AT Psychoanalysis K - Michigan 7 2023 BFHGR

Aff Answers
2ac death drive
There’s no utility in embracing the death drive—it just reinforces things that already suck
Robinson 5 [Andrew, PhD in political theory at the University of Nottingham, Theory and Event, 8/1, “The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique”, projectmuse]
Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis makes clear the myths which underlie it. 'Psychoanalysis transforms and deforms the unconscious by forcing it to pass through the grid of its system of inscription and representation. For psychoanalysis, the unconscious is always already there, genetically programmed, structured, and finalized on objectives of conformity to social norms'104. Similarly, Reich has already exposed a predecessor of the idea of "constitutive lack" - the Freudian "death instinct" - as a denial that "I don't know". It is, he says, a metaphysical attempt to explain as yet inexplicable phenomena, an attempt which gets in the way of fact-finding about these phenomena105. He provides a detailed clinical rebuttal of the idea of the "death instinct" which is equally apt as an attack on Lacanians (who seem unaware of Reich's intervention). In Reich's view, the masochistic tendencies Freud associates with the "death instinct" are secondary drives arising from anxiety, and are attributable to 'the disastrous effect of social conditions on the biopsychic apparatus. This entailed the necessity of criticizing the social conditions which created the neuroses - a necessity which the hypothesis of a biological will to suffer had circumvented'106. The idea of the "death instinct" leads to a cultural philosophy in which suffering is assumed to be inevitable, whereas Reich's alternative - to attribute neurosis to frustrations with origins in the social system - leads to a critical sociological stance107. The relevance of Reich's critique to the political theory of constitutive lack is striking. The "death instinct" is connected to an idea of primordial masochism which, in the form of "aphanisis" or "subjective destitution", recurs throughout Lacanian political theory. Zizek in particular advocates masochism, in the guise of "shooting at" or "beating" oneself, as a radical gesture which reveals the essence of the self and breaks the constraints of an oppressive reality108, although the masochistic gesture is present in all Lacanian theorists. The death instinct is typified by Zizek as a pathological (in the Kantian sense), contingent attitude which finds satisfaction in the process of self-blockage109. It is identical with the Lacanian concept of jouissance or enjoyment. For him, 'enjoyment (jouissance) is not to be equated with pleasure: enjoyment is precisely "pleasure in unpleasure"; it designates the paradoxical satisfaction procured by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium of the pleasure principle. In other words, enjoyment is located "beyond the pleasure principle"'110. It is also the core of the self, since enjoyment is 'the only "substance" acknowledged by psychoanalysis', and 'the subject fully "exists" only through enjoyment'111. Primordial masochism is therefore central to the Lacanian concept of the Real, which depends on there being a universal moment at which active desire - sometimes given the slightly misleading name of the "pleasure principle" - is suspended, not for a greater or delayed pleasure, but out of a direct desire for unpleasure (i.e. a primary reactive desire). Furthermore, this reactive desire is supposed to be ontologically prior to active desire. Dominick LaCapra offers a similar but distinct critique to my own, claiming that Lacanian and similar theories induce a post-traumatic compulsion repetition or an 'endless, quasi-transcendental grieving that may be indistinguishable from interminable melancholy'112. Reich has already provided a rebuttal of "primordial masochism", which, paradoxically given Zizek's claims to radicalism, was denounced by orthodox Freudians as communist propaganda. In Reich's view, masochism operates as a relief at a lesser pain which operates as armouring against anxiety about an underlying trauma113. Regardless of what one thinks of Reich's specific account of the origins of masochism, what is crucial is his critique of the idea of a death drive. 'Such hypotheses as are criticised here are often only a sign of therapeutic failure. For if one explains masochism by a death instinct, one confirms to the patient his [sic] alleged will to suffer'114. Thus, Lacanian metaphysics conceal Lacanians' encouragement of a variety of neurosis complicit with oppressive social realities. Politically, the thesis of primordial masochism provides a mystifying cover for the social forces which cause and benefit from the contingent emergence of masochistic attachments (i.e. sadistic power apparatuses). One could compare this remark to Butler's claim that Zizek 'defends the trauma of the real... over and against a different kind of threat'115.
