Todestrieb sigmund freud biography

Sigmund Freud

Freud introduced the concept of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle ().

Here he established a fundamental opposition between life drives (eros), conceived of as a tendency towards cohesion and unity, and the death drives, which operate in the opposite direction, undoing connections and destroying things.

The concept of the death drive was one of the most controversial concepts introduced by Freud, and many of his disciples rejected it, but Freud continued to reaffirm the concept for the rest of his life.

Jacques Lacan

Psychoanalysis

Lacan follows Freud in reaffirming the concept of the death drive as central to psychoanalysis:

"To ignore the death instinct in his [Freud's] doctrine is to misunderstand that doctrine entirely."^[1]

Nostalgia

In Lacan's first remarks on the death drive, in , he describes it as a nostalgia for a lost harmony, a desire to return to the preoedipal fusion with the mother's breast, the loss