Extract Three

Freud:
My picture of the basic forces or instincts, which still arouses much opposition among my fellow psychoanalysts, was already familiar to the philosopher Empedocles of Agrigento, that many-sided personality, who rightly substituted chance for finality and necessity for purpose.

When we compare the new scientific notion of the death instinct with the writings of Empedocles, we are tempted to maintain that the two theories are identical: the two fundamental principles of Empedocles - Love and Strife - are both in form and in function the same as our two primal instincts, Eros and destructiveness, the first of which attempts to combine what exists into ever greater unities, while the second endeavours to dissolve these combinations and to destroy the structures to which they have given rise.

Love and Strife are necessary and indestructible. Each is always present under the dominion of the other, a hint, a canker, seeping back. The opposed instincts work simultaneously: we deal never with pure life instincts or pure death instincts but only with mixtures of them in different amounts.

Empedocles' sphere is an absolute zero state of excitation, self-sufficient. Humans retain a phantasmic memory of the initial golden age of the sphere; and Empedocles was the fallen god whose power arises from his knowledge of the unity of what is, of the nature of human beings as mere moments in the continuous play of the elements.

Copyright John Sutton 1999.

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