Mad Men on the Death Drive

A bit of thoughtful pop culture to kick off our Freud blog deliberations:

In what I believe was the pilot episode of Mad Men, the 1950s advertising professionals that are the show's main characters are thinking about how to do a campaign for a cigarette company now that it was becoming common knowledge that smoking causes cancer. The company's researcher pulled out Freud's notion of the death drive, saying that really, people want danger on some level, so an effective ad campaign should play on that: acknowledge that the product is deadly but say "so what?"

Now, this suggestion ends up getting dismissed by both the main character and, when it is later brought up in a moment of desperation, by the client. (A paraphrase: "So we tell them that since you're going to die smoking anyway, you should die with us? That's crazy!")

The scene points out an obvious initial objection to Freud's idea of putting forth the sex drive and death drive as fundamental explanatory forces for human behavior. If these forces both worked overtly, then a campaign like this should actually work: just as sex is used to sell, death should work too, so long as it's glammed up as advertising is. ...And certainly this could be an explanation for the appeal of slasher horror and other forms of entertainment, but really, the apparent danger of thrill rides, scary movies, dark music, and the like is only attractive because it's actually perfectly safe for us. Catharsis seems a better explanation than any actual will towards death; we may want to go on a scary ride at Six Flags, but as soon as we hear that that ride has caused actual permanent injuries, attendance tends to go down considerably.

So if Freud wants to posit the death drive, he has to say that it's usually suppressed, and makes its appearance only covertly or mixed together with the sex drive, i.e. through the raw energy that is libido. But in this case, the empirical grounds for positing the death drive as basic become very difficult to establish. The reason why Freud posits the two basic urges is scientific simplicity, but there's no prima facie reason to prefer his account, which has to give a pretty complex story about how the death drive shows or fails to show itself, over other accounts like Alfred Adler's, who, following Nietzsche, focused on power dynamics. Remember, Freud says that we are not fundamentally aggressive; aggression is just the death instinct pointed outwards, meaning that the drive to die off, which can be viewed, he thinks, even at the cellular level.

From the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying:

This todtriebe (drive toward death) is active not only in every creature, great or small, but also in every cell of every organism. He pointed out that the metabolic processes active in all cells have both constructive (anabolic) and destructive (catabolic) functions. Life goes on because these processes work together—they are opposing but not adversarial.

I can't help but see this as an attempt at metaphor: you can't draw any conclusions about psychological drives out of cell behavior (even if Freud's account of cell behavior is scientifically accurate, which I've not researched but have serious doubts about) any more than you can get psychological drives out of an observance of the properties of the fundamental particles of physics. Freud's theory has to rise or fall on the elegance with which it explains psychological phenomena themselves, and on the face of it, his account lacks the simplicity he desires and lacks the falsifiability required to be a strictly empirical, i.e. scientific, theory.

For more on the death drive, see Freud's book Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

You can watch Mad Men episodes online here.

-Mark Linsenmayer