One of many disturbing aspects of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is how little the huge number of Russian casualties weighs upon the mind of President Vladimir Putin.
Data analysed by the BBC estimates that more than 95,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the first three years of the invasion. When members serving in the militia of the self-proclaimed Donbas republics in eastern Ukraine are included, the Russian death toll rises to between 146,194 and 211,169, or as many as 234,699 dead, when Russian-aligned combatants are taken into account, according to independent tallies up to February 2025.
Five years before the invasion began, Russian-American author Masha Gessen postulated in the book The Future is History that Putin’s Russia was in the grips of a “death drive” – a term borrowed from psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. “Russia and Russians had been dying for a century – in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life.”
Rather than seeing this as negligence, “perhaps it should be understood as active desire”, wrote Gessen. Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev has similarly written about a Freudian “drive to annihilation” in Russia, observing how TV presenters praise how “no one knows how to die like us” amid the rising body count in Donbas.
Freud is usually reduced to a sex-obsessed caricature in public debate. But his multifaceted analysis of human behaviour continues to inspire and enrich psychological investigations. The superego, one of several famous concepts he coined, may initially sound alien but that nagging, inner voice it represents is immediately recognisable. The superego delivers mental reward or punishment for your actions – and, for Freud, it was synonymous with one’s father.
As for the death drive, Freud defines it as “a force or energy, propelling us towards self-destruction and death”, says Albert Llussà, who is presenting a paper on the subject at a Dublin conference this weekend. A Dublin-based solicitor with expertise in mental health law and refugee rights, he is part of a cross-disciplinary group interested in the role psychoanalysis can play in understanding global crises, including the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Llussà explains further as this week’s Unthinkable guest.
What is the death drive?
“Freud introduces the idea of the death drive for the first time in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where he describes a ‘compulsion to repeat’ in human behaviour. He says that both the life and death drives operate within the human subject, in opposition to each other.
“In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud postulates that civilisation imposes great sacrifices on human sexuality and on our aggressivity. Life can be explained from the mutually opposing actions of the life force (eros) and the drive towards death.”
Where does the superego come into this?
“Freud shows how civilisation inhibits the aggressiveness that opposes the life drive. The demands of life impose severe renunciations on both the sexual and aggressive drives. He suggests that the way this is done is by way of the introjection [or unconscious adoption] of part of the aggressiveness inherent in humans, internalised and sent back to where it came from, namely the ego.
“This internalised aggressivity is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as a superego. The superego can direct its harsh aggressiveness against the ego. The tension between the harsh superego and the ego gives rise to the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment ...
“I think it is a fair question to ask whether the superego has been relegated to a diminished role in contemporary society – both in individuals and in culture – and whether this potentially causes an increase in violence and aggressivity. It could be argued that the fact that we are witnessing an erasure of the paternal image (imago) in our collective psyche is further proof of the decline of the superego.”
Do we all have the death drive? Or just some of us?
“It is at work in all of us. Freud’s position is that there exists in every human being a tendency towards aggression, whether it manifests itself internally in the form of a very harsh superego and the concomitant sense of guilt, or whether it expresses itself outwardly through the ego’s relationship with the external world by trying to control it, subdue it, destroy it.”
How is this relevant to what’s going on in the world today?
“It is indispensable. As Lacan says, ‘the unconscious is the social’. Psychoanalysis is not a philosophy, nor does it purport to have final answers to social or political questions. Its field of study and application is the individual subject. It seeks to emphasise what is most human in the person. It invites the subject to try to live better. It does this by seeking to understand unconscious mental processes that are at work in each one of us.”
- Albert Llussà is one of several speakers at a conference ‘Why war?’ on Saturday, April 12th, 2025, at Avila Conference Centre, Dublin, hosted by the Milltown Lacanian Association, which is dedicated to the study of Freud and the subsequent psychoanalytical work of Jacques Lacan and Charles Melman. For details and tickets see: eventbrite.ie/e/why-war-tickets-1028450171147
