The death drive: what Freud claimed in 1920, and what is left of it

The death drive is Sigmund Freud’s name for an assumed drive of all living matter to return to a lifeless, inorganic state. Freud introduced it in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Its opposite is Eros, the life drives, which include the sexual drives. Turned outward, the death drive appears as aggression and destruction. Mixed with Eros, it appears as sadism and masochism. Freud himself called his argument speculation, and the word Thanatos does not come from his writings.

The quotations from Beyond the Pleasure Principle below come from its first English translation, by C. J. M. Hubback (1922). That translation says “death-instincts”: “death drive” and “death instinct” are two English names for Freud’s German word Todestrieb. Quotations from Freud’s later German texts are our own translations.

• In 1920 Freud defined an instinct as a tendency “towards the reinstatement of an earlier condition”. From this he drew his famous sentence: “The goal of all life is death.”
• About his own theory, Freud wrote that he was “neither convinced myself, nor am I seeking to arouse conviction in others”.
• According to his biographer Ernest Jones, Freud used the word Thanatos only in conversation. Wilhelm Stekel used it in 1909 for a death wish, and Paul Federn introduced it for the death drive.
• In a footnote, Freud names three forerunners: Sabina Spielrein (1912), August Stärcke (1914) and Otto Rank.
• Jones wrote in 1957: “No biological observation can be found to support the idea of a death instinct.”

What the death drive is

In 1920 Freud sorted all drives into two groups. The life drives keep living matter alive and join it into larger and larger units. The death drive breaks these units apart and leads the living back to the lifeless state. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud gave a short summary in 1930: “So, besides Eros, a death drive; the phenomena of life could be explained from the interplay and counteraction of the two.”

The APA Dictionary of Psychology gives a similar definition today. Its entry on the death instinct describes “a drive whose aim is the reduction of psychical tension to the lowest possible point, that is, death”. According to the entry, the drive is first directed inward and later turned outward as the aggressive instinct. The entry names aggressiveness, sadism and masochism as behaviours that it is “believed” to underlie.

Freud thought that the two drives rarely, perhaps never, appear in isolation. In his view they combine in proportions that vary widely. In 1930 he described sadism as a strong mixture of love and the destructive drive.

Why Freud went beyond the pleasure principle

Until 1920, Freud explained mental life mainly with the pleasure principle: the mind tries to avoid unpleasure and to gain pleasure. In his later structural model, the pleasure principle is the principle of the id. Our article on Freud’s structural model of id, ego and superego explains how the three parts work together.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud collects observations that do not fit the pleasure principle. They have one thing in common: people repeat something unpleasant. Freud examines three cases. For each one, he also writes what speaks against his own reading.

Dreams after accidents and in the war

The first case is the traumatic neurosis. In chapter II of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud writes: “The terrible war that is just over has been responsible for an immense number of such maladies.” The dreams of these patients take them back again and again to the situation of the accident. This does not fit Freud’s older theory that every dream fulfils a wish. A wish-fulfilling dream, Freud writes, would rather show the patient “images from the time of his normal health”. In the next chapter he calls the shock dream the “least suspicious” of his cases.

The fort-da game of his grandson

The second case is a game that Freud describes in the same chapter. Freud stayed for some weeks with a family whose boy was one and a half years old. The boy threw his small toys into corners and under the bed and said a long “o-o-o-oh”. His mother and Freud agreed that it meant “fort”, German for “gone”. One day Freud saw the full game. The boy threw a wooden reel on a string over the side of his cot, so that it disappeared, and said “o-o-o-oh”. Then he pulled it back and greeted it with a joyful “Da” (there).

Freud read the game as a replay of the mother’s going away and coming back. He found it remarkable that the child played the first, painful part on its own far more often than the full game with the happy end. According to the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, the boy was Ernst, a son of Freud’s daughter Sophie.

Freud himself thought the example was weak. He offers two other readings: an urge to master a situation by playing an active part in it, and revenge against the mother. Both stay inside the pleasure principle. His verdict is in the text:

Freud adds that in children’s play, the urge to repeat and a direct pleasure are “inextricably intertwined”. By Freud’s own account, the fort-da game does not prove a drive beyond pleasure.

The repetition compulsion

The third and most important case comes from treatment. In psychoanalysis, patients repeat old experiences in their relationship with the analyst instead of remembering them. In chapter III Freud calls this the repetition compulsion. What was new to him: the patients also repeat experiences that were only painful at the time. “Nothing of all this could ever have afforded any pleasure,” he writes. Outside treatment he describes a “destiny compulsion”: people “with whom every human relationship ends in the same way”.

Here too Freud is careful. In the destiny compulsion, he writes, “much appears capable of rational explanation”. At the end of the chapter, however, he concludes:

From repetition to the death drive: Freud’s argument

Chapter IV starts with a warning to the reader: “What follows now is speculation, speculation often far-fetched, which each will according to his particular attitude acknowledge or neglect.” The step to the death drive then takes three parts.

