Spectres of the Death Drive

The idea that there exists within us a drive towards death that, unlike the life drive, ‘works unobtrusively’ and desires a ‘return to the quiescence of inorganic life’ was one of Freud’s most controversial concepts. His biographer Ernest Jones was suspicious of the idea and thought it reflected Freud’s own morbid preoccupation with death. Freud’s own doctor, Max Schur, suggested that in formulating the compulsion to repeat and the death drive, Freud was attempting to ‘work through his obsessive superstitions and to come to terms with the problem of death by treating it as a scientific problem’. Freud himself wrote that he ‘did not know how far’ he believed the hypotheses he had set out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Despite these reservations, the discovery of the death drive helped to usher in the final creative period of Freud’s life. Without it, hugely influential texts such as Civilization and its Discontents (1930) would not have been possible. Underscoring the importance of the death drive for psychoanalytic theory, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would later write, ‘to evade the death drive in his doctrine is not to know his doctrine at all’.