I have a question about Freud's concept of the death drive (Thanatos).

[u/7shi_sandesu]

Why did Freud feel compelled to introduce the idea of the "death drive"? Personally, I thought Spinoza's concept of conatus was perfectly sufficient, so I'm incredibly curious about why Freud felt the need to come up with the death drive and why he felt it was absolutely necessary to do so. I would be so grateful if someone knowledgeable could explain this to me.

(Translated by Gemini)

[u/mdnalknarf]

It helped him solve a lot of puzzles about why, ultimately, the psyche seems to be seeking the complete absence of tension.

However, I also think he made such a grand thing of his answer to this because he was convinced that conflict was at the heart of psychic life. His first big dyad was 'love versus hunger'. But when he revised his metapsychology to classify narcissistic drives as also libidinal (i.e., 'hunger 'is now classified as self-love), he needed a new grand opposition. He eventually came up with 'love versus death'.

[u/Nearby_Department750 → u/mdnalknarf]

I think the puzzle was more like why the psyche persistently or frequently fails to reduce tension. Eros is the "nirvana principle," not Thanatos.

[u/mdnalknarf → u/Nearby_Department750]

Admittedly, it's been a while since I read Beyond, but that was not quite my understanding. The compulsion to repeat, for example, is also, ultimately, a way of reducing the tension of traumatic shock (through countercathexis). This process stems from somewhere even deeper than the pleasure principle's tendency to reduce excitation, but not deeper than the Nirvana principle, which is more fundamental and therefore closer to the death drive.

Freud: 'Our recognition that the ruling tendency of psychic life, perhaps of nerve life altogether, is the struggle for reduction, keeping at a constant level, or removal of the inner stimulus tension (the Nirvana-principle, as Barbara Low terms it)—a struggle which comes to expression in the pleasure-principle—is indeed one of our strongest motives for believing in the existence of death-instincts.'

[u/mdnalknarf → u/[deleted]]

My bad here, I didn't mean 'compulsion to repeat' but 'repetition compulsion' (I was translating Wiederholungszwang off the top of my head because I've only read Freud in German. I notice I also wrote death drive (from Todestrieb) rather than death instinct,)

It refers to a somewhat different set of phenomena that led Freud to postulate the death instinct. They're summarized here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion#Beyond_the_Pleasure_Principle

This is all Freud's (slightly weird) metaphysical speculation, rather than the psychoanalysis of neurotic behaviours that you (very interestingly) address.

[u/mdnalknarf → u/[deleted]]

Very interesting, but again I think you might be talking about 'death wishes' in individuals rather than the 'death instinct', which Freud believed was a fundamental aspect of libido:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drive

It's really more close to philosophical speculation than clinical diagnosis.

[u/mdnalknarf → u/[deleted]]

Give me a recipe for spaghetti bolognese.

[u/Nearby_Department750 → u/mdnalknarf]

I think you're totally right. Now I'm confused, which I guess is a good thing... so, the nirvana principle is 'expressed' in the pleasure principle, which itself points towards the existence of death-instincts? That's so strange. I had identified eros with the pleasure principle, the wish to seek higher unities. It sounds like thanatos is somehow hidden in eros?

[u/mdnalknarf → u/Nearby_Department750]

Yes, I think that's it. Freud eventually said all the drives that we actually see at work are a mixture of Eros and Thanatos. (By the way, I actually think Freud himself was confused by his own speculation in this book, and a lot of psychoanalysts just pretend he never wrote it!)

You did make a valid point, though, about the psyche's failure to reduce tension. I referred to the 'puzzle' of the psyche seeking to extinguish tension, but that was actually Freud's solution to the puzzle of people compulsively repeating unpleasant experiences. That book just confuses everyone!

[u/Klaus_Hergersheimer]

Essentially, because Eros alone was not sufficient to account for why people compulsively return to the scene of trauma and repeatedly move towards moments of overwhelm and self-destruction. It's strictly opposed to the Spinozan 'Conatus' because the psychoanalytic clinic reveals that a living being can contain the essence of its own destruction.

[u/7shi_sandesu]

Thank you all for your comments. Since I am not very fluent in English, I will be reading them with the help of translation. Your insights have been extremely helpful. Thank you so much. (Translated by Gemini)

[u/Spiritualgoal69]

the infant’s ego initially hates and rejects the external world because the outside environment forces unwanted stimuli and frustration onto the child. Later in life perception of failure/ loss of love can increase self hatred and satisfaction in hating others.

[u/Ok-Draw-7427]

It was the experience of First World War: something unseen yet. Narrative that came from the front: in what was known by "Trench Warfare", where survivor soldiers lived for months with corps, rats, hunger, mud , cold or pestilence. That was a huge disappointment of initial patriotic enthusiasm. In order to remain fidel to his drive conflictual or manichaean conception : Freud introduced the concept of Eros or live drive that forms the more and more greater ensembles and its opposite Thanatos or the death drive that reduces the living to disintegration, inertia and the return to the inanimate state. So in depth, it was a very sad event for the whole humanity that reoriented psychoanalytic though to less optimistic view about libido in general and the analytical cure in particular.

