Death Instinct

  • (noun): (psychoanalysis) an unconscious urge to die.
    Synonyms: death wish

Some articles on instinct, death, death instinct, death instincts, instincts:

Death Drive - Analytic Reception
... As Freud wryly commented in 1930, "The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles" ... half-century concluded that "the facts on which Freud based his concept of a death instinct in no way necessitate the assumption...of a genuine self-destructive instinct" ... set of hypotheses of the "life" and "death instincts"'" ...
Life Against Death - Synopsis
... Brown begins his Life Against Death with the riddle that haunts all romantics Why does man who is born into a garden of innocent delight create a culture in ... ambivalence of Freud's late instinctual dualism", in which "Eros and Death were seen as antagonistic psychological principles which constantly ... a secondary manifestation of a more fundamental instinctual force, the death instinct it was "the external expression of an impulse originally directed ...
The Ego And The Id - Exegesis By Chapter - Forces Within The Framework: “Two Classes of Instincts”
... the forces that act within that structure—namely, the love instinct and the death instinct ... for the existence of these two opposing instincts—save to (parenthetically) mention “anabolism and katabolism” (56), the cellular processes of building up and breaking ... Using these opposing instincts as the basis for further inquiry, Freud notes that there are cases where love seems to transform into hate and where hate transforms into love (59) ...

Famous quotes containing the words instinct and/or death:

    The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain—until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.
    Willa Cather (1873–1947)

    I knew the poor,
    I knew the hideous death they die,
    when famine lays its bleak hand on the door;
    I knew the rich,
    sated with merriment,
    who yet are sad.
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)