Death drive

In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive (German:Todestrieb) is the drive towards death, self-destruction, and the return to the inorganic chemistry: "the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state". It was originally proposed by Sigmund Freud in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where in his first published reference to the term he wrote of the "opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts". In this work, Freud used the plural "death drives" (Todestriebe) much more frequently than in the singular. The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives. The death drive is sometimes referred to as "Thanatos" in post-Freudian thought, complementing "Eros", although this term was not used in Freud's own work, being rather introduced by one of Freud's followers, Wilhelm Stekel.