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→Sigmund Freud
Here he established a fundamental opposition between [[death drive|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.
The concept of the [[death drive]] was one of the most controversial [[:category:concepts|concepts]] introduced by [[Freud]], and many of his disciples rejected it (regarding it as mere poetry or as an unjustifiable incursion into [[philosophy|metaphysics]]), but [[Freud]] continued to reaffirm the concept for the rest of his life.
[[Lacan]] follows [[Freud]] in reaffirming the concept of the [[death drive]] as central to [[psychoanalysis]]:
<blockquote>"To ignore the death instinct in his [Freud's] doctrine is to misunderstand that doctrine entirely."<ref>{{E}} p. 301</ref></blockquote>
In [[Lacan]]'s first remarks on the [[death drive]], in 1938, he describes it as a [[nostalgia]] for a [[preoedipal|lost harmony]], a [[desire]] to [[return]] to the [[preoedipal|preoedipal fusion]] with the [[mother]]'s [[breast]], the [[castration|loss]] of which is marked on the [[psyche]] in the [[complex|weaning complex]].<ref>{{1938}} p. 35</ref>
In 1946 he links the [[death drive]] to the [[narcissism|suicidal tendency]] of [[narcissism]].<ref>{{Ec}} p. 186</ref>.
By linking the [[death drive]] with the [[preoedipal phase]] and with [[narcissism]], these early remarks would place the [[death drive]] in what [[Lacan]] later comes to call the [[imaginary order]].
However, when [[Lacan]] begins to develop his concept of the [[order|three orders]] of [[imaginary]], [[symbolic]] and [[real]], in the 1950s, he does not situate the [[death drive]] in the [[imaginary]] but in the [[symbolic]].
In the [[seminar]] of 1954-5, for example, he argues that the [[death drive]] is simply the fundamental tendency of the [[symbolic order]] to produce [[repetition]]:
<blockquote>"The [[death drive|death instinct]] is only the mask of the [[symbolic order]]."<ref>{{S2}} p. 326</ref></blockquote>
This shift also marks a difference with [[Freud]], for whom the [[death drive]] was closely bound up with [[biology]], representing the fundamental tendency of every living thing to return to an inorganic state.
By situating the [[death drive]] firmly in the [[symbolic]], [[Lacan]] articulates it with culture rather than [[nature]]; he states that the [[death drive]] "is not a question of bjology,"<ref>{{E}} p. 102</ref>, and must be distinguished from the [[biological]] [[instinct]] to return to the inanimate.<ref>{{S7}} p. 211-12</ref>
Another difference between [[Lacan]]'s concept of the [[death drive]] and [[Freud]]'s emerges in 1964.
