In psychology, the forces or tendencies of a person’s actions are called drives, i.e., the pushes to repeat patterns of behavior that we reproduce over and over again. Drives are unconscious forces that can bend the will of the most determined skier.
According to Freud, drives are oriented towards satisfaction through constant forces that come from within our body and he defined it as something close between the psychic and the bodily. The drive stimulus is a need, and satisfaction extinguishes it.
Freudian theory calls the two antagonistic drives the life drive and the death drive, which they generate a kind of dispute between them. From the psychoanalytic perspective, the concept of life drive corresponds to seeking satisfaction of our own needs. It is understood as movement, action, and change but also chaos and disorder, which are generators of psychic tension. The life drive is the psychic drive for self-preservation governed by the pleasure principle, avoiding displeasure and tending to reduce tensions
The pleasure principle
In the psychic process, our tendency is towards the pleasure principle but it cannot always be applied since sources of displeasure appear such as the repression of drives insofar as pleasure cannot be felt as such, so it is replaced by the reality principle. This principle, which contrasts with that of pleasure, seeks balance by relying on the reality of the external world at the behest of the Self in prevalence of the Id.
The purpose is to delay tension discharge caused by a certain behavior until the information of the context has been satisfactorily processed. For example, we will be able to contain the pleasure principle oriented to sliding on the snow by means of the reality principle, learning that not every slope is skiable and, at the same time, realizing what we have yet to assimilate technical elements. While our pleasure principle is oriented towards immediate satisfaction (descending the slope anyway), our reality principle is aligned towards medium/long-term goals (for example, improving our technique to enjoy the descent).
The pleasure and displeasure we experience are related to the amount of tension or excitement. If it increases, it produces displeasure and, conversely, if it decreases, it generates pleasure. The maximum pleasure, according to Freud, is to reach maximum distension.
The death drive
The death drive is opposed to the life drive and is directed first inward (self-destruction), and then outward (aggressiveness). It can be interpreted as the conviction of our fragility and probability of misfortune, which originates apprehensive behaviors provoked by the knowledge of being vulnerable. On the other hand, we find the skier who exhibits provocative behaviors inciting risky skiing.
In extreme skiing, we can speak of death drive to the predisposition to take certain risks, and there could be, in a certain way, the tendency to feel pleasure in self-destruction, otherwise, how would it be explained that someone jumps into the abyss from a cliff, slides at full speed between rocks and trees, or defies avalanches risking his own life?
The carelessness of acting without thinking about danger has to do with the death drive, which tends towards self-destruction. Here, this drive is directed towards a sinister and unconscious flirtation with danger in which the origin and goal of actions with a self-destructive tendency are unknown.
The extreme skier might manifest the death drive by creating ‘death forms’, that is, by pretending to return to a state of mental calm by eliminating psychic tension and acting towards the external object causing the tension or towards himself. For this type of skier, challenging nature is a source of tension, disorder, and chaos from which he seeks, unconsciously, to free himself by trying to reduce to a minimum all psychic tension, or zero degree of tension, in order to reach the state of Nirvana, that is, a state of inner peace.
Extreme skiing, as a search for full satisfaction, compels the skier to go beyond the principle of pleasure but also beyond his well-being, challenging his vulnerability in a vertiginous experience, exposing himself more and more by wanting to demonstrate his childlike omnipotence. While this activity can lead to self-destruction, it must be recognized that it is a highly stimulating practice that pushes the performer to believe that he is outside the laws of nature in terms of sliding the fastest or jumping from the highest, believing that there is no limit whatsoever.
This radical discipline of skiing is based on the dispute of mastering nature and challenging oneself. Seeking ever more satisfying experiences may be due to the fact that, having become accustomed to certain sensory thresholds, it must be difficult for the extreme skier to accept anything less stimulating. For him, the irresistible thing is that the exposure to risk is such that the drive to seek pleasure leads him to underestimate the risk of dying from an avalanche or a fall on the rocks.
The accident, that is to say, the destruction of the bodily, sets the limit to the psychic, being a barrier that interrupts pleasure. The extreme skier plays, unconsciously, with his self-destruction in pursuit of drive satisfaction. This demand drags him to dangerous situations in order to reach, impulsively, full satisfaction, the search for more pleasure by exposing himself to the risk of the extreme, or worse, to the extreme risk.
