THE DEATH INSTINCT: FREUD--and Hitler

Richard Koenigsberg

People today continually write about the "death drive," insisting that the use of the term "death instinct" was a mistranslation. Actually, the term death instinct more precisely evokes what Freud was trying to say (see below).

I've been able to understand this concept more deeply through my study of Hitler. The central metaphor that dominated his speeches was that of the Jew as a force of disintegration. Hitler imagined that the death instinct was operating upon and within the German body politic. He had projected the death instinct outward--the death instinct operating within his own body--and imagined that Germany was disintegrating. The Holocaust constituted a struggle to destroy "the Jew," symbol of the death instinct operating within the German body politic.

But there is no escape from death or the death instinct. Hitler could not win, even if he had "conquered the world." Because no matter what he did, the force of death--his knowledge that he like each of us eventually disintegrates--was operating within. It was impossible to kill the Jew within his own body.

Freud’s concept of the death instinct points to the fact that, whatever symbols human beings construct, organisms inevitably move toward their demise. Like Hitler, Freud conceived of human existence as a struggle of “life against death.” He observed that while organisms possess a life instinct working to “preserve living substance and  join it into ever larger units,” living creatures also possess a death instinct, an internal force working to “dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primeval, inorganic states.”

While the aim of the life instinct, Freud said, was is to establish “ever-greater unities and to preserve them thus,” to “bind together”—the aim of the death instinct is to “undo connections and so destroy things.” In the multicellular living organism, the libido meets the death instinct that works to “disintegrate this cellular being and bring each elemental primary organism into a condition of inorganic stability.”

The life or sexual instincts active in each cell, Freud theorized, “take the (other) cells as their object.” They “partly neutralize the death instincts in these cells,” thus preserving their life. The life instinct, in short, acts to force or hold together “portions of living substance” within each organism, neutralizing that other force working to “disintegrate the cellular being.” The life instinct thus prevents the organism from falling into a condition of “inorganic stability.”

Freud’s depiction of the struggle taking place within organisms is nearly identical to Hitler’s description of the struggle occurring within Germany. Where Freud described the death instinct working to “undo connections” and to “disintegrate the cellular being,” Hitler described Jews as “no element of organization,” but rather a “disintegrator of peoples” whose presence caused the “falling to pieces of the organic structure of the nation.” Where Freud understood the death instinct as a force working to “dissolve living units and bring them back to their inorganic states,” Hitler divined a process within the nation that threatened to “dissolve the German people into its basic elements.”

How can we account for this remarkable similarity between Freud’s theory and Hitler’s ideology? I hypothesize that both derived from observations and perceptions. Freud experienced or observed a force of disintegration acting within his own mind/body and that of his patients, and developed his theory of the death instinct, theorizing that the force working toward death emanated from the inner world. Hitler similarly experienced or observed a force of disintegration within his own body. Unlike Freud, however, Hitler believed that the force working toward death emanated from the outer, rather than inner, world. He projected his death instinct into the German body politic.

Rudolf Hess often declared at mass rallies, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.” Hitler deeply identified his own body with the German body politic. He relocated his body in the body politic, leading him to experience his own death instinct in the form of his belief that the German nation was disintegrating.

Living organisms eventually disintegrate and die. Hitler aspired to create in Germany a unique kind of organism that did not contain a death instinct—and therefore was capable of living forever. Hitler’s odyssey constituted a struggle to defeat the death instinct, to overcome the force of disintegration he imagined was working to destroy Germany. He aspired to shape Germany into an organism that would never die.