Binding is both a psychical defense and a political mechanism against dissolution

Evidence

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, binding is the most important function of the psychical apparatus, which binds the destructive external quantities of excitation in order to master them, even before the intervention of the pleasure principle. Binding is thus the mechanism that serves to protect the organism against the unpleasurable unbinding of the ego caused by excessive stimulation, or trauma. … By binding excitations, the organism defers its own death drive. Binding carries also an explicitly political meaning: by binding or bonding the individual with the other or outside in an emotional bond of identification that constitutes the homogeneous group or mass, individuals neutralize their lethal tendency to disband into a disorderly panic or all against all. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 4314

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Freud’s concept of binding as the psychical apparatus’s primary function against trauma, and extends it politically.
• SEED: The political reading of binding as what forms the homogeneous mass against ‘all against all’ opens an essay angle: how shared identity functions as a defense against trauma-induced dissolution.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from psychical binding to political bonding in a single gesture converges Freud’s death drive with group formation and panic — a genuinely paradigm-level synthesis worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Possession defends the self against the Other’s power to define it; State power depends on borrowing the bodies of its subjects — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 695

Broader Connections

• State power depends on borrowing the bodies of its subjects #expands (0.80) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 695
• Possession defends the self against the Other’s power to define it #complicates (0.75)