ipl-logo

Compare And Contrast Death Driving And Thanatos

871 Words4 Pages

Freud links our unconscious history with the history of the Western civilization. He describes love and death by referring to the Greek mythology, using two specific terms: Eros to describe love and Thanatos to describe death. Eros is the life drive/instinct and is involved in the safeguarding of life. It materializes through the basic needs for health, safety and especially through sexual drives, in order to get pleasure. In fact, the energy originated by this drive is called the ‘Libido’. Its central aim is to try to conserve and to generate life. This life drive generates positive emotions, such as: love, cooperation and collaboration into the society and within the others. It is a love, a creativity, and a self-satisfaction drive. On the contrary, Thanatos is the death drive/instinct, which is found in contradiction with the Eros. ‘The aim of all life is death...inanimate things existed before living ones’ (Freud 1920)
The death drive, Thanatos, is followed by a range of negative emotions, these are: fear, hate and anger. They could lead to anti-social behaviours, which could develop until the murder of an individual. A metaphor used by Freud relies on …show more content…

Freud expressed his concept by saying: 'The goal of all life is death '(Freud,1920). In the individual the death drive is found in the superego, which tries to master the ego and the parts of the self that only seek for love and sex. Therefore, the superego causes a lot of suffering to the individual and makes this relationship between love and hate complicated. On the other hand, in a society, the death drive has precise consequences such as: aggressions and dominance. Freud claims that societies also possess a superego, which makes them wish to have the control over the other groups. Societies use this death drive in a negative way, creating a sense of guilt into the individual, so they could be controlled and their actions could be

Show More
Related
1440 Words | 6 Pages

Lucretius states that some people are driven to such pleasures, such as the lust of wealth and status, that they are willing to spill another’s blood to attain it. Pleasures such as these evoke negative actions and cause corrupt individuals to become victim to numerous crimes and eventually death. He mentions that this fear of death is the root of all perpetuating problems, because it affects the way an individual thinks, impedes relationships, and annihilates moral responsibilities. Lucretius discusses the concept and ideals of self-pity a man feels when he fears that death is impending and then mauled by animals.

Read More
609 Words | 3 Pages

Murder; What exactly possesses one to commit such a heinous crime? How do we bring ourselves to harm our fellow man? What forces could possibly be at play to twist one’s mental psyche? Fear, anger, disasters, depression to hit the nail on the coffin so to speak. The story that I am going to unfold is one explaining such atrocities, our tale begins around the 1930’s on a seemingly peaceful farmland in Oklahoma.

Read More
502 Words | 3 Pages

Likewise, this wanton murder leaves lasting moral injuries in the minds of the

Read More
1042 Words | 5 Pages

Fear is seen in everyone’s daily life. Many different fears affect different people but when those fears are used to manipulate people’s lives, it can cause destruction and hurt many. When fear is used as a tool of manipulation, it can control others actions through fear of death, betrayal, and abandonment. This can be seen through the sources the Crucible, 1984, and in today’s society with toxic relationships. One of the ways fear is used to manipulate is using the fear of death against others.

Read More
1268 Words | 6 Pages

Milgram’s studies observed conditions that fostered obedience and contribute to the development of the agentic state theory, one’s tendency to rationalize that responsibilities and blame lie on the authority figure. In order to understand why people inflict pain upon

Read More
771 Words | 4 Pages

Murder, it is an act that escapes rational human reasoning. It brings upon a social and moral unrest among all societies. It has been a topic of complex nature among sociologist to fathom the ideas and reasoning behind such atrocious acts especially those committed by serial killers. Serial killers symbolizes deviancy in the most brutal and violent manner, they deviate through the sheer act of killing for irrational reasons ranging from need to just sheer pleasure from committing the act itself. II.

Read More
1575 Words | 7 Pages

The actions of people come from a variety of sources. Normally, a drive stimulates a person to act upon a desire. However, the unconscious motivation of individuals becomes apparent through unsightly consequences. As a result, guilt then becomes the driving factor for actions regarding the original motivation. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19th century historical fiction novel, The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne takes a psychological approach to reveal the hasty results of the unconscious motivations of his characters.

Read More
1922 Words | 8 Pages

William Fairbairn is known for postulating that libido unlike what Freud said is object seeking and not pleasure seeking. He said our search for relationships is more primitive than the desire to gratify them. Fairbairn’s structural model proposes, “that the libido is not primarily aimed at pleasure, but at making relationships with others.” Fairbairn’s internal objects are formed directly from actual experiences with external objects. For Fairbairn, badness is the internalization of parents who are actually depriving or rejecting.

Read More
1134 Words | 5 Pages

A child under the confines of parents cannot express their aggressive nature, and so that cruelty turns inwards and assaults it’s host through the superego. Both Nietzsche and Freud’s thoughts on guilt still revolve around a power relationship and internalization of punishment caused by man's inferiority to a community, parents or another controlling force. By going through the development of guilt, Freud and Nietzsche make it clear that guilt is a consequence of restraint from a superior force against the

Read More
1889 Words | 8 Pages

In every piece of literature, film, art, music, or theatre, there is either sex or death; the inextricable link and inescapable fact of the giving and taking of life. This circle of life and death has been referenced by many philosophers and critics over the years, most famously Freud, who developed the theory of Eros and the death drive (later referred to as Thanatos, to

Read More
749 Words | 3 Pages

Nothing else could call for the sacrifice of a life for its expiation. And the original sin was an offence against God the Father, the primal crime of mankind must have been a parricide, the killing of the primal father of the primitive human horde, whose anemic image was later transfigured into a deity.” At first glance this excerpt comes off almost as if it were another language, but Freud uses this passage to argue his main case that society’s distress is provoked by war which strips mankind of civilization’s effect on the

Read More
906 Words | 4 Pages

In this text there are three Ovid’s myths explicated in the light of Freud’s thesis about sublimation. According to Freud it means that the energy related to sexual desire redirects in the form of another mental process. This Freud’s thesis can be found in all three myths of Ovid. In the further parts of the text there will be short analysis of all three.

Read More
1528 Words | 7 Pages

Psychoanalysis was first introduced by Sigmund Freud and is now known as classical psychoanalysis. The theory, as defined by Sigmund Freud, is the dynamic between underlying forces that determine behavior and personality. He stressed the importance of human sexuality, childhood experiences, and the unconscious processes. However, his theory was seen as misogynistic and narrow focused. Consequently, classical psychoanalysis was criticized and rejected by many scholars.

Read More
1404 Words | 6 Pages

The Comparison between Freud and Jung: Their Contributions, Similarities and Differences Many people have known about psychology because of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (Blundell, 2014). In spite of the fact that they have various theories, they have so many contributions to understand the struggle of human mind. Their theories and thoughts have not always differed from each other (Blundell, 2014). Once, they were friends and colleagues.

Read More
701 Words | 3 Pages

Freud also drove a strong movement that sex drive is the most important motivating force. “He went on to identify that at times in our lives we find different areas on our bodies pleasurable and today these are known as erogenous zones. These ideas mixed together to form Freud’s Psychosexual Stage Theory which is still taught in textbooks today”. This theory consisted of five different stages. The first is the oral stage, in it a newborns to eighteen month old infants find pleasure from the mouth, specifically, sucking.

Read More

More about Compare And Contrast Death Driving And Thanatos

Related Topics

Open Document