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In his later writings [[Freud]] posits the existence of two broad categories of life instincts (''Lebestriebe'', also known as ''Eros'') and death instincts (''Todestriebe'', sometimes known as '[[Thanatos]]').
The former are cconcerned with the creation of cohesion and unity; the latter with the undoing of connections and the destruction of unity.
All drives are regressive in that they seek to return to an earlier state or to recover a lost [[object]], and the death drive expresses the tendency, which is said to be found in all living beings, to annul all tension by reverting to an inorganic state.
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 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.
[[Lacan]] tends to reject Freud's thesis of a duality of life and death drives, arguing that the death drive is an aspect or component of all drives.
The death drive strives, in Lacan's view, to go beyond the [[pleasure principle]] and to attain the painful joys of [[jouissance]].
==Death Drive and Freud ==
(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]]. He [[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]].
