ABSTRACT
Psychic operations relate to the manipulation and warding-off of affect states, such as retaliatory rage and anger. A phenomenological theory can define such operations in clinical terms. To label the projective mechanisms employed to manage aggression as a “death instinct” contributes nothing to reader understanding of developmental strivings or the psychic causes. A. Freud’s death instinct theory became a theory of a yearning for nirvana. This is quite different from Klein’s theory of aggression existing with an axiomatic drive compulsion. For Melanie Klein, the death instinct is connected with a belief that we are all born with a reservoir of hostile aggression that is too much for any infant to tolerate without killing itself. The demon lover evolves from early negative parent objects, combined with split-off or dissociated rage, and it is also the result of a split-off idealised image of the early parent.
