Talk:Death drive

Disambiguation
In 24 hours, I'm going to reroute "Deathwish" to the disambiguation page.

Deathwish
Should the article Deathwish be merged with this one? -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:26, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I would say so. Most references I checked treat them as synonyms. --Thunderhead 17:48, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
 * No! A death wish is an active, suicidal desire.  That is not what Freud is getting at in Beyond the Pleasure Principle at all.  He is thinking of a drive (like Nietzsche's will to power), an impersonal force at work all the time in every being.  Every organism (people, dogs, single cells), according to Freud, is prey to the death drive, a desire to find its own end, a drive to return to its earliest, pre-organic form.  But a dog cannot have a death wish. Prosopopeia 18:32, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Agreed, the two are not one and the same. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by BlueFox the Shadow (talk • contribs) 23:41, 18 December 2006 (UTC).
 * I also agree with the above point that 'deathwish' and 'death drive/instinct' should NOT be merged. Once more, deathwish describes a conscious, secondary process of thinking. While Freud's 'Death drive/instinct' a primary(i.e. genetically acquired), uncoscious energy within the core of the personality. Which in psychoanalytic language is considered a distinctingly different state and aspect of the personality Dvonof 14:00, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
 * "More specifically, it refers to a perpetual desire to commit suicide." No, it really doesn't. Sentence removed.Fourdegrees 11:10, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Style
I've tried to improve the pervasive style and formatting issues; this seems like someone originally wrote it for school. There's a lot of information here, but it still needs help to be a solid article. Amadh 12:40, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It's also not especially accurate. Nowhere but nowhere did Freud talk about Thanatos; to suggest that it is synonymous with Freud's formulation thus: "death drive (Thanatos)", is misleading, and to refer to a "thanatos drive" is plain wrong. Therefore, if the scope of this article is limited to Freud's concept, to assert that "It is named after the Greek word θάνατος, or Thanatos" is also inaccurate, and the potted biography of the Hellenic deity is extraneous. (I believe the use of "Thanatos" in this sense comes at least in part from Herbert Marcuse's Eros & Civilization.) The characterisation of the death drive as a "desire (...) to return to the grave" is also questionable (did we emerge from the grave?). For Freud the death drive was a striving to return to an inorganic state; to a zero-point that existed before an organism came into being and that it finds again in death (Paraphrasing SE 18:36-9).

Fourdegrees 23:55, 22 December 2006 (UTC)


 * The main body of the article comes from a draft of my PhD thesis' literature review, which I though would provide a good start to a detailed entry on the 'death instinct'.

On the 'thanatos' aspect, it is true that Freud never used the term although it did become popular in post-Freudian literature and in particular by psychoanalysts like Jean Laplanche as well as the Kleinian school which made wide use of the concept. 'Thanatos' is indeed derived from Greek but more as a contradiction of 'Eros' rather than a reference to the deity. Finally, I agree, the death instinct as a "desire to return to the grave" is plainly wrong. Maybe it should be amended as 'the desire for physical or psychological death as a manifestation of the drive towards the inanimate state'.Dvonof 14:12, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Instinct is wrong, drive is right
The standard edition of Freud mixes up the German words for instinct (Instinkt) and drive (Trieb). But Freud did not, and distinguished between them carefully, at least by the time of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He never spoke of a death instinct, only of a death drive. Even so, the term is almost universally known in scholarly literature on Freud as the "death drive." How did this article get put under "death instinct"? Can someone change it back to death drive? That goes beyond my humble wikipedia abilities. Prosopopeia 18:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
 * You are right to highlight this important distinction, which is indeed observed in most psychoanalytic thought, but throughout the Standard Edition it is referred to as "instinct" and therefore the article title should probably correlate to this standardised if mis-translated term.

