is Winnicott’s concept of being. Along the way, he takes us into an experience of how being develops; its dependence on the reflective function of the mother and, by proxy, the analyst; the different connotations of splitting involved; the role of creativity; the meaning of drives and their relationship to being; the experience of death or not-being; the counterfunction of destructiveness; and the living force of the death instinct, which being opposes. I say he takes us into an experience because Green’s intent is not to teach us about these things. We learn by entering into his conversation with Winnicott and with us.

Let me try to illustrate. Take the simple idea of the analyst’s re-flecting something back to the patient. Shortly after the paper begins, Green tells us about a patient who said to Winnicott, “I’ve been trying to show you me being alone; that’s the way I go on when alone.” And Win-nicott responds, “All sorts of things happen and they wither. This is the myriad of deaths you have died. But if someone is there, someone who can give you back what has happened, then the details dealt with in this way become part of you and do not die” (Winnicott 1971, p. 64).

Green comments:

Winnicott had to show the patient that he was aware of his re-flective role. So it is he, at first, who presents himself as having to send back what he heard, in order not to let the patient think that her communication dropped dead, fell into emptiness. [p. 14]

This exchange between Winnicott and his patient—and between Green and us—set in the simplest of terms, introduces Green’s thought about the reflective function as a vital aspect of how being develops in opposition to dying. Green goes on to note “a connection between dying and reflection as a form of resurrection, through the presence of the other, felt as an opportunity for survival—the other having integrated the dead fragments into a new, living unity.” These are evocative images, but it is their combination with Green’s more personal discourse that is persuasive: “I think that Winnicott was really speaking of how a being can be born from a relationship, even one associated with death, a re-lationship that may become related to the search for oneself” (p. 14).

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Without ever using those staples—clichés, really—of contemporary discourse, containment and the holding environment, Green leads us to realize that what he is calling reflecting back is much more than either holding or containing:

The person who reflects back is not only reflecting, but also sending back the situation with what has been newly integrated by him or her . . . . It is this understanding that is reflected back—not only the facts that have been communicated . . . .

The creation of being needs a person who already is. We now understand why reflecting back is so important: be-cause it stands apart from inner reality, but also looks like it in some way, though produced by another. [p. 15, italics in orig-inal]

Green is talking about matters of life and death, of destruction and survival, and of how analysts might have a hand in the latter, but once again in the most ordinary, conversational terms—he is speaking to us—which is what makes it powerful.

Green then comments on splitting, how Klein’s notion of splitting—and, separately, Winnicott’s—were fundamentally different from Freud’s, which leads him to Winnicott’s treatment of a boy who was raised by a mother who “wished him to be a girl”; more important, he was “driven to think this should be his own wish or his own nature” (p. 21, italics in original). The split in the boy’s nature illustrates Winnicott’s notion of a universal dissociation between male and female elements. Realizing, however, that the boy assumes himself to be mad, rather than that his mother is mad, and noting that he has been listening to the boy as if he were a girl, Winnicott says to him, “It is I who am mad.” The patient momentarily feels sane in an insane world.

But soon Winnicott discovers that the boy is trying to pass off his remark as just a “way of putting things, a figure of speech which could be forgotten” (Winnicott 1971, p. 75). Green explains: “Winnicott could not ‘really’ be mad, just as the patient’s mother could not ‘really’ have seen him as a girl.” And then he adds off-handedly, “In this case, the conception of splitting is closer to Freud’s description” (p. 21)—that is, the boy both acknowledges and disavows the reality of his mother’s and

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his analyst’s “madness,” resulting in a “splitting of the ego” (Freud 1938, p. 276).

Do you see what has happened? In the process of explicating Win-nicott’s evocative text, Green invites us into an illustration of splitting that makes the concept—both Winnicott’s version of split-off male and female elements and Freud’s of a split in the ego—more immediately clear than they may ever have been before. And this was not his intent. His intent was to examine Winnicott’s case for what it might tell us about the concept of being.

In the final third of the paper, Green takes us more deeply into Winnicott’s character, but again, the glimpse we have, which is startlingly alive, is effective precisely because it is not Green’s aim to psychoanalyze Winnicott. His speculations about Winnicott are incidental to his pur-pose, which in this section is to examine how being relates to not being or to dying, taking as his text those patients who threatened both Win-nicott and themselves with physical and/or psychic death. And, without Green’s intending it, we are immersed in a dialogue about the death instinct that brings the concept to life anew.

What I am suggesting is that what we learn about the death instinct—or about splitting, or about how Winnicott intervenes with patients, or about the depth of Winnicott’s suffering—is effective precisely because each of these topics appears as incidental to the main focus of Green’s paper. It is this incidentalness that paradoxically invites us into an experi-ence of discovery.

