Death drive

In classical psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, the death drive (German: Todestrieb) is the drive toward destruction in the sense of breaking down complex phenomena into their constituent parts or bringing life back to its inanimate 'dead' state, often expressed through behaviour such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness. The term was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein in her paper "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being" (Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens) in 1912, then taken up by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). He has related this concept with a kind of opposition between the ego's aspect of death drive and the id's aspect of life drive.

Life drive and death drive – also referred to as Thanatos and used in plural (Todestriebe) – represent two complementary functions of the same libidinal energy, which in Freudian theory dynamises all instincts, linked to Platon's universal desire symbolisated by the demon Eros. Wilhelm Stekel, followed shortly afterwards by Paul Federn, used the term eros from 1906 onwards.

The functional intertwining of both aspects of libido makes it impossible to determine them completely separately. In general, the life drive - like the id - is attributed to everything that serves the tendencies of survival, such as the needs for reproduction, nutrition, social behaviour and other creative actions. Jacques Lacan, whose work is frequently referred to as return to Freud, described the concept of death- and life drive arising from libido as a fundamental component of Freud's three-instance model of the human psyche.