Love with the Death Drive

Presenter: Todd McGowan, PhD

Love throws off our psychic equilibrium. Even the best romantic relationship disturbs the ability to sustain one’s everyday existence as one did before. It is precisely this disturbance that makes love appealing and that draws us to it repeatedly. The disturbance of love provides a unique insight into the functioning of what Freud calls the death drive. When falling in love, we unconsciously opt for a psychic disturbance that involves elevating a singular object to a sublime status and giving it sway over the entire field of objects. My argument is that this is what occurs in the death drive: Through an act that sabotages our self-interest, we create a sublime object that orients our desire as a result of its sublimity. Love is the most revelatory manifestation of the death drive, a manifestation that shows what we gain psychically from the loss that this drive enacts on us.