Concept
Life drive
In Freud's last theory of the drives, introduced in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), the drives that tend to preserve life and to bind living substance into ever larger unities, which he also called Eros. They take in both the sexual drives and the drives of self-preservation that he had earlier opposed to them, and stand against the death drive. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930) describes the history of civilisation as the struggle between the two.
Read more- Broader concept
- Drive
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 3
- Related
- Death drive
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1920 In Jenseits des Lustprinzips Freud gathers the sexual drives and the drives of self-preservation into the life drives, Eros, which strive to combine living substance into ever larger unities, and sets them against the death drives. Das Ich und das Es builds the second drive theory on this pair.
opposes
- Death drive 1920 Freud's second drive theory is a dualism: Eros binds living substance into ever greater unities, while the death drive tends to undo connections and lead back to the inorganic. All of life, he writes in 1930, is the interplay and struggle of the two, which are usually found fused.