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Paul Verhoven's film, Basic Instinct (1992),' constitutes a remarkably precise portrayal of the death instinct which Freud describes in Civilization and its Discontents. The film depicts a love triangle involving a police detective, Nick Curran (played by Michael Douglas), and the two women with whom he is sexually involved: Catherine Trammell, the prime suspect in Nick's murder investigation (played by Sharon Stone), and Beth Hoberman, Nick's psychologist and his former lover (played by Jeanne Tripplehom). Following Freud's suggestion that every person appearing in the dream is a representation of the dreamer himself,' I propose that the film can be read as Nick Curran's dream. On this reading, the film is a psychodramatic portrayal of Nick's psyche, in which Catherine and Beth represent the struggle between Eros and the death instinct. Indeed, almost every character in the film can be read as corresponding to an aspect of the psyche that is described in psychoanalytic theory. Thus, Nick's turning away from Beth and his growing interest in Catherine can be read as the cinematic image of the inwardly directed aggression of Nick's death instinct, which only becomes visible when "tinged with erotism."3 In other words, I am proposing that Nick's involvement with these two women represents how Eros and the death instinct "seldom - perhaps never appear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each other in varying and different proportions and so become unrecognizable in our judgement."' This close intertwining of the love and death instincts means that Freud's death instinct - which I take to be the "basic instinct" alluded to in film's title - easily lends itself to being represented by Stone's femme fatale.
Because Freud's account of the death drive in Civilization and its Discontents remains somewhat enigmatic; I will be interpreting the film in terms of Lacan's reading of the death drive, which has the virtue (whatever its other defects might be) of specifying the relation between the death drive and Freud's topography of the id, ego and super-ego in a precise way For Lacan, as for Freud, all external expressions of aggressivity are to be understood on the model of a more basic aggressiveness toward oneself, which is the work of the death instinct.6 Although the cause of this...