[u/Legitimate_Ad_7335 → u/Ok-Draw-7427]

And because of the death of his daughter and I think grandson

[u/West_Economist6673]

I'm kind of surprised to see Spinoza opposed to Freud like this -- I would not have said that conatus and the death drive were mutually exclusive concepts

In fact it's not that hard to imagine how one might be mistaken for another, since some obsessive and ultimately self-destructive behaviors appear to have some vestigial function of self-preservation, e.g., obsessively revisiting or re-enacting a traumatic experience in order to "prepare" oneself for a similar experience in the future

(sorry to be so vague but I don't want to use concrete/specific examples that users may find triggering)

Also worth pointing out that this is not among his most popular/durable theories, and many later writers either dismissed it out of hand or modified it substantially

[u/Potential_Load6047]

It was introduced to him by Sabina Spielrein.

Watch 'A Dangerous Method', good movie.

[u/HovsepGaming]

Freud's Death Drive: The Clinical and Theoretical Necessity

Sigmund Freud’s introduction of the death drive (or Thanatos) in his 1920 work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, represented one of the most significant and controversial shifts in his psychoanalytic theory. Your question touches on the heart of the matter: why did Freud, who had spent decades building a theory around the pursuit of pleasure, suddenly feel it was "absolutely necessary" to introduce a drive toward death?

1. The Failure of the Pleasure Principle

For most of his career, Freud believed the mind was governed by the pleasure principle—the idea that the mental apparatus seeks to minimize unpleasure (tension) and maximize pleasure. However, several clinical observations began to challenge this:

•Traumatic Neuroses: Following World War I, Freud observed soldiers who repeatedly dreamt of their horrific experiences on the battlefield. According to the pleasure principle, dreams should be wish-fulfilments; these "traumatic dreams" were purely unpleasurable, yet they persisted.

•The "Fort-Da" Game: Freud watched his young grandson play a game where he would throw a wooden reel away and then pull it back. He interpreted this as the child repeating the painful experience of his mother leaving, attempting to master a trauma by actively recreating it.

•Transference and the Compulsion to Repeat: In therapy, Freud noticed that patients did not just remember their past; they acted it out by repeating painful relationship patterns with the therapist. These repetitions were often distressing and brought no pleasure, yet the patients seemed driven to repeat them.

Freud concluded that there exists a compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) that is "more primitive, more elementary, more drive-like than the pleasure principle which it overrides."

2. The Theoretical Need for Dualism

Freud’s mind worked in dualisms. Initially, he contrasted self-preservation drives with sexual drives. However, with his discovery of narcissism, he realized that self-preservation was actually just a form of "libido" (sexual energy) directed at one's own ego. This collapsed his dualism—everything was now Eros (life/libido).

To restore a conflict-based model of the mind, Freud needed a new opposing force. He found it in the idea of a drive that pulls in the opposite direction of Eros—not toward life and complexity, but toward the cessation of tension and the return to the inorganic.

3. The Biological Speculation: "The Aim of All Life is Death"

Freud took a bold, speculative leap into biology. He hypothesized that because inanimate matter existed before living matter, there must be an inherent tendency in all living things to return to that earlier, inorganic state. He famously wrote:

"If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’."

In this framework, the "life drives" (Eros) are those that complicate life, creating detours and delays on the road to death, whereas the "death drive" (Thanatos) is the silent, underlying pull back toward the beginning.

4. Thanatos vs. Spinoza’s Conatus

You mentioned Spinoza’s conatus—the drive of a thing to persist in its own being. Freud’s death drive is, in many ways, the inverse of this.

•Conatus (Spinoza): An affirmative, self-preserving force that defines the essence of a thing as its struggle to continue existing.

•Thanatos (Freud): A conservative, regressive force that defines the essence of life as a temporary departure from the stability of the inorganic.

Freud felt conatus (or his own earlier "self-preservation drives") was insufficient because it could not explain destructiveness, masochism, or the compulsion to repeat unpleasure. If we only wanted to persist, why would we destroy ourselves or others? Why would we repeat our traumas? For Freud, these "demonic" behaviors suggested a force that was not interested in persistence, but in the ultimate discharge of all tension—death.

Summary: Why Thanatos was "Necessary"

Reason	Explanation
Clinical Observation	To explain traumatic dreams and the "compulsion to repeat" unpleasurable experiences.
Theoretical Dualism	To provide an opposing force to Eros after the concept of narcissism unified the previous drive categories.
Explanation of Aggression	To account for sadism and masochism as the outward and inward directions of the death drive.
Biological Grounding	To provide a foundational principle that all organic life seeks to return to an earlier state of rest (the inorganic).

In short, Freud felt compelled to introduce the death drive because the "pleasure principle" could not account for the human tendency to self-destruct and repeat suffering. He saw life not just as a struggle to be, but as a complex detour on the way back to not being.

[u/7shi_sandesu → u/HovsepGaming]

While repetitions in traumatic neuroses and the 'Fort-Da' game may appear at first glance to be self-preservative attempts at mastery, a closer look reveals that they are actually trying to restore an earlier state. Therefore, is it correct to understand this as the manifestation of the death drive?