1. 1.In chapter V, Freud gives a new definition of an instinct: “a tendency innate in living organic matter impelling it towards the reinstatement of an earlier condition”. With this definition, repetition is the nature of every drive.
2. 2.Freud asks which condition is the earliest. If all living things die “from causes within” themselves, then the lifeless was there first. From this he draws his sentence: “The goal of all life is death.”
3. 3.Freud connects this with the pleasure principle. The mind tries to reduce inner tension, to keep it constant or to remove it. With a term from Barbara Low, Freud calls this the “Nirvana-principle”. He calls it “one of our strongest motives for believing in the existence of death-instincts”.

The conclusion therefore depends on two assumptions: Freud’s definition of an instinct, and the premise that all living things die from inner causes. Freud states the second premise as a condition: “If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself…”

What Freud found in biology

In chapter VI, Freud looks for support in the biology of his time. August Weismann separated a mortal body (the soma) from a potentially immortal germ plasm. For Weismann, however, death was a late adaptation of many-celled organisms, not a basic property of life. This did not help Freud much.

Freud also reports experiments with single-celled organisms. The American researcher Woodruff bred a line of slipper animalcules (paramecia) to the 3029th generation and put each new generation into fresh water. Other researchers, such as Maupas and Calkins, found that these organisms grow weaker after many divisions and die. Without fresh fluid, Woodruff saw the same signs of age. Freud draws no clear result. The discussion, he writes, “has in my opinion had no decisive result in any direction”. Near the end of the chapter he adds that borrowing from biology makes his speculation more uncertain. Biology, he writes, may one day give answers that “overthrow the whole artificial structure of hypotheses”.

Eros and Thanatos: where the word Thanatos comes from

Freud took the name Eros from poetry and philosophy. In 1920 he writes that the libido of the sexual drives “would coincide with the Eros of poets and philosophers, which holds together all things living”. For the opposite drive he chose no Greek name. He wrote “Todestrieb” (death drive), often in the plural, and later also “Destruktionstrieb” (destructive drive).

The name Thanatos, the Greek personification of death, came from other people. Ernest Jones writes in the third volume of his Freud biography:

Jones also gives the origin. Wilhelm Stekel used the word in 1909 to mean a death wish. Paul Federn introduced it for the death drive. Our own check of four Freud texts agrees with Jones. The word Thanatos does not occur in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (in German or in the 1922 English translation), The Ego and the Id, Civilization and Its Discontents or the New Introductory Lectures.

Not every reference work agrees. The APA Dictionary’s entry on Thanatos says the name “was chosen by Sigmund Freud”. Jones, who knew Freud personally, gives Federn the credit and says Freud used the word only in conversation. The texts we checked support Jones. The pair “Eros and Thanatos” is therefore a later short form, not a formula from Freud’s published work.

English texts often say “death instinct” because the English translations of Freud rendered his word Trieb as “instinct”. Freud also had the word Instinkt, which is one reason why many writers now prefer “drive”. Our article on psychology terms that do not translate cleanly between English and German explains this choice and others.

Sabina Spielrein and the other forerunners

Many texts say that Sabina Spielrein described the death drive first, in her 1912 paper “Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens” (Destruction as the cause of coming into being). Freud mentions her in a footnote to chapter VI of Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

Freud writes that Spielrein called the sadistic component of the sexual drive “destructive”. In the same footnote he names two other forerunners. August Stärcke, in 1914, tried to identify the libido with a biological “impulsion towards death”. Freud also refers to Otto Rank’s book Der Künstler (The artist). By Freud’s own account, Spielrein was one of several forerunners, not the only one.

Ten years later, Freud admitted that he had resisted the idea himself. In 1930 he wrote: “I remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of a destructive drive first appeared in psychoanalytic literature, and how long it took before I became receptive to it.”

How sure was Freud?

At the end of chapter VI, Freud asks himself whether he believes his own theory. His answer is unusually open:

Freud calls himself an “advocatus diaboli” (devil’s advocate) who follows an idea out of scientific curiosity. He admits that this third step in his theory of drives “cannot claim the same certainty” as the first two: the wider idea of sexuality and the idea of narcissism. About the observations of repetition behind it, he adds: “But perhaps I have over-estimated their significance.”

The doubt did not last long. According to Jones, Freud came to accept the ideas fully within a couple of years, in The Ego and the Id (1923), and “with increasingly complete conviction” later. In a letter to Arthur Schnitzler in 1922, Freud said that Beyond the Pleasure Principle had tried to show Eros and the death drive as “the primal forces whose interplay governs all the riddles of life”.

Even so, Freud kept a limit on his claim. In 1930 he wrote that the assumption rested “essentially on theoretical grounds” and was “not fully secure” against theoretical objections. In 1933, in lecture 32 of the New Introductory Lectures, he called the whole theory of drives a mythology:

In the same lecture he added: “We do not claim that death is the only aim of life.”

