ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the death drive and draws on the data gathered to explore the insights of Thanatos to understand organisational closure. It describes the death drive as a return to an earlier, inorganic state; it is also associated with violence, with a wish to cancel and to destroy. The chapter explains how the death drive operates in the closure of Interbank in all its vicissitudes. It compares the application of the death drive in the City of London with that in the international headquarters. The death drive manifests itself in organisational death in a number of ways. In the compulsion to repeat self-destructive behaviours, the organisation fails to recognise the disastrous consequences of continuing as they had always done, creating personal loss and corporate downfall. There were different presentations of the death drive in the headquarters and City of London research sites. The chapter focuses on single entity, the organisation, Interbank.
