D
DEATH DRIVE (Also ‘death-instinct’ or ‘Thanatos’) A term that Freud introduces in his later writings, which emerges from his work on sadism and the compulsion he discovered patients had to repeat traumatic events.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923) Freud posits two contending drives: ‘the sexual instincts or Eros…not merely the uninhibited sexual instinct proper…but also the self preservative instinct’ (Freud 1991b: 380) and the death-instinct, ‘the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state’ (Freud 1991b: 380). Accordingly, life itself is the conflict and compromise between these two drives.
Whilst this duality of instincts was, by Freud's admission, speculative (‘I do not ...
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