Studies don’t support death drive—replicable tests are impossible, variables are too vague to operationalize
Holowchak 12 [Andrew, teaches Philosophy at Rider University. When Freud (Almost) Met Chaplin: The Science behind Freud's "Especially Simple, Transparent Case" Project Muse]
The problem is that psychoanalytic concepts (e.g., "super-ego," "Oedipus complex," and "death drive"30 ), unlike them of say physics ("electron," [End Page 67] "muon," and "quark"), are logical constructs that have not been corroborated by precise observations and replicable tests. Hence Freud's logical constructs as proto-concepts are not even adequate as working hypotheses. As early as 1934, J. F. Brown, who claimed he was in sympathy with Freud's new science, urged, "But, and here almost all critics of psychoanalysis are in agreement, the theory has never been precise enough to allow formulation of working hypotheses for which adequate experimental situations could be found" (1933, p. 333). He went on to acknowledge, perhaps somewhat prophetically, given the amount of attention Freud gets today in philosophy of mind, "Freud's discoveries probably are the most striking and original contributions made to the science of mind in our time." He added, in a manner that vitiates the compliment, that Freud is more prophet than scientist—more Bruno than Galileo (1933, p. 226).
Freud was aware of that. His own view of the concepts of psychoanalysis is ambivalent. At times, he shows impatience and becomes intolerant of his critics. "Only in psychology [is obscurity not tolerated]; here the constitutional incapacity of men for scientific research comes into full view. It looks as though people did not expect from psychology progress in knowledge, but some other kind of satisfaction; every unsolved problem, every acknowledged uncertainty is turned into a ground of complaint against it" (1916–7, S.E., XXII: 6). At other times, Freud seems to agree with his critics. In "Autobiographical Study," when he mentions difficulties with "compulsion to repeat," he adds:
Although it arose from a desire to fix some of the most important theoretical ideas of psycho-analysis, it goes far beyond psychoanalysis. I have repeatedly heard it said contemptuously that it is impossible to take a science seriously whose most general concepts are as lacking in precision as those of libido and of drive in psychoanalysis.
(1925, S.E., XX: 57)
In "Why War?," Freud writes to Einstein in a manner to explain his ambivalence: "It may perhaps seem to you [Einstein] as though our theories are a kind of mythology and, in the present case, not even an agreeable one. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this?" (1933, S.E., XXII: 211)
In sum, the bedrock concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis are conceptually indeterminate. That means that the fundamental principles of Freudian psychoanalysis are conceptually indeterminate and, thus, obscure or meaningless. Unfortunately, as we have seen, Freud was evasive when it [End Page 68] came to the question of the status of the bedrock concepts of psychoanalysis and even said that psychoanalysis, with the exception of "repression" and "unconscious," could do just as well without them31 (1914, S.E., XIV: 16; 1925, S.E., XX: 32–3). Without referents to the concepts he employs so significantly, Freud is writing gobbledygook.
A related difficulty is conceptual change. Freud, as a scientist, was committed to conceptual flexibility, insofar as his postulates were avowedly data-driven. Nonetheless, many of the conceptual changes he made—e.g., his rejection of his Seduction theory and his adoption of the death drive and structural model—were prompted more by theoretical difficulties than they were driven by observational data. In addition, Freud surrounded himself with lackeys, albeit intelligent lackeys, that allowed him, as founder of psychoanalysis, the privilege of being final arbiter on issues of conceptual change within psychoanalysis.32
2ac death k
Affirming survival doesn’t devalue life – life is complex and malleable and can be celebrated even when it seems oppressive
Fassin, 10 - James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, as well as directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. (Didier, Fall, “Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach to the Politics of Life” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Vol 1 No 1, Project Muse)
Conclusion
Survival, in the sense Jacques Derrida attributed to the concept in his last interview, not only shifts lines that are too often hardened between biological and political lives: it opens an ethical space for reflection and action. Critical thinking in the past decade has often taken biopolitics and the politics of life as its objects. It has thus unveiled the way in which individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by powers, the market, or the state, during the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era.
