ABSTRACT
The chapter first deals with the fundamental psychoanalytic concept of the “death drive” (Todestrieb) as explained by Sigmund Freud in 1919, taking into account its opposition to the life drives, repetition-compulsion as its mode of expression, and its relation to a number of pathological as well as normative acts. Later, the chapter sheds light on the radically different depiction of the death drive (pulsion de mort) and repetition-compulsion (insistance), in terms of the insistence of the signifier and the insistence of the symbolic order itself, by twentieth-century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. All concepts discussed in the chapter are adequately illustrated with the help of clinical case histories and widely read literary works.
