If the creation of higher unities for Freud is the result of Eros, and Eros is inherently bound to life, we can interpret the condition of the inorganic physical world as one of complete dissolution. The world is, to say it in a Kantian term, purely manifold (mannigfaltig), devoid of unities.

The fulfilment of the pleasure principle is death, while Eros irritates it, adds tension. Each organism seems to have a limited capacity to endure this irritation until it needs to divert it again to the outside, “pass it on”, which essentially perpetuates Eros and overcomes narcissism (cf. On Narcissism: An Introduction, p. 2940; Introductory Lectures, p. 3466). We will have a closer look at this process later, but this means that the pleasure principle needs not only to be understood in regard to the death drive, but it also has a function for the perpetuation of Eros. If we had an unlimited capacity of holding tension, if narcissism never reached its limit, we would never feel the need to search for objects to inject our libidinal energy, never feel the urge to unite with other beings. At the same time, it is due to Eros that we are continuously irritated from the inside (cf. Drives and their Vicissitudes, p. 2958). This means that tension keeps getting built up in the individual being, which, once it reaches a limit, is channeled to the outside in line with the pleasure principle. Meanwhile, the latter never manages to reach its goal of zero tension (the inorganic state) due to the pressure of Eros.

All that means that Eros inherently belongs to life, and that aspect begs for interpretation. After all, Freud derives the death drive from the cosmological constancy (the continuity of the physical laws), and he might have been afraid that a cosmological interpretation of Eros would force him into a theological view. After all, if Eros “sets in” when a cell is taken as an object by another entity, doesn’t that remind us of the story of Genesis, where God took the universe as his object of creation? Yet, this connection might not be necessary. In the second chapter of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins traces back Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” to the “more general law of survival of the stable” (The Selfish Gene, p. 12). The tendency towards stability is admittedly not quite the same as Eros’ tendency towards higher unities, but they definitely share a close resemblance. In that sense, we can see that a cosmological interpretation of the emergence of complexities, life included, doesn’t necessarily contradict a scientific frame of mind. In the end, we can ask ourselves, if planets, stars, and black holes should be considered as higher unities, or if only living beings (organisms) can lay claim to that. If it’s the former, then we have a cosmological interpretation of Eros, if it’s the latter, it is “vitalistic”. Considering that for Freud, the inorganic world is one of dissolution, we should rather ascribe him the “vitalistic” interpretation, where Eros is exclusively reserved for life.

For now we can summarise the dynamics of Eros and Thanatos as such: Each living being has an inherent tendency towards self-destruction, the dissolution of its own unity. But right from its conception, libidinal energy is injected into it from the outside until a certain level is attained, where, due to the pleasure principle, the living being feels the urge to channel its libido to the outside by using another living being as its object and passing on its libidinal energy. That way, the object’s tendency towards self-destruction is neutralised. This is all very abstract, and we’ll understand it better once we get a bit more specific.

Learning to love

To do so, we don’t even have to change too much, we just need to remind ourselves that Eros is the God of love. Sure, in regard to what we’ve worked out above, we can’t forget that the two fundamental drives are both impersonal and operate mostly without us being aware of them; but after all, as Freud says himself, their interplay can be observed in all phenomena of life. All in all, even though Eros is the force that continuously creates higher unities, the prime examples for that process are still love and sexuality.

In view of love’s role in our personal development, we can observe that we learn how to love very late, and that we merely want to be loved in our infancy. After all, it is the feeling of being worthy of love, of someone caring about our survival that neutralises the death drive, as our suicidal tendencies often come along with a feeling of being unloved. The passivity of being-loved (Geliebtwerden) by our parents and surroundings that care about us and keep us safe precedes the activity of “giving back” and a certain development needs to occur before we are able to share our love to other subjects or objects, when we learn active cathexis. In Freudian theory, this is not understood as a simple switch from passivity to activity, and the economical interpretation that we’ve mentioned above, of our libidinal capacity merely reaching its limit, is somehow insufficient when describing our personal development. Rather, when we actually start loving on our own, it is parts of our own body that become the object of our attention (autoeroticism), so that we first develop “a pure pleasure-ego” (Lustich) while projecting displeasure to the outside world (Civilisation and its Discontents, p. 4467).

What causes this change? While we are being-loved perpetually in the womb, where all our desires are met, after birth these processes are bound to certain conditions. For example, the baby needs to cry for the mother’s breast as to satisfy its need for hunger. Satisfaction is now dependent on external objects, and we start loving our own body to compensate that, as a means of being-loved without depending on others. That way, we start loving to satisfy our need of being-loved; this is called secondary narcissism. This again confirms that the passivity of being-loved goes before the activity of loving, or, in other words, that Eros comes to us first from the outside.

