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A century ago, Freud proposed the conception of mind structure models consisting of the following three components: the id (unconscious/instinctual drives), the ego (the exclusive apparatus of the conscious mind), and the super ego (which represses the id in order to avoid any disruptions of rational thought). In the process of clarifying the unconscious components—the id and the super ego, Freud additionally developed the economic energy models of the following unconscious drives; first the “life instinct (Lebenstrieb)”—the tendency toward survival, propagation, and other creative life-producing drives, and later the “death drive (Todestrieb)” described in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920)” as “… everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’”.

Following Freud’s discovery of the death drive, it has continued to be one of the key concepts of psychoanalysis, which is often considered to form the basis of various emotions/behaviors—anxiety, fear, aggression and envy, and problematic behaviors including violence and suicide (Freud, 1933b; Klein, 1957). Historically, Freud underpinned the death drive from clinical phenomena such as negative therapeutic reactions, repetition-compulsion, anxiety dreams in persons with war neurosis, and masochism. Freud considered that the life instinct and the death drive fuse together in early life stages, and emphasised that the death drive was silently driving individuals toward death and that only through the activity of the life instinct was this death-like force projected outwards and appeared as destructive impulses directed against objects in the outside world (Freud, 1924). Freud named the outward-directed death drive “the destructive instinct (drive).” Melanie Klein and Karl Menninger were among the very few psychoanalysts who succeeded and developed the concept of the death drive. Klein, the Vienna-born British female psychoanalyst, who further developed Freud’s concept of the death drive and was the basis of the Kleinian school in her later life, regarded the super ego in early life stages as the clinical expression of the death drive (Klein, 1932).

Based on her theory, humans genetically and potentially have both the life instinct (desires for affection and/or objects) and the death drive (destructiveness and aggression), and these drives are expressed as internal/external object relations (good object/bad object) (Klein, 1957). Klein and Hanna Segal, a prominent Kleinian psychoanalyst, linked the death drive to envy (Segal, 1952, 1993). Segal also linked it to aesthetics by describing that “Re-stated in terms of instincts, ugliness—destruction—is the expression of the death instinct; beauty—the desire to unite into rhythms and wholes, is that of the life instinct. The achievement of the artist is in giving the fullest expression to the conflict and the union between those two (Segal, 1952).” Herbert Rosenfeld regarded the death drive in line with the concept of the pathological organization (narcissistic organization) in which good objects are abolished and destroyed internally in the self (Rosenfeld, 1971). As stated above, Kleinian theory has been continuously developed based on two opposing internal objects; the good object and the bad object. On the other hand, independent group psychoanalysts have developed their own theories. Ronald Fairbairn avoided the good/bad dichotomy, and established a unique object-relation theory with two essential objects; the exciting object and the rejecting object (Fairbairn, 1952). He assumed that the two internal objects were the roots of human behaviors and emotional life. Donald Winnicott emphasized the importance of external objects (environmental factors) in addition to internal objects (Winnicott, 1953, 1960).

Researchers such as Heinz Hartmann, Otto Kernberg, and Jaak Panksepp have fundamentally discussed the concept of instincts and drives in psychoanalysis in connection with biology and affective neuroscience. Hartmann, one of the founders of ego psychology, developed the theory of aggression based on the death drive (Hartmann, 1939). In addition, Panksepp, who coined the term “affective neuroscience,” has been proposing a provocative theory linking drives and emotions. Based on his neurobiological and neuropsychoanalytic background, he and his colleagues have recently developed the theory of the SEEKING system (Wright and Panksepp, 2012). The SEEKING system is described as a “primary process” that promotes psychomotor eagerness to obtain pleasure generating resources and eliminate calamities, providing euphoric anticipatory excitement, and linking with other drives, such as those apart of the rewarding affective systems of LUST, CARING, and PLAY, and at times the aversive affective systems of FEAR and RAGE (Wright and Panksepp, 2012). Interestingly, in the commentary of the article of Wright and Panksepp, and Kernberg suggested “the concept of ‘death drive’ be retained for the pathological predominance in some clinical conditions of negative internalized object relations that may lead to an overwhelming dominance of self-destructive motivation (Kernberg, 2012).”

In psychoanalysis, the relationship between Es (id), libido and drive (instinct) has been ambiguously classified. While valuing Freud’s original concept of the two essential drives and the following psychoanalytic theories, we believe that these concepts should be modified with accordance to recent theoretical/biological developments as discussed above. In the present day, the majority of psychoanalysts and scholars such as ethologists and experimental psychologists are skeptical regarding the validity of the death drive as a relevant concept (Dufresne, 2000), but many researchers continue to accept the concept of the (aggressive) destructive drive (Rosenfeld, 1971; Feldman, 2000; Britton, 2003; Kernberg, 2012). In this article, we use the term of the death drive basically as the destructive drive (instinct), which induces negative emotions and outward destructive behaviors.