Freud’s Nirvana Principle

“The principle of Nirvana expresses the tendency of the death instinct”. The tendency of the death drive is the complete reduction of tensions.

Hello friends!

The psychology of religion is the area of ​​psychology that studies religious phenomena. There is a long tradition of studies, especially in Germany, within what became known as Religionswissenschaft, Science of Religion – which encompasses, in addition to psychology, theology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy of religion. Therefore, it is a very complex area with several possibilities for study. Please do not confuse psychology of religion with religious psychology.

In a didactic way, we can divide the studies of psychology of religion into two major areas:

1) Studies on the religious phenomenon (religious conversion studies, specific practices such as meditation, Yoga, mass, worship, etc.);

2) Studies on what certain authors thought about religion.

This text fits into the second type, by analyzing the concept of the principle of Nirvana, in Freud’s work.

The concept of Nirvana

For those who don’t know, Nirvana is a term used within Buddhism. nibbana, in Pali and Sanskrit, निर्वाण, literally means not having fetters, not being attached to anything. And it was defined as the goal of the meditation practice, vipassana, by Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Buddha. It is considered a goal to be achieved in the sense that nirvana consists of total liberation from suffering and the annihilation of the desire that generates suffering.

Although there is great controversy whether Buddhism should be defined as a religion or not (depending on the concept of religion – a term, in turn, Western), it is a fact that the word nirvana is used primarily within practices that are generally considered to be religious practices.

According to Ajaan Thanissaro, Nibbana, Nirvana should be understood as follows:

“We all know what happens when a fire goes out. The flames die and the fire disappears. So when we first realize that the goal of Buddhist practice, nibbana (nirvana), literally means the extinguishing of a fire, it’s hard to imagine a deadlier image for a spiritual goal: complete annihilation. It turns out, however, that this interpretation of this concept is a mistranslation, not so much of a word as of an image. What did an extinguished fire mean to Hindus at the time of the Buddha? Anything but annihilation.

According to the Brahmins of antiquity, when a fire was extinguished it passed into a state of latency. Rather than ceasing to exist, it became dormant and in that state – untied from any particular fuel – it spread throughout the cosmos. When the Buddha used this image to explain nibbana to the Hindu Brahmins of his day, he bypassed the question of whether an extinguished fire continues to exist or not, focusing instead on the impossibility of defining a fire that does not burn: hence his statement that a person who is totally ‘extinct’ cannot be described.

However, when teaching his own disciples, the Buddha used nibbana more as an image of freedom. Apparently, all Hindus at that time considered burning fire to be agitated, dependent and imprisoned, both attached and bound to its fuel as it burned. To light a fire it was necessary to “master” it. When the fire let go of its fuel, it was “free”, freed from agitation, dependency and bondage – calm and without limitations. This is why Pali poetry repeatedly uses the image of extinguished fire as a metaphor for freedom.

In fact, this metaphor is part of a figurative model of fire that also involves two other related terms. Upadana, or attachment, also refers to the sustenance that a fire derives from its fuel. Khandha meaning not only one of the five “aggregates” (form, sensation, perception, formations and consciousness) that define all conditioned experiences, but also the trunk of a tree. Just as fire is extinguished when it ceases to cling and obtain sustenance from wood, so the mind is freed when it ceases to cling to the khandhas.

So the image behind nibbana is one of freedom. The Pali commentaries support this point by tracing the word nibbana to its verbal root, meaning “untying.” What kind of untie? The texts describe two levels. One is untying in this life, symbolized by a fire that has gone out but whose embers are still hot. This represents the enlightened arahant, who is aware of sights and sounds, sensitive to pleasure and pain, but free from passion, aversion and delusion. The second level of untying, symbolized by a fire that is so extinguished that its embers have grown cold, is what the arahant experiences after this life. All stimuli to the senses cool down and he/she is totally freed from even the subtlest limitations and stresses of existence in time and space.

The Buddha insists that this level cannot be described, even in terms of existence or non-existence, because words only have effect for those things that have limits. All he really says about it – except for the images and metaphors – is that a person can have partial knowledge of this experience in this life and that this is ultimate happiness, something truly worth knowing.

So the next time you watch a fire go out, don’t see it as a case of annihilation, but as a lesson in how freedom can be found in letting go of things.”

The Nirvana Principle in Freud’s Work

Freud uses the concept of the Nirvana principle a few times in his Complete Works. O nirwanaprinzipof course, does not mean that Freud became a Buddhist after 1920, when he published his book Beyond the pleasure bases.

We must understand this reference as coming from its introduction in the West by Schopenhauer and, later, by Barbara Low (1877 – 1955), English psychoanalyst and one of the founders of the British Society of Psychoanalysis. Low defines the pleasure principle as: “tendency towards the reduction, towards the constancy, towards the suppression of the tension of internal excitation”.

As I have mentioned a few times here on the site, Freud’s work is extremely complex and in order to study it in its entirety we have to devote some years. Many people know only the first concepts of Freud, about the supposed “trauma” that would leave a person psychically ill or about the influence of sexuality in the etiology of neuroses. In most faculties, we see the study of psychoanalysis staying only until this stage.

O Beyond the pleasure bases 🇧🇷Jenseits de Lustprinzips), first published in 1920, is a work that Freud himself considered speculative, although his hypotheses were based on his clinical experience. Roughly speaking, we can understand that before 1920, Freud believed that the psyche tended to pleasure, that is, the psychic activity that seeks to avoid displeasure and achieve pleasure. It is also an economic principle, inasmuch as an increase in the amount of excitation is connected with unpleasure, and its decrease consists in a reduction.

After 1920, Freud modifies this structure and adds the possibility that the psyche has its functioning Beyond the pleasure bases and formulates the concept of death drive (todestrieb🇧🇷 Perhaps by allowing himself greater speculation, Freud then speaks of the principle of Nirvana. The idea is also present in the text The economic problem of masochism: “The principle of Nirvana expresses the tendency of the death instinct”. The tendency of the death instinct, therefore, is similar to the principle of Nirvana: the complete reduction of tensions, the return of the living being to the inorganic state.

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