The Vetala Panchavimshati: Reflections on the Death Instinct

Abstract

The Vetala Panchavimshati, an ancient collection of tales from India, can be read as a trauma narrative, with hatred, murder, and death transmitted through multiple generations. Death permeates the tales that take place in a charnel ground and feature a man's consciousness sealed up in a corpse. The original meaning of the tales can be read as a profound philosophical meditation on impermanence, or as a Hindu householder's life. In this essay, I will interpret the tales as a commentary on the psychoanalytic ideas about the death instinct. Freud's version of the death instinct and the elaborations of Melanie Klein and Andre Green are reviewed. Two of the tales in the collection illustrate both the theories of Klein and Green. It is proposed that the death instinct as aggression and the death instinct as subjective deadening are complementary forms of expression of a basic way of the negative.