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Life Instinct and Gender

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Abstract

The instinct for survival or self-preservation represents the most relevant tendency of the human being, as the development of other instincts and vital functions depends on it.

Life and death are interdependent; they exist simultaneously and not consecutively, and they exert an enormous influence on experience and behavior.

Our life and hence our experience, behavior, and identity (including gender) are related to experiences of change, pain, risk, symptoms, ambivalence, and loneliness and the experience of “the others,” the grief, the anxiety before death, and the perception of the meaning of life.

Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s model, through his work Masculine Domination, we conduct an analysis of how culture and society interfere/interact in our behavior, therefore in our lifestyle, and hence in our identity (from a gender perspective) to the extent that we unconsciously add incorporations (from that culture/society) and subsequently assume them as “natural,” “immovable” aspects that are determined by our sex (“biologically”).

However, things are not as simple as that because, if so, we would not feel disagreement with those behaviors/manifestations/ways of feeling that are given to us “naturally,” and that is where the human being (regardless of sex/gender) makes an effort to “take the reins” of what belongs to him: his life, his body. We will thus approach the subject of suicide from some different theoretical perspectives and models, as well as the subject of self-harm, where we will also specifically address self-mutilations, and conclude by providing our reflection.

The irony of human’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive. [1]

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance… The contradiction of our existence as for-itself is that our essence only becomes complete when our existence is no more. [2]

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The queer theory is a hypothesis about gender affirming that sexual orientation and sexual or gender identity of people are the result of a social construction and that, therefore, there are no essential or biologically registered sex roles in human nature but socially variable forms of performing one or more sex roles.

    “The subject decides for itself in its full sovereignty. That doesn’t mean ‘against society’. The individual can destroy what he or she own, which never really was one’s own, for the sake of an authenticity about which one is anxious. One lays hands on oneself (Amery J).

  2. 2.

    The dark-gothic movement becomes relevant in the mid-late 1970s, while the emo movement takes place in the 1980s. Both styles include a philosophy and a way of conceiving the world that goes beyond the musical style and the clothing. Suicide and death are recurrent in the sense that gothic people gives to self-harm, while for emo people (whose name is an abbreviation of the term “emotional”), self-injuries tend to be less aggressive but more superficial cuts [97].

  3. 3.

    Miss A explained to Emmerson that she self-inflicted that injury when a man she was in love with, and with whom she had had an affair, rejected her when she proposed to him and he called her “whore.” She drank alcohol, took a blade, and marked the letter w (of whore) on her calf. For Emmerson, Miss A felt that her past did not make her suitable for marriage, an idea that she could not stand, so she hurt the part of herself that represented a symbolic embodiment of her torment.

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    Olatz Napal-Fernandez

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Napal-Fernandez, O. (2019). Life Instinct and Gender. In: Sáenz-Herrero, M. (eds) Psychopathology in Women. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15179-9_16

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