However, through indiscriminate extension, this powerful instrument has lost some of its analytical sharpness and heuristic potentiality. On the one hand, the binary reduction of life to the opposition between nature and history, bare life and qualified life, when systematically applied from philosophical inquiry in sociological or anthropological study, erases much of the complexity and richness of life in society as it is in fact observed. On the other hand, the normative prejudices which underlie the evaluation of the forms of life and of the politics of life, when generalized to an undifferentiated collection of social facts, end up by depriving social agents of legitimacy, voice, and action. The risk is therefore both scholarly and political. It calls for ethical attention.
In fact, the genealogy of this intellectual lineage reminds us that the main founders of these theories expressed tensions and hesitations in their work, which was often more complex, if even sometimes more obscure, than in its reduced and translated form in the humanities and social sciences today. And also biographies, here limited to fragments from South African lives that I have described and analyzed in more detail elsewhere, suggest the necessity of complicating the dualistic models that oppose biological and political lives. Certainly, powers like the market and the state do act sometimes as if human beings could be reduced to “mere life,” but democratic forces, including from within the structure of power, tend to produce alternative strategies that escape this reduction. And people themselves, even under conditions of domination, [End Page 93] manage subtle tactics that transform their physical life into a political instrument or a moral resource or an affective expression.
But let us go one step further: ethnography invites us to reconsider what life is or rather what human beings make of their lives, and reciprocally how their lives permanently question what it is to be human. “The blurring between what is human and what is not human shades into the blurring over what is life and what is not life,” writes Veena Das. In the tracks of Wittgenstein and Cavell, she underscores that the usual manner in which we think of forms of life “not only obscures the mutual absorption of the natural and the social but also emphasizes form at the expense of life.”22 It should be the incessant effort of social scientists to return to this inquiry about life in its multiple forms but also in its everyday expression of the human.
Death reps cause an empathic shift---this is especially crucial in the context of policy advocacy simulations
Recuber 11 Timothy Recuber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City. University of New York. He has taught at Hunter College in Manhattan "CONSUMING CATASTROPHE: AUTHENTICITY AND EMOTION IN MASS-MEDIATED DISASTER" gradworks.umi.com/3477831.pd
Perhaps, then, what distant consumers express when they sit glued to the television watching a disaster replayed over and over, when they buy t-shirts or snow globes, when they mail teddy bears to a memorial, or when they tour a disaster site, is a deep, maybe subconscious, longing for those age-old forms of community and real human compassion that emerge in a place when disaster has struck. It is a longing in some ways so alien to the world we currently live in that it requires catastrophe to call it forth, even in our imaginations. Nevertheless, the actions of unadulterated goodwill that become commonplace in harrowing conditions represent the truly authentic form of humanity that all of us, to one degree or another, chase after in contemporary consumer culture every day. And while it is certainly a bit foolhardy to seek authentic humanity through disaster-related media and culture, the sheer strength of that desire has been evident in the public’s response to all the disasters, crises and catastrophes to hit the United States in the past decade. The millions of television viewers who cried on September 11, or during Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech shootings, and the thousands upon thousands who volunteered their time, labor, money, and even their blood, as well as the countless others who created art, contributed to memorials, or adorned their cars or bodies with disaster-related paraphernalia— despite the fact that many knew no one who had been personally affected by any of these disasters—all attest to a desire for real human community and compassion that is woefully unfulfilled by American life under normal conditions today. ¶ In the end, the consumption of disaster doesn’t make us unable or unwilling to engage with disasters on a communal level, or towards progressive political ends—it makes us feel as if we already have, simply by consuming. It is ultimately less a form of political anesthesia than a simulation of politics, a Potemkin village of communal sentiment, that fills our longing for a more just and humane world with disparate