ABSTRACT
Freud (1920g) conceived of the death instinct as an antagonistic counterpart to the life instinct, which included (a) the aggressive aspects of his older concept of the libidinal instinct and (b) the repetition compulsion. Klein out-Freuded Freud in virtually concretizing his concept of the death instinct. She believed that the infant clinically suffers from an anxiety whose inchoate roots sprang from its peremptory emergence. While Freud (1920g) conceived of the instinct of death as an inherent tropism for guiding the organism towards death, he never fully enfranchised it with the whole range of aggressive phenomena, such as sado-masochism. Klein and her followers, some of whom still embrace her theory of the death instinct, do so in the context of drive and drive-derivative phenomena. In sum, the infant's inchoate morality sense constitutes a binary-oppositional structure that comprises the dialectical operation of inherent innocence and inherent guilt.
