Death drive
In classical psychoanalysis, the death drive is an aspect of libidinal energy that seeks "to lead organic life back into the inanimate state." For Sigmund Freud, it "express itself—though probably only in part—as a drive of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms", for example, in the behaviour of predation. It complements the life drive, which encompasses self-preservation and reproduction behaviours such as nutrition and sexuality. Both aspects of libido form the common basis of Freud's dual drive theory.
The death drive is not only expressed through instinctive aggression, such as hunting for nourishment, but also through pathological behaviour such as repetition compulsion and self-destructiveness.
Freud proposed the concept of the death and life drives in his work Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. It was developed to solve problems arising from the distinction between the pleasure principle of the id and the reality principle of the ego, with which he was still unable to explain seemingly meaningless or even self-destructive phenomena like recurring dreams of veterans that constantly remind of their war injuries. Freud also proposes that redirection of the death instinct outwards is the source of aggression.
The death drive forms an important part of Freud's psychoanalytic theory, being one of the two fundamental drives that influence behaviour. It is a controversial aspect of Freud's theory, with many later analysts modifying it or outright rejecting it. Later analysts who have accepted the concept have created the concept of mortido and destrudo to provide an analogous term to Eros's libido.
Terminology
Three major terms are used to refer to the same Freudian concept: death drive, death instinct, and Thanatos.Death drive and death instinct both originate from varying translations of the German words Instinkt and Trieb. While Freud typically used the word Trieb when referring to the death drive, the Standard Edition of Freud uses the word "instinct" for both Instinkt and Trieb. Death instinct and death drive are typically synonymous.
The term Thanatos was coined by Wilhelm Stekel and its use was advocated by Paul Federn. The term is never found in Freud's written works, but according to biographer Ernest Jones, Freud occasionally used the term in conversation when referring to the death drive. The term is a reference to the personification of death from Greek myth, Thanatos, who is used to provide an opposite to the mythological term used to refer to the life drive, Eros. Thanatos is also typically synonymous with death drive.
Freud
Origin of the theory
Freud arrived at the concept of the death instinct through these observations of repetition compulsion—the tendency of people who have undergone traumatic events to return to their painful experience repeatedly, often in dreams, and children's play. He found the phenomenon of people involuntarily subjecting themselves to disturbing stimuli would be irreconcilable with the pleasure principle. While maintaining his theory of the pleasure principle and its regulation by the reality principle, Freud introduced the concept of the death instinct in his 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He cites Sabina Spielrein and her paper "Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being" as a predecessor for his line of thinking. In this work, Freud claims that repetition compulsion has a highly instinctual characteristic and gives the appearance of a "daemonic force at work". From there, he argues that another instinct beside the pleasure principle must be responsible for the phenomena. He claims that all instincts are "an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things", and since the earliest state instinct could restore in the state preceding life itself, there must be an instinct that aims to return oneself into inorganic non-existence. He claims that this instinct is used to provide mastery over unpleasant experiences by repeating them in play and dreams. In The Ego and the Id, he states that the death instinct forms a duality within the id alongside Eros. Freud also predicated his notion of the death drive on the "nirvana principle": the fundamental tendency to aim toward reducing all instinctual tension to zero, that is, non-existence.Aggression/aggressive instinct
Freud originally held that aggressive impulses could be variously explained by both the sexual and self-preservative instincts. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud moves away from this belief by claiming that the two primary instincts are the life instinct Eros, and the death instinct. Freud believed that the death instinct was aimed toward the self, and that aggression was the death instinct reoriented at the outside world.The death instinct can be directed outwards as aggression when the ego is disturbed and engages in a defense mechanism such as projection. This is tempered by the super-ego, which redirects that aggression onto the ego itself and creates the feeling of guilt. In childhood, frustration of desires by parents causes aggression towards them, and then results in introjection and identification of this aspect into the super-ego during its formation. To summarize, the death instinct is originally oriented at the self, then when oriented outwards as aggression, it is repressed as the super-ego develops, which results in the death instinct being again oriented inwards at the ego.
Application to society and civilization
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discusses the importance of instincts to the structure of civilization, with civilization performing a moderating role which reorients aggression to the outside world onto the self. Freud believed that aggression stemming from the death instinct must be repressed via reaction formation in order for civilization to exist. In the process of civilization, Freud places the death instinct behind Eros in visibility and importance, stating it is only detected when "alloyed with Eros".Philosophical connections to Schopenhauer
From a philosophical perspective, the death drive may be viewed in relation to the work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In The World as Will and Representation, he postulates that all exists by a metaphysical "will", and that pleasure affirms this will. Schopenhauer's pessimism led him to believe that the affirmation of the "will" was a negative and immoral thing, due to his belief of life producing more suffering than happiness. The death drive would seem to manifest as a natural and psychological negation of the "will".Freud was well aware of such possible linkages. In a letter of 1919, he wrote that regarding "the theme of death, have stumbled onto an odd idea via the drives and must now read all sorts of things that belong to it, for instance Schopenhauer". Ernest Jones considered that "Freud seemed to have landed in the position of Schopenhauer, who taught that 'death is the goal of life'".
However, as Freud put it to the imagined auditors of his New Introductory Lectures, "You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: "That isn't natural science, it's Schopenhauer's philosophy!" But, ladies and gentlemen, why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research?" He then went on to add that "what we are saying is not even genuine Schopenhauer....we are not overlooking the fact that there is life as well as death. We recognise two basic instincts and give each of them its own aim".
Analytic reception
The concept of the death drive has been controversial. Freud acknowledged this, saying "the assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles". Ernest Jones would comment of Beyond the Pleasure Principle that the book not only "displayed a boldness of speculation that was unique in all his writings" but was "further noteworthy in being the only one of Freud's which has received little acceptance on the part of his followers". Salman Akhtar writes in the Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis that "with the exception of Melanie Klein, her followers, and Kurt Eissler, most subsequent analysts laid the postulate of death instinct to rest."Otto Fenichel in his compendious survey of the first Freudian half-century concluded that "the facts on which Freud based his concept of a death instinct in no way necessitate the assumption... of a genuine self-destructive instinct". Heinz Hartmann set the tone for ego psychology when he "chose to... do without 'Freud's other, mainly biologically oriented set of hypotheses of the "life" and "death instincts"'". In the object relations theory, among the independent group, the most common repudiation was the loathsome notion of the death instinct'.