Pulsão de Morte e a Toxicomania: Uma Revisão Narrativa de Literatura

Abstract

The present study discusses how the death drive manifests itself in drug addiction, seeking to understand the abusive use of drugs beyond the biomedical paradigm and prohibitionist policies. A narrative literature review was adopted in this research to integrate sources and interpretations available in Portuguese and found in databases such as Google Scholar and SciElo. The discussion begins with the historical and social context of drugs, marked by the “War on Drugs,” which in Brazil reinforces racial and social inequalities by stigmatizing and criminalizing users, especially young, Black, and poor individuals. Based on psychoanalytic theory, drug addiction is understood as an effect of science and of the Capitalist Discourse, in which the drug operates as a gadget capable of offering immediate drive satisfaction, to the extent that the addict’s relationship with their object of satisfaction replaces the symbolic relationship with the Other. In this sense, drug addiction is understood through the subject’s particular relationship with the drug-object, insofar as the abusive use of alcohol and/or other drugs emerges as a means to confront the impossibility of fully symbolizing jouissance, configuring a mode of surplus-jouissance that, although it produces pleasure, also reveals itself as deadly. This points to a relation with the concept of the death drive, which for Freud manifests itself in the repetition of painful experiences, and for Lacan relates to the subject’s structural lack, whose need to cover it sustains a repetitive movement of surplus-jouissance in the register of the real. Therefore, the present research, based on the concept of the death drive, discusses psychoanalysis as an alternative opposed to the culture of the death drive, that is, the exclusive logic of abstinence, and likewise the logic that criminalizes and stigmatizes drug users, through a form of listening centered on the ethics of desire and on the singularity of subjects. Beyond the clinic, this study highlights the importance of acknowledging, within public policies, the presence of this concept as that which represents the subject’s inherent impossibility, contributing to the development of psychoanalysis in extension by presenting the possibility of integrating the concept of the death drive into Harm Reduction practices.