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{{Top}}pulsion de mort]]''; [[German]]: ''[[Todestrieb{{Bottom}}
==Death Drive and Freud ==
Although intimations of the concept of the [[death drive]] can be found early on in [[Freud]]'s [[Works of Sigmund Freud|work]], it was only in ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'' (1920) that the concept was fully articulated.
In this work [[Freud]] established a fundamental opposition between [[life drive]]s (''[[eros]]''), conceived of as a tendency towards cohesion and unity, and the [[death drive]]s, which operate in the opposite direction, undoing connections and destroying things.
(''[[Todestriebe]]'' or ''[[Thanatos]]'').
The former is concerned with the creation of cohesion and unity; the latter with the undoing of connections and the destruction of unity.
According to [[Freud]], the [[death drive]] exhibits the tendency of all living beings to return to an inorganic state.
All drives are regressive in that they seek to return to an earlier state or to recover a lost [[object]].
Initially inward-directed, the death drive first manifests its existence in the human tendency to self-destruction; as it subsequently turns to the outside world, it takes the form of [[aggressivity|aggressive]] or destructive behavior.
The theory of the death drive is, by Freud's own admission, speculative, and is grounded in the ddescriptions of the [[compulsion to repeat]].
The fact that Freucd describes the death drive as 'silent' makes it difficult to supply concrete clinical evidence for its existence and the notion remains controversal, even though Freud continues to uphold it in his very last writings.
Many post-Freudian analysts dismiss the notion of a death drive as mere speculation on Freud's part, but Klein adopts it whole-heartedly, regarding the tyranny of the early [[superego]] as it crushes the young child's [[ego]] as the first clinical manifestation of its power.
(The concept of the death drive was one of the most controversial concepts introduced by Freud, and many of his disciples rejected it, but Freud continued to reaffirm the concept for the rest of his life. Of the non-Lacanian schools of psychoanalytic theory, only Kleinian psychoanalysis takes the concept seriously.)
==Death Drive and Lacan==
[[Jacques Lacan]] (following Freud) reaffirms the concept of the [[death drive]] as central to [[psychoanalysis]].
[[Lacan]] wrote: "to ignore the death instinct in his [Freud's] doctrine is to misunderstand that doctrine entirely."<ref>E, 301</ref>
In 1938, [[Lacan]] describes the [[death drive]] as a [[nostalgia]] for a [[lost harmony]], a [[desire]] to [[return]] to the [[preoedipal]] fusion with the [[mother]]'s [[breast]], the [[loss]] of which is marked on the [[psyche]] in the [[weaning complex]].<ref>Lacan, 1938: 35</ref>
In 1946, [[Lacan]] associates the [[death drive]] with the [[suicide|suicidal tendency]] of [[narcissism]].<ref>Ec, 186</ref>
In the 1950s, [[Lacan]] does not situate the [[death drive]] in the [[imaginary]] (despite its association with the [[preoedipal phase]] and [[narcissism]]), but rather in the [[symbolic]].
In the 1954-5 seminar, ''[[The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis]]'', Lacan states that the [[death drive]] is simply the fundamental tendency of the [[symbolic]] [[order]] to produce [[repetition]].
"The death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order."<ref>S2, 326</ref>
==Death Drive and Biology==
For Freud, the [[death drive]] was closely bound up with [[biology]].
[[Lacan]] situates the [[death drive]] in the [[symbolic]].
[[Lacan]] articulates it with culture rather than nature.
[[Lacan]] states that the death drive "is not a question of biology."<ref>E, 102</ref>
The [[death drive]] is not the [[biology|biological]] [[instinct]] to return to the inanimate.<ref>S7, 211-12</ref>
==Death Drive and Drives==
Another difference between Lacan's concept of the death drive and Freud's emerges in 1964.
Freud opposed the death drive to the sexual drives.
[[Lacan]] rejects Freud's thesis of a duality of life and death drives.
[[Lacan]] argues that the [[death drive]] is an aspect of every [[drive]].
The [[death drive]] is an aspect of every [[drive]].
"The distinction between the life drive and the death drive is - true in as much as it manifests two aspects of the drive."<ref>gl 20</ref>
[[Lacan]] writes that "every drive is virtually a death drive;"<ref>Ec, 844</ref> because
# every [[drive]] pursues its own extinction,
# every [[drive]] involves the subject in [[repetition]], and
# every [[drive]] is an attempt to go [[beyond the pleasure principle]], to the realm of [[excess jouissance]] where enjoyment is experienced as suffering.
The death drive strives, in Lacan's view, to go beyond the [[pleasure principle]] and to attain the painful joys of [[jouissance]].
==See Also==
* [[Death]]
* [[Drive]]
==Look Up==
<ref>3, 1, 64-5, 94, 135 Conversations.</ref>
==References==
<references/>
[[Category:Terms]]
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
[[Category:Concepts]]
[[Category:Freudian psychology]]
[[Category:Real]]
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]
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As with the movement of the signifying chain, which both seeks coincidence with the void which organises it and perpetually misses that rendez-vous, desire is simultaneously a drive towards and an evasion of the void at the heart of subjectivity. In this way, both desire and the signifying chain harbour death at their very core; the death drive is