From the death drive to aggression

In The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud built the death drive into his new structural model. He describes how the death drive of each cell becomes harmless. The organism directs it outward through the muscles, “probably only in part”, and there it appears as the destructive drive. Freud names sadism as a representative of the death drive. Already in 1920 he thought that masochism was possibly primary, and not only sadism turned back against the self. Psychoanalysis also knows turning against the self as a defence. Anna Freud lists it among the classic defence mechanisms.

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud moves the weight further. He writes that the death drive works “silently” inside the living being, “but that was of course no proof”. What is visible is aggression directed outward. Freud writes that he no longer understands how psychoanalysis could overlook “the ubiquity of non-erotic aggression and destruction” for so long. Then he makes the link:

For Freud, this also explained why civilisation is difficult. Civilisation must bind people to each other with libido, against the hostility “of one against all and of all against one”. In 1933 he wrote that the questions of how the two drives mix, and how the death drive serves Eros, were “tasks left to the research of the future”.

Did the death of his daughter Sophie inspire the death drive?

Freud’s daughter Sophie Halberstadt died on 25 January 1920. According to the Sigmund Freud Museum, Freud wrote to his mother that she died “from galloping influenza and pneumonia”. Beyond the Pleasure Principle appeared in the same year. For this reason, many people think that Freud invented the death drive out of grief. Fritz Wittels made this link in a biography of Freud, which Freud read at the end of 1923.

Freud disagreed. Harold Kudler quotes Peter Gay’s 1988 Freud biography on this. Freud wrote to Wittels: “Beyond was written in 1919, when my daughter was still healthy and flourishing.” In the early summer of 1920 he had already asked Max Eitingon and others to testify, if necessary, that they had seen a draft of the book before Sophie’s death. Gay does not close the question, however. He notes that the term “death drive” entered Freud’s letters a week after Sophie died. The text itself was not completely untouched either. A footnote to the fort-da game says that the child’s mother died when the boy was five and three-quarter years old. That mother was Sophie.

What analysts and biologists made of the death drive

The death drive was controversial among Freud’s own followers. Freud said so in 1930: the assumption had met with resistance “even in analytic circles”. Ernest Jones, a close colleague of Freud, describes “a very mixed reception among analysts”. Franz Alexander, Max Eitingon and Sándor Ferenczi accepted it at once. Others looked for support in physics and compared the death drive with entropy. Jones judged that these attempts failed.

The strongest verdict concerns biology. Jones summarises a study by Rudolf Brun:

Jones adds that Brun could not even find a reason for a primary aggressive drive. Brun explained aggression as a secondary reaction to situations such as hunger or frustration. As far as Jones knew, the analysts who still used the term, for example Melanie Klein, Karl Menninger and Hermann Nunberg, used it “in a purely clinical sense which is remote from Freud’s original theory”. Jones also quotes the analyst Edward Bibring with approval: the life and death drives “are not psychologically perceptible as such”, and their existence “is required by hypothesis alone”.

The concept has not disappeared. The APA Dictionary still defines it as a psychoanalytic term. Some analysts reinterpret it. In 2022, Michael Kirsch, Aleksandar Dimitrijevic and Michael Buchholz argued in Frontiers in Psychology that the “death drive” is “not a drive but a collection of trauma-induced auto-addictive diseases”, such as masochism and gambling disorder. That paper is a theoretical proposal, not a test of Freud’s theory.

The death drive is not a death wish

The name can mislead. In Freud, the death drive is not a conscious wish to die, and it is not an explanation of suicide. It is a theoretical assumption about a tendency of all living matter. Jones warns against this confusion. Psychoanalysis also calls wishes to see other people dead “death wishes”, and according to Jones the “mere play on the word ‘death’” caused much confusion. In rare cases of melancholia such wishes can lead to suicide, but Jones says this is “no proof” of a primary wish for self-destruction. In his words, “the clinical evidence points clearly in the opposite direction”.

If thoughts of death or suicide are on your mind, talk to someone about them. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, free and at any hour. Outside the US, contact a local crisis line or your emergency number.

Keeping the terms apart

Death drive, death instinct, destructive drive, aggressive drive, Thanatos, repetition compulsion, Nirvana principle and pleasure principle come from the same phase of Freud’s work. They are easy to mix up on an exam. A rule of thumb: the death drive (or death instinct) is Freud’s term for the tendency directed inward. The destructive and aggressive drives are its representatives directed outward. Thanatos is a later name from other authors. The repetition compulsion is the observation that Freud started from, and the Nirvana principle is the tendency to reduce tension that he read as a sign of death drives.

In Psychology World you can save terms like these to one list. Then you can drill the list as flashcards, as multiple-choice questions once it has four or more terms, or by typing the answer. What each study mode does is set out on the home page. Our guide to memorising psychology terminology explains which study methods have the strongest evidence.