Freud’s life and death drives are fused rather than mutually exclusive

Evidence

The distinction between these two drives is not a simple alternative. On one hand, as Freud often emphasizes, the two types of drive—the life drives (which include the sexual drive) and the death drive—are always fused within one another. If “defusions” remain possible, they have to begin from the original “mixture.”4* On the other hand, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, before Freud groups all types of sexual drive together with the life drives, he considers the possibility that the (“narcissistic”) ego drives are also expres­ sions of the death drive, in the sense that their aim is to preserve the isolated individual rather than to perpetuate the species. These two hypotheses therefore do not exclude one another. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 2456

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the Freudian drive mixture that grounds Malabou’s two hypotheses about brain damage and the death drive.
• XREF: connects to: Freud holds all drives are mediated through images, never pure — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 201