Beyond what everyone can think about psychoanalysis, the influence that Freudian theories have had on our Western culture and our worldview, which have radically changed the way we understand the inner world of people, or the reasoning to explain mental disorders, is undeniable. The milestone was marked by the discovery of the unconscious. Because it made us aware of the existence of a secret, dark and famous area, in which the most heterogeneous and contradictory forces that form our self, unknown to the conscience, inhabit us to the point of having almost total power over our conduct.

The in-depth investigation of this concept began because Freud sought the origin of neurosis and, to begin with, he saw that the unconscious was composed of two different parts. First of all, there would be everything related to our natural instinct, which operates under the principles of pleasure, and which instinctively seeks the satisfaction of natural desires and needs. On the other hand, the desires that have had to be repressed when the instinct clashes with the frustrating external reality, and that we must extract from our conscious realm in order to live peacefully and in order for the repression to be truly effective. Neurosis, therefore, would occur when we suppress our nature by avoiding pain or by fear of grief.

The consequences of these discoveries were as obvious as disturbing. If reality was opposed to the instinctive needs of people and their repression was at the starting point of neurotic disorders, it was clear who was to blame for the individual issue and the social system: society. But Freud wasn't willing to do this. He was a member of the Austrian bourgeoisie of the 19th century, and the problem was also to denounce power, or to claim the need to seek the solution of collective neurosis in the political-social transformation.

So, and that's why, I would invent the instinct of death. He revolutionized the first formulation of his theory and radically changed his view of the instance he had defended until then from night to morning. Suddenly, and based on the peculiarities (only) of its masochistic patients who supposedly sought unpleasant, it represented those unknown currents within us, formed by perverse impulses, somehow attributing people’s suffering to the very nature of instinct.

In this way, it was able to declare the authoritarian and repressive social order innocent, exculpating any responsibility it might have in the psychological misery of the people and justifying, in passing, the need for education based on the repression of our nature for the benefit of civilisation.

I wanted to bring this episode of the history of psychology to these lines, because its political implication is greater than you can imagine, and so far the hakes of this point of view that takes into account the existence of the instinct of death. We continue to give to education, the instinct of children, the role of the domination of nature and character, because we have internalized that human beings were not able to live in a civilized society. Without realizing that that's what makes us more neurotic and pathological than civilizing.

As in the Freudian era, education based on repression is only a procedure to accept the status quo, a tare that must be provoked in the human being and that, being healthy, would never accept to savor.

“And then there is no hope?” asked Wilhelm Reich. “Yes, it already exists. Only if we demonstrate sufficient dignity and courage to be aware of our failure.” Well, of course.