Mortido

Mortido is a term used in Freudian psychoanalysis to refer to 'a form of energy belonging to the death instinct and analogous to libido'.^[1] 'The term "mortido", which is nowadays rarely used...designates here the destructive mode of psychic energy'.^[2]

Origins: Federn

The term was introduced by Freud's pupil Paul Federn, 'to denote the psychic energy of the death instinct',^[3] following a lead from Edoardo Weiss: ' Weiss calls it destrudo'^[4] or mortudo.

'In "The Reality of the Death Instinct" of 1930, he [Federn] reported that he found in certain self-destructive manifestations of severely melancholic patients an inescapable evidence of the existence of the death instinct...which he later called "mortido"'.^[5]

However 'neither version of the term was liked by Sigmund Freud, and therefore they never gained popularity in psychoanalytic literature'.^[6]

Eric Berne

Main article: Eric Berne

Eric Berne, who was a pupil of Federn's, made extensive use of the term mortido in his pre-Transactional Analysis study, The Mind in Action (1947). As he wrote in the Foreword to the third (renamed) edition of 1967, 'I have followed the "strict" version of Freud, which separates the sex instinct from the death instinct, and have given equal weight to Eros and Thanatos. That makes everything much easier to explain, and certainly fits in better with the historical events of the last thirty years, which...become much clearer by introducing Paul Federn's concept of mortido'.^[7]

In Berne's words, 'the destructive urge activates hostility and hate, blind anger, and the uncanny pleasures of cruelty and decay. The tension which lends force to such feelings may be called mortido '.^[8]

Berne considered that 'guilt and the need for punishment mean...the unsatisfied tension of inwardly directed mortido', and that when the latter gets out of hand 'the mortido inwardly directed caus[es] a depressive or melancholic episode'.^[9]

He also believed 'on careful investigation that in some ways the sexual act gratifies mortido as well as libido', and that sometimes 'the mortidinous satisfactions in the sexual relationship become more important to the individual than the libidinous ones...men and women who manage to arrange their love relationships so that again and again they get active or passive mortido gratification'.^[10]

Laplanche and the death drive

'On several occasions Jean Laplanche has returned to this question of terminology (1970, 1986)',^[11] and of how far a distinctive instinct of destruction can be identified in parallel to the forces of libido - eventually seeing 'the death drive as a modality or regimen of the only true drive, which is the sexual drive'.^[12]

See also

• Karl Menninger

References

1. ^ Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London 1995) p. 104
2. ^ Jadran Mimica, Explorations in Psychoanalytic Ethnography (2007) p. 78
3. ^ Salman Akhtar, Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (2009) p. 176
4. ^ Eric Berne, A Layman's Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (Middlesex 1976), p. 101
5. ^ Franz Alexander et al, Psychoanalytic Pioneers (1995) p. 153
6. ^ Akhtar, p. 176
7. ^ Berne, A Layman's Guide, p. 16
8. ^ Berne, A Layman's Guide, p. 69
9. ^ Berne, A Layman's Guide p. 95 and p. 214
10. ^ Berne, A Layman's Guide p. 124
11. ^ Bernard Golse "Destrudo"
12. ^ Jean Laplanche/John Fletcher, Essays on Otherness (1999) p. 34