Fourdegrees 23:55, 22 December 2006 (UTC)


 * The translation of Freud's works in the SE has been debated ever since it was published - and for a reason as some of the terms are unnessarily complicated (see, hyper-cathexis, id, instinct, etc.). Nevertheless, I too think that we should stick with the prevalent use in the SE and keep 'instinct' (or maybe instinct/drive).Dvonof 14:17, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Destrudo
Destrudo is a concept that appears but briefly in Freud's work and does not necessarily merit a mention in the first paragraph of the article. It is the energy associated with the death drive; the destructive impulse. It is not wrong to confuse the death drive with the destructive impulse; this is precisely Freud's thinking in Civilization and Its Discontents and my summation of Eros and death drive in psychoanalytic theory, at the end of the first section, reflects this. Fourdegrees 00:40, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
 * We should also keep in mind that some psychoanalysts reject the term altogether and support that 'libido' is the energy within the 'death instinct'. All very metapsychological but nevertheless an important discourse in this theoretical area. I'll try to put something together on this.Dvonof 14:22, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Beyond Freud
It would be nice if someone incorporated relevant scientific research such as is mentioned in parts of this: Global Brain excerpt. (Search for thanatos.) — Jodawi (talk) 22:56, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Misplaced information?
I've read the 'Clinical manifestation' of the death drive, but it doesn't quite make sense. It doesn't mention a word on death drive or the desire to return toward the primordial state at all. It seems to make more sense when I think that this part belongs to 'agression' article, though. I must admit that I don't know much at all about the death drive, so this information might not be misplaced after all, but if it's not, this section seems to need more explanation. Or I really don't think an average reader will see the connection. I sure as hell don't see it here. Anthonydraco (talk) 16:57, 30 June 2010 (UTC)

Quoting errors
there are abbreviations such as Freud, "Beyond", p. 282. Freud, "Beyond", p. 285. Freud, "Beyond" p. 288. Freud, "Beyond" p. 294 and p. 292. Freud, "Beyond", p. 294. Freud, "Beyond", p. 295. Freud, "Beyond", p. 308. Freud, "Beyond", pp. 316 and 322. Freud, "Beyond", p. 311. Freud, "Beyond", p. 328. Freud, "Beyond", p. 334.

which are not carefully chosen and correctly quoted for example the quote from p. 285 is not a proper sentence, in the translation I know it probably is this sentence: "When the dreams of patients suffering from traumatic neuroses so regularly take them back to the situation of the disaster they do not thereby, it is true, serve the purpose of wish-fulfilment, the hallucinatory conjuring up of which has, under the domination of the pleasure-principle, become the function of dreams." Or in Original German: "Wenn die Träume der Unfallsneurotiker die Kranken so regelmäßig in die Situation des Unfalles zurückführen, so dienen sie damit allerdings nicht der Wunscherfüllung, deren halluzinatorische Herbeiführung ihnen unter der Herrschaft des Lustprinzips zur Funktion geworden ist." The quote used in the text should be adapted.Triple5 (talk) 02:38, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Scientific perspective and factual validity
It's unclear to me that there's any scientific evidence that this is actually a real phenomenon. The cited Global brain exerpt (from this book) does not seem to represent a well-informed scientific view, and certainly not any sort of mainstream view. It seems to endorse group selection which is rejected by the mainstream of evolutionary psychologists. I have the feeling that mainstream psychology grounded in empirical experiments has dropped this theory as unsupported by the evidence, but it would be good to explain in the article if it's been dropped or if in fact later investigation has supported the theory. -- Beland (talk) 02:15, 13 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Mainstream empirical psychology hasn't discovered that people are often self-destructive? Weird flex but okay. -- PStrait (talk) 05:21, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Regarding the Eric Berne section.
Not to dispute the assertion, but is there a credible reference to Berne having been a "pupil" of Paul Federn? I need to know for something I'm writing. Thanks. 2600:8801:BE26:2700:ED12:2681:FFCC:D393 (talk) 19:21, 26 August 2021 (UTC) JJ Elias