Introduction

Since the debates and discussions on the death drive have continued for almost a hundred years, any attempt to provide an overview of this concept necessarily will remain fragmentary and incomplete. This chapter sketches some of the main lines in the debate about this controversial term. As with so many of the basic psychoanalytic concepts, the chapter discusses Sigmund Freud’s foundational ideas in order to gain a sense for the original meaning of the notion. Only via the introduction of a new fundamental opposition between life and death drives could the dualistic balance be reinstated, which Freud deemed necessary to account for the pervasiveness of psychic conflict. Adding to the complexity of Freud’s idea was his insistence that the death drive never enters the stage alone, but only appears in the form of fusions with Eros.