Concept
Death drive
Freud's hypothesis, put forward in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), of a drive that tends to return the living being to an inorganic state and to undo connections, set against the life drives, Eros, which bind matter and minds into ever larger unities. Turned outwards it shows as aggression and destructiveness; Freud tied it to the compulsion to repeat, to masochism and to the negative therapeutic reaction. Many analysts rejected it, while others, among them Melanie Klein and André Green, each in their own way made it central to their thought.
Read more- Narrower concepts
- Disobjectalising function
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 8
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1920 Freud put forward the death drives in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), setting them against the life drives and suggesting that the pleasure principle itself seems to serve them.
diverges from
- Destruction as the cause of coming into being 1920 Freud acknowledged that Spielrein had anticipated part of his speculation, but where she placed destruction inside the reproductive drive, as one of its two antagonistic components, he set the death drives apart from and against the life or sexual drives.
gave rise to
- Destructive narcissism 1971 Rosenfeld framed destructive narcissism as a clinical approach to Freud's theory of the life and death instincts: the idealized destructive narcissistic organization is where, in his account, the death instinct shows itself in the clinic.
- Negative narcissism Negative narcissism is Green's narcissism of the death drive: where life narcissism binds the ego into a unity, it pursues the ego's extinction.
- Disobjectalising function Green conceived the disobjectalising function as the way the death drive works: undoing the links that invest objects, as against the objectalising work of the life drives.