Death Drive
In classical psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, the death drive or death instinct (German: Todestrieb) is the mental drive toward self-destruction and the annihilation of oneself, often expressed through behaviour such as aggression, repetition compulsion, and self-destructiveness. It stands in contrast to Eros, the life instinct, which encompasses the sexual and self-preservative drives. Together, these two instincts form a duality within the id.
Freud proposed the concept of the death drive in his work Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. The concept was created in order to solve issues stemming from the pleasure principle and the reality principle being unable to fully explain certain strange behaviors, such as children re-enacting traumatic events in their play or veterans experiencing recurring dreams of their trauma. Freud also proposes that redirection of the death instinct outwards is the source of aggression.
The death drive forms an important part of Freud's psychoanalytic theory, being one of the two fundamental instincts that influence behavior in his later work's dual instinct theory. It is a controversial aspect of Freud's theory, with many later analysts modifying it or outright rejecting it. Later analysts who have accepted the concept have created the concept of mortido/destrudo to provide an analogous term to Eros's libido.
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