A matter of psychic life and death: reappraising the death drive and its link to psychosis through the prism of the free energy principle

This paper applies principles and perspectives emerging from free energy neuroscience to the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive. The aim is to offer a contemporary reappraisal of this controversial aspect of psychoanalytic theory and its link to psychosis. The paper begins with a review of the death drive as proposed by Sigmund Freud, before proceeding to briefly outline Karl Friston's free energy principle. Building on proposals from Gustaw Sikora and Bernard Penot, it then explores how the combined and coordinating processes of minimising [binding] free energy and dismantling [unbinding] inexpedient generative models of reality may be understood as essential to life, growth, and adaptation. The question is thus raised: if a periodic unbinding-even destruction and demise-of generative models is vital to adaptive living, how might the death drive be conceptualised? The paper then proceeds to develop the notion that what Freud identified as the (defused) death drive may reflect a critical breakdown in the reciprocal ebb and flow of binding free energy/unbinding generative models of reality. Two illustrations-both of which concern psychotic phenomena-are given in an attempt to depict how the death drive in defused form may be recognised as manifesting both as arrested unbinding and/or interminable binding. The discussion explores how such a breakdown in the vital rhythms of life and self-organisation can sabotage the ability to think, compromise the mind's capacity to function as a container, and produce a boundless infinitisation of experience therein.