Green makes a compelling case for Winnicott’s need to repudiate the death instinct because Winnicott could not ascribe his patients’ de-spair to their instinct toward destruction rather than to his own failures. Even when the failure was his own grave physical illness, precipitating a patient’s suicide, Winnicott felt that to invoke the death instinct only ex-onerated the analyst from responsibility. Moreover, Green tells us, Win-nicott’s view was that “the idea of destruction of the object-mother in loving can be tolerated” only if there is “an environment-mother ready to accept”; that is, as Green notes, “if the prospect of reparation is at hand” (p. 25). And here Green adds, again thinking out loud:

I suppose that, instead of accepting the idea of a death drive, Winnicott reacted by introducing the being concept—that is, of

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a being that would be strong enough to oppose the temptation to totally destroy the object, or could at least help survive its at-tacks. [pp. 25-26, italics in original]

Thus the infant can have an uninterrupted sense of going on being, in Winnicott’s words, if the mother is capable of going on being. And, we might add, in the consulting room the patient can have an experience of going on being if the analyst is capable of going on being despite the pa-tient’s attacks.

Green then takes us into Winnicott’s devastating experience at the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1965, the details of which were spelled out by Baudry (2009) in the last issue of the Quarterly. It may have been an attack from which Winnicott could not survive—could not go on being—coming as it did from his colleagues and accompanied by a patient’s suicide. Green speculates that this was the psychic breakdown that led to Winnicott’s thinking about fear of breakdown.

Now Green returns to Winnicott’s view that being is separate and dis-tinct from any drive activity. And as he shares his thinking with us, he invites us into his own relationship with the drives, free of any theoretical discourse that might come between us. Again we enter a personal rela-tionship not only with Winnicott, but with Green as well, conveyed—or brought into being—through the medium of their relationship.

Here Green’s language bespeaks a lover’s quarrel:

Even if one is tempted to agree with Winnicott that being has nothing to do with drives, it is very difficult to maintain that agreement when we speak of going on being. Going on implies that we are not referring to a static state, but to a dynamic one that continues to move on forever. I cannot see how this would be possible without involving at some point the idea of a constant excitement—awareness, openness, readiness to accept and to ca-thect whatever may happen in the realm of psychic activity . . . The instinctual impulse is to mental life what the beating heart or breathing is to a living being. [p. 28, italics in original]

It is a lover’s quarrel with Winnicott because of Green’s passion for the drives. For Green, drives are the breath of life, and we cannot help but see them as he does, with his own “excitement—awareness, open-

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ness, readiness to accept and to cathect whatever may happen in the realm of psychic activity.” Now he has us with him. If he is “tempted” out of affection for Winnicott “to agree . . . that being has nothing to do with drives, surely, we argue for him, that would be so only in the hypothetical state of pure being. The aliveness of being, as it is lived, must be drive related, since being in actual life cannot be distinguished from going on being. No being, I should think, can be static unless it is so perilously close to death as to be virtually indistinguishable from it.

With death and survival, Green reintroduces us to the matter of time, a topic that has long preoccupied him (Green 2009; Smith 2009), and it is through the lens of time that he next immerses us in the experience of omnipotence, defining it in relation to time: “Omnipotence wants things to be so at once—not only to happen in the future, but immediately.” Have you ever thought of it quite this way before? He goes on:

In omnipotence, there is a belief about things happening in reality—a kind of actualization that is a creation of the sub-ject . . . . Therefore, the loss of omnipotence is felt as a catas-trophe, with a concomitant feeling of unworthiness, the failure of making things be. [p. 28]

Making things be. Although Green does not make it explicit, he touches here on the sense of omnipotence inherent in creativity, the bringing something into being—now and in the moment. Such omnipo-tence lay behind Winnicott’s creativity and also behind his failure to help his patients with their omnipotence. As Green describes the situation:

The most dangerous trap in confronting an omnipotent pa-tient is the tendency to oppose him with a corresponding om-nipotence . . . . Unfortunately, Winnicott, who knew a lot about omnipotence, could not avoid falling prey to it in his feeling that only he could cure difficult cases. [p. 29, italics in original]

The failure of omnipotence announces what may be the most pro-found part of Green’s paper:

Loss of omnipotence is the loss of the power to make things exist, and one exists through this accomplishment. Omnipo-tence is like an act of faith by which miracles happen and exist by virtue of one’s own will.

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I think this could be the meaning hidden behind suicide. The issue is not so much one’s own disappearance, but rather the disappearance of the object, which in this way is punished, helpless, impotent, wounded—and definitely annihilated. [pp. 28-29]

Here Green introduces us to that vicious circle so familiar in the analysis of extreme negative states, namely, the effort to punish and de-stroy the object by punishing and destroying the self (Smith 2008). He concludes for the moment that “being is contrary to omnipotence” and comments once more on the death drive, but he does so tentatively—with an “if”—as befits his respect for Winnicott:

If a death drive exists, its aim, in fine, is to stop this going on being—to interrupt life or relationships in the activity of the mind, which means to interrupt the movements that bring us forward, to catch every bit of experience, to give it meaning and to bring meanings together with others, which is the evidence that we are going on living psychically. [p. 29]

As he nears the end of his paper, Green speaks of a “feeling of immi-nent death,” a “danger of no longer existing that we cannot figure out” (pp. 30-31). And here he returns to the notion of destroying the object by destroying the self:

