Death Drive - The Continuing Development of Freud's Views

The Continuing Development of Freud's Views

In the closing decade of Freud's life, it has been suggested, his view of the death drive changed somewhat, with "the stress much more upon the death instinct's manifestations outwards". Given "the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness", he wrote in 1930, "I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man".

In 1933 he conceded of his original formulation of the death drive 'the improbability of our speculations. A queer instinct, indeed, directed to the destruction of its own organic home!'. He wrote moreover that "Our hypothesis is that there are two essentially different classes of instincts: the sexual instincts, understood in the widest sense - Eros, if you prefer that name - and the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction". In 1937, he went so far as to suggest privately that 'We should have a neat schematic picture if we supposed that originally, at the beginning of life, all libido was directed to the inside and all aggressiveness to the outside'. In his last writings, it was the contrast of "two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct...our two primal instincts, Eros and destructiveness, on which he laid stress. Nevertheless, his belief in "the death instinct.. a return to an earlier state...into an inorganic state" continued to the end.