To really confirm this latter aspect, we can take a closer look at our first “encounter” with Eros, which is in the womb. In the relation of the mother to the embryo, we could say that the embryo is permanently being-loved by the mother, so that its death drive is neutralised and it continues to grow. Meanwhile, the nourishing mother’s body takes the embryo as its object and is interested in its survival, in an act of purely active loving. The embryo itself is completely narcissistic in the sense that it feels fully satisfied in its pure passivity. It is after birth, which Freud describes as a traumatic experience and as the original experience of fear (Angst) (cf. the footnote in The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 856; Introductory Lectures, p. 3445), that this absolute passivity is disturbed. As we have mentioned, the mother’s breast is not as unconditionally available as the womb, it needs to be summoned by crying. This development is advanced when the child learns that the conditions of being-loved are bound to certain rules, so that it needs to behave in a certain way to please its parents and submit to their interdictions (for example, the incest prohibition, which we’ll talk about in a few moments).

Displacement and the definition of “drive”

The aspect of inhibition brings us to a central point of the theory of drives, namely that both Eros and Thanatos need to be displaced. Displacement occurs whenever the direct route to satisfaction is somehow blocked and we need to find other ways to release the tension that is built up in us. Here, the whole activity of the unconscious comes into play: displacing, repressing, disguising, densifying. The direct satisfaction of the death drive, which strives for the abolition of unities, would be the immediate self-destruction of the organism. Because it is a fundamental drive that originates within us, we can never get rid of it. This means that the organism needs to find other ways to avoid it from harming it, while still somehow satisfying the death drive. But the case isn’t as clear with Eros, the drive that desires the creation of higher unities. After all, don’t we satisfy Eros directly if we form sexual relationships, families, societies? In what way can we say that Eros needs to be displaced and inhibited?

It all boils down to the definition of the drive. Freud posits that drives are essentially conservative, that they have the need to restore a previous condition (cf. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 3740; The Ego and the Id, p. 3974; Civilisation and its Discontents, p. 4509). In that sense, founding the fundamental development of life and culture on drives stands in contrast to theories that are built on the will as a positive and often unexplainable strive towards the future. Freud denies the existence of such a creative force. Either way, this definition works quite smoothly with the death drive. If the latter is all about restoring the inorganic condition by abolishing all unities, we can indeed see how it is conceptualised as a return, as a repetition. The death drive arises when the primal inorganic condition is somehow disrupted by the genesis of life and the whole intention is to return that condition, to repeat it.

But if Eros is a fundamental drive, then the element of repetition must pertain to it as well. As we’ve seen above, this isn’t intuitive, as Eros is after all a productive force; the higher unities that it creates are genuinely new. Before we tackle this problem, let us note that if Eros is a drive — and Freud insists on that — , then we will have to assume two forms of repetition, one for each fundamental drive, and we can assume that one of them will be a productive repetition, pertaining to Eros creating higher unities, and one of them will be destructive, pertaining to Thanatos destroying those unities and approaching the inorganic condition.

We already know what Thanatos wants to repeat, and we know how it does that — by using the pleasure principle to constantly reduce irritation. If we ask the same thing about Eros, we need to note that it seems that Freud never really managed to resolve this problem for himself either (cf. the footnote in Civilisation and its Discontents, p. 4509). We can see why it is problematic: If Eros is the force that permanently creates higher unities, in what way can it be really understood as a repetition? What condition does Eros want to restore? Much rather, it seems future-oriented than aiming at a primal condition. Still, Freud insisted on understanding Eros as a drive (and not as some positive force), and explicitly poses the question of its repetition close to the ending of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Instead of answering it directly, he sidesteps and refers to the myth that Aristophanes conjures in Plato’s Symposium. It is the famous myth that in the beginning of creation, all humans were double beings with two heads, four arms and four legs and two genitals that were then cut apart by Zeus and which then desired to reunite with each other. If, therefore, we were indeed initially created as double beings, then the quest of uniting with a loved one is indeed “conservative”, as it desires to restore a past condition. But it is hardly the case that Freud wanted to sell us the idea of soulmates, and the passages that follow the retelling of the myth (and others where he tries to reply to that problem) are quite obscure.

After retelling Aristophanes’ myth, Freud asks: “Shall we follow the hint given us by the poet-philosopher, and venture upon the hypothesis that living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through the sexual drives?” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 3759). Before answering this question, Freud abandons his speculations, and we might understand why he does so in light of the answer his question seems to imply. It seems that Freud wasn’t really sure about the whole thing either. In another place, Freud proposes that what Eros wants to restore (repeat) is the primary narcissism at the mother’s breast, which is “the first object of the sexual drive” (Introductory Lectures, p. 3385), where the ego drives and the sexual drives aren’t differentiated yet, where all desires are met (cf. ibid.). But as he himself admits, the breast is not always at hand, and the baby already feels displeasure.