The feeling of imminent death is a phenomenological descrip-tion by doctors. A psychoanalyst could not avoid thinking of it as a victory of bad objects, being killed and wanting to kill the object and oneself in one move. It represents killing two birds with one stone in a devastating deployment of an inner force, the object and the self being reunited in a common non-being. The real breakdown lay in Winnicott’s anticipation of his own death. But as he writes, it has already happened. What I am suggesting is that Winnicott experienced a danger in his sense of being. Though we do not know what death is, we may have some feelings about endangering our being, our sense of self. This is what Winnicott prefers to deny when he expresses the belief that his patients committed suicide only because they lost hope, when the analyst fails. What he denies in my view is the urgent need to destroy everything—the object and one’s self,

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both together; they will not be separated any longer. [p. 31, italics in original]

What Green implies but does not fully spell out in this remarkably concise paper is that, in these devastatingly negative states that appear both in Winnicott’s patients and in Winnicott himself, not only is there an effort to punish the external object by punishing the self—familiar, garden-variety masochism—but there is also a more fundamental aim, it seems to me, to destroy the internal object by destroying the self, and to do that one has to destroy the person that contains both object and self. In this one act, self and object become one, merged again, as if completing the original wish to be one with the maternal object in a malignant unity in death.

Green speaks of Winnicott’s guilt toward those patients who killed themselves and speculates that Winnicott experienced guilt following his father’s death. Here we might expand on the relationship between these states of destructiveness—the death instinct, if you will—and the role of guilt. Winnicott’s need to destroy both the object and himself, which may have been awakened by the death of his father, would seem to be no simple guilt reaction. But it is in keeping with how Freud (1923) first conceived of what he called the murderousness of the superego and the death instinct that lurked beneath that murderousness. There is a pas-sion in Freud’s language that matches Green’s—a passion that is all too rare in contemporary discussions of guilt and the superego.

Here are Freud’s (1923) words on the intensity of the negative, as he sets the stage: “Helpless in both directions, the ego defends itself vainly, alike against the instigations of the murderous id and against the reproaches of the punishing conscience” (p. 53). And here is Freud’s contribution to the mutual destruction of both self and object:

It [the ego] succeeds in holding in check at least the most brutal action of both sides; the first outcome is interminable self-tor-ment, and eventually there follows a systematic torturing of the object, in so far as it is within reach . . . . How is it then that in melancholia the super-ego can become a kind of gathering place for the death instincts? From the point of view of instinc-tual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is to-

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tally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral and then become cruel as only the id can be. [pp. 53-54]

Green speaks of Winnicott’s guilt, his need to be punished for his death wishes toward his father, but that punishment, as Freud tells us, must be an expression of the very same death instinct, now visited upon himself. And so it seems that we come again to an endless circle of de-structiveness: murderous wishes toward the object leading to murderous punishment of the self, but as that very punishment of the self is itself a punishment of the object, it can only lead to more punishment of the self (Smith 2008). What a field day for the death instinct.

I remember a patient who was caught in just such a labyrinth of de-structive wishes toward her father, who had cruelly mistreated her, and her own vicious self-destructiveness. Her physician said to me, “She won’t be free until he dies.” But her father’s death brought no relief, and we can now explain why. The death of my patient’s father could not relieve her; it could only evoke anew her murderous wishes, her fear of them, and her retaliatory self-punishment. With no external object to punish, the vicious circle of punishing the self and punishing one’s internal ob-jects (the self-punishment at once an act of destructiveness toward them and a misguided attempt at reparation) continues in perpetuity. Relief can come only from a death of the self that is simultaneously a death of the object, a moment in death when self and object are reunited again.

And yet there is one other possibility, for which Winnicott holds out hope. If the analyst can survive the patient’s attacks—and, we must add, his or her own self-attacks—perhaps the vicious circle can be broken. It is this same hope for which Winnicott, forsaking the death instinct, held himself responsible. Without evidence of the analyst’s going on being, however, the vicious circle of punishing the object by punishing the self is surely interminable, until it ends in death.

We are grateful to André Green for his inquiry into Winnicott’s thinking because, in his unusually personal way, he takes us into an ex-perience of his own thinking, within which he engages us in certain en-during concepts of psychoanalysis and gives them new life.

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REFERENCES

Baudry, F. (2009). Winnicott’s 1968 visit to the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute: a contextual view. Psychoanal. Q., 78:1059-1090.

Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. S. E., 19.———- (1938). Splitting of the ego in the process of defence. S. E., 23.Green, A. (2009). From the ignorance of time to the murder of time: from the

murder of time to the misrecognition of temporality in psychoanalysis. In The Experience of Time: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. L. G. Fiorini & J. Canestri. London: Karnac, pp. 1-19.

———- (2010). Sources and vicissitudes of being in D. W. Winnicott’s work. Psycho-anal. Q., 79:11-35.

Smith, H. F. (2008). Vicious circles of punishment: a reading of Melanie Klein’s Envy and Gratitude. Psychoanal. Q., 77:199-218.

———- (2009). “The past is present, isn’t it?” Foreword to The Experience of Time: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. L. G. Fiorini & J. Canestri. London: Karnac, pp. xv-xxii.

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