Death drive

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In his later wrirings Freud posits the existence of two broad categories of life instincts (Lebenstriebe, also known as "Eros") and death instincts (Todoestriebe, sometimes known as ("Thanatos").

The former are concerned with the creation of cohesion and unity; the latter with the undoing of connections and the destruction of unity.

The fusion of the two results in sadism.


Return

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 drives first manfiest their existence in the human tenency to self-destruction; as they subsequently turn to the outside world, they take the form of aggressive or destructive behavior.


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The theory of the death drive is, by Freud's own admission, speculative, and is groundedn in descriptions of the compulsion to repeat.

The fact that Freud describes the death drive as "silent" makes it difficult to supply concrete clinical evidence for its existence and the notion remains contrversial, even though Freud continues to uphold it in his very last writings.

Many post-Freudian analysts mismis the notion of a death drive as mere speculation on freud's part.

lacan tends t reject freud's thesis of a duality of life and death drives, arugin tthat the death drive is an aspect or component of all drives.

the death drive strives, in lacna's view, to go beyondd the pp and to attain the painful joys ofo jouissance

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud introduces the concept of the death drive.


The concept of the death drive was first articulated by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).