We might therefore feel inclined to go a bit beyond Freud, trying to think through what is only implied in his texts. After all, if Thanatos intends to repeat its primal inorganic condition, why shouldn’t Eros strive to repeat its own primal condition, namely where the individual being was first “injected” with Eros —its conception, where it first “appeared” in the mother’s womb? Freud often speaks of the womb as the place of primary narcissism, a condition that we want to repeat when going to bed every night (cf. Introductory Lectures, p. 3190). In contrast to the situation on the mother’s breast, which is not always available to the baby, there is no conditionality or lack in the womb, and all fundamental desires are perfectly met (this might, of course, not always be empirically the case). If Eros is a drive, and by being a drive it desires to restore a past condition, and, moreover, Eros is the drive that desires the creation of higher unities, why wouldn’t it desire the first higher unity that it has experienced as a living human being, a higher unity in which it was perfectly satisfied, loved unconditionally, namely in the mother’s womb?

The first thing to note here is that this not only answers the question of why Eros is to be understood as a drive, but also why it necessarily needs to be displaced. After all, it is physically impossible for us to return into the womb, and if this desire is to be met, deviations need to be found that will offer it a worthy alternative, a similar satisfaction. We can see this happening in regard to a part of Freudian theory that is perplexing the readers even today, namely the Oedipus complex and the sexual desire of the son for his mother. In itself, this desire remains a mystery, especially since Freud posits an original bisexuality of all humans, in view of which it would be equally plausible for the son to desire his father. If, on the other hand, the original libidinal desire is the return into the womb, then we can understand the sexual desire for one’s mother as an already displaced version of this desire: The incest as an alternative way of entering the womb (That would also change the interpretation of the Oedipus complex for the girl, which Freud claims desires the father and wants to make a child for him. We won’t follow the implications here, but the question is pertinent). We can see in this displacement already a change from the mere passivity of the womb to the active sexual desire, and it is in that sense that the Oedipus complex might play an important role in overcoming the merely passive wish of being-loved.

Displacing the primal condition

Regarding the question of what it is that the two drives want to repeat (which condition they want to reinstate), we can note another interesting displacement. The death drive repeats not only a prenatal, but even a “pre-conceived” condition, i.e. a condition where the individual being wasn’t even conceived yet, because as soon as it is in the womb, it is no longer purely inorganic. The death drive in us strives to reinstate something that we never have experienced, a situation where we weren’t in the world yet. Eros, on the other hand, repeats a prenatal condition, but one where we’re already conceived, a condition therefore that we have indeed experienced (even though in an extremely rudimentary form). In short, the death drives repeats an unreal condition (one that it has never experienced) while Eros repeats a real condition (the one in the womb). At the same time, the death drive ends up in a real condition (we become inorganic after our death), while Eros does not (we don’t return to the womb). One might therefore speculate that the ideas of a blissful afterlife, where the soul rests in the presence of God, is an unreal phantasy that intends to fulfil the desire of Eros for repetition by imagining an analogous situation to the womb. It makes sense in this regard that Freud ascribes the “oceanic experience”, one that some religious people describe as a feeling of infinite connection with the world, to the infantile condition where our feeling of I (Ichgefühl) wasn’t established yet (cf. Civilisation and its Discontents, ch.1). Just as the embryonic condition was about a passive integration within a higher unity, the otherworldly bliss portrays a higher unity with God. In short, while the death drive repeats an unreal condition with a real one, Eros repeats a real condition with an unreal one. Both repetitions are inherently displaced.

We might still not be convinced about the repetition of Thanatos being “unsuccessful” (displaced). After all, returning to the inorganic state is exactly what it wants and exactly what it does after we die. We might ask ourselves here, if the inorganic state before our conception is really congruent with the inorganic state after our death. The difference can be seen in the suicidal wish, which is not merely about ending the pain and disappearing from the world, but to never have existed in the first place. This is not only due to the wish of not harming the loved ones with one’s suicide, but also of undoing all the things that have made one’s live so burdensome. Yet, while the desire of not existing anymore is not only possible, but will necessarily come to its fulfilment, the desire of never having existed is impossible. We cannot undo our existence and the changes that we have made in this world. If this really makes a difference or not — we are not really in a position to answer that. But the aspect which would cause the difference between the inorganic state before our birth and the one after our death, is individuation. Before our birth, there was not a trace of us in the world, while after our death, we had been in it, even if only for a short time.

If individuation causes the potential displacement of the death drive, we can say the same about Eros. After all, it is due to us becoming individual beings that we can no longer return to the womb, as there we were completely dissolved in a higher unity. The individual is by its very nature a distinct entity, separated from the world, which means that a complete passive dissolution is impossible for it as long as it is alive. Even the mythical experience needs to assume a subject that makes that experience. If we accept this interpretation, then it can be said that Eros and Thanatos are necessarily displaced due to individuation, due to the individual’s independence and freedom to change its surrounding. The separation of the individual from its surroundings gives it the minimal difference of having been. This inhibits its total dissolution in the dissociated inorganic matter and in a higher cosmological order. After all, can we really experience bliss in the presence of God, if our individuality has been completely dissolved?