acts of cathartic consumption. Still, the positive political potential underlying such consumption—the desire for real forms of connection and community—remains the most redeeming feature of disaster consumerism. Though that desire is frequently warped when various media lenses refract it, diffuse it, or reframe it to fit a political agenda, its overwhelming strength should nonetheless serve notice that people want a different world than the one in which we currently live, with a different way of understanding and responding to disasters. They want a world where risk is not leveraged for profit or political gain, but sensibly planned for with the needs of all socio-economic groups in mind. They want a world where preemptive strategies are used to anticipate the real threats posed by global climate change and global inequality, rather than to invent fears of ethnic others and justify unnecessary wars. They want a world where people can come together not simply as a market, but as a public, to exert real agency over the policies made in the name of their safety and security. And, when disaster does strike, they want a world where the goodwill and compassion shown by their neighbors, by strangers in their communities, and even by distant spectators and consumers, will be matched by their own government. Though this vision of the world is utopian, it is not unreasonable, and if contemporary American culture is ever to give us more than just an illusion of safety, or empathy, or authenticity, then it is this vision that we must advocate on a daily basis, not only when disaster strikes.
2ac falsifiability
They preclude genuine solutions---only evaluate replicable scientific claims
Singal ’22 [Jesse; 2022; science and culture journalist, described as “America’s best social science journalist,” by Jonathan Heidt, former science editor at New York Magazine; The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, Farrar, Starr, and Giroux paperback edition, p. 6-10]
WHAT I SOON REALIZED is that our society’s fascination with psychology has a dark side: many half-baked ideas—ideas that may not be 100 percent bunk but which are severely overhyped—are being enthusiastically spread, despite a lack of hard evidence in their favor. The IAT is one example, but there are numerous others. The popularity of these ideas, as well as the breathless manner in which they are marketed by TED Talks and university press offices and journalists and podcasts, is not harmless. It misallocates resources to overclaiming researchers when others are experiencing a funding crunch, and it degrades the institution of psychology by blurring the line between behavioral science and behavioral pseudoscience.
Perhaps most important, these ideas are frequently being adopted by schools, corporations, and nonprofits eager to embrace the Next Big Thing to come out of the labs and lecture halls of Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania. As the decision-makers who work in these institutions have grown more fluent in science and cognizant of the need to look to behavioral scientists for guidance (a good thing), they’ve also become more susceptible to half-baked behavioral science (a bad thing). And this explosion of interest in psychological science has occurred at a time when, if anything, people should be more cautious about embracing new and exciting psychological claims. As we’ll see, many findings in psychology—including those featured in introductory textbooks—are failing to replicate, meaning that when researchers attempt to re-create them with new experiments, they are coming up short. This so-called replication crisis has cast a giant shadow over the entire field of psychology, and the best available evidence suggests that a sizable chunk of published psychological findings may be false (though the size of that chunk is a source of heated debate). Many psychologists themselves may be unwittingly helping to promote half-baked science that seems to be built upon a solid foundation of published research. In all likelihood, we’ll look back wincingly at some of the popular theories being taught and developed today and, all too often, transformed into sleek interventions that promise to alleviate our ills.*
THIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT to explain the allure of fad psychology, why that allure is so strong, and how both individuals and institutions can do a better job of resisting it. It is important to improve our understanding of how behavioral scientific information circulates in the public realm, because only sound knowledge will earn us the improvements we wish for. Just as we can’t enact successful environmental and energy policies while denying global warming, and we can’t improve global public health without taking a stand against anti-vaccination myths, we will never solve the pressing social issues of the day—racism and inequality and the education gap

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