ABSTRACT
Banquo in Macbeth, startled by the vanishing of the witches who have just foretold his greatness, exclaimed: `The earth hath bubbles, as the water has'. It should probably now be accepted that Freud's (1920) account of the death drive,3 which appeared in his thought for the ®rst time when he was 64, was such a bubble. Nevertheless, just as Macbeth's witches, despite their bubble-like unreality, served mightily to advance the plot, so too that ®rst account of the death drive has exerted remarkable traction in the subsequent development of psychoanalysis. It makes up a fascinating and instructive episode both in the history of ideas and in the history of psychoanalysis, and I shall attempt in this chapter to spell out in pedestrian fashion, step by step, the central line of it.
