Self-destructive? It could be your death drive…

Daedalus, a master craftsman and architect of the labyrinth of Crete, once created wings made from feathers and wax that would help him and his son Icarus escape their imprisonment. Before they attempted to escape, Daedalus warned Icarus against flying too close to the sun or the sea, as the sea’s dampness would clog his wings, and the sun’s heat would melt them. But Icarus ignored his father’s caution and flew higher toward the sun. As he came closer, the heat melted the wax that kept his wings together.

Unable to maintain his wings, as the feathers came loose, Icarus began to fall and plunged into the sea below and perished; hence, the Icarian Sea got its name. There are different reasons and interpretations of why Icarus decided to fly so close to the sun. Some say youthful impulsiveness made him feel invincible and prone to risk-taking. Others claim it was the allure of danger and the seeking of thrill.

But could there be a darker, more disturbing reason behind his actions? Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed that humans are subject to two opposing drives. The first is the life drive, also known as ‘Eros.’ The second one is the death drive, later called ‘Thanatos.’ Although Freud admitted that the concept was speculative, the death drive became essential to his later theoretical framework.

The death drive points to irrational, self-destructive tendencies within human behavior. It supposedly motivates us to repeat traumatic experiences, engage in conduct that leads to demise, or cause violence outwardly toward other beings. It also underlies an inexplicable desire for pain or an irrational tendency to undermine one’s well-being. And at the root of all this, there’s a longing to return to the inorganic state we all came from: death.

The death drive is undoubtedly one of the most confusing concepts I’ve delved into. There have been various interpretations and explanations of the death drive, reshaped and expanded by thinkers like Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. Even though I tried my best, I acknowledge that my exploration is limited, especially regarding later interpretations. However, my focus leans less on its psychoanalytical facets and more on the existential questions the death drive evokes.

Why would living entities harbor a wish for self-destruction or even death? And if we look closer at the sufferings of existence, isn’t this longing to revert to an inorganic state quite understandable? This video explores self-destructive tendencies in light of Freud’s death drive and death itself. A little warning: this video isn't very cheerful, so if you're struggling mentally, consider not watching it.

Also, the purpose of this video is simply to explore Freud’s concept and reflect on death, and it’s not intended to be helpful or anything like that. Thank you. In the wake of World War I, humanity faced unprecedented devastation. Amidst this backdrop, Sigmund Freud observed his young grandson playing a curious game. The boy would repeatedly throw a toy out of sight and say “Fort” (German for gone) and then retrieve it and say “Da” (German for there).

What seemed to be simple, meaningless child play, Freud saw as a profound but mysterious phenomenon: a human tendency to replicate and repeat undesirable, possibly traumatic events, such as loss. In the case of the boy, the game would have been triggered by the temporary absence of his mother, during which he played that game. Before the war, Freud developed an idea that he called the pleasure principle (Lustpinzip in German), which is the instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoiding pain.

Though he had previously suggested that humans predominantly seek pleasure and avoid pain, his grandson’s game showed another dimension to human motivation. This curious human drive became all too apparent for Freud, observing the intense trauma caused by the war, including his own, especially after losing his daughter. Freud observed how war veterans repeatedly relived traumatic battlefield experiences in their dreams.

He also saw his patients continually find themselves in the same destructive relationships or situations again and again. Thus, he came to believe that humans harbor an intrinsic drive towards self-destruction and, ultimately, death. How else could we explain these irrational tendencies to self-harm and self-annihilate? Before diving further into the death drive, let’s look at what this phenomenon drives us towards: the inorganic state, the great nothingness: death.

The general preference for life and aversion toward death seems to be the norm in most cultures, especially in the West. But what’s so wrong with death, which is not just a natural occurrence but also a cessation of life’s many sufferings? It’s the eternal calm, the escape from existence toward the perfect, flawless state of inorganic stillness. It’s the return from where we came.

Death is usually considered something to be feared, something ill-favored and undesirable. It’s the antagonist of the thing most cherished, the state that we wish to maintain and even expand if we get the chance: life. The wish to live seems natural to us and other living beings. We just have to observe our daily efforts to obtain food and water, acquire protection, and, as far as humans are concerned, arrange our circumstances to facilitate our future survival – not obtaining such things would endanger our lives.

In human societies, it’s also to be expected that when we’re sick, we visit a doctor for a cure. And when we’re struck by life-threatening diseases such as cancer, we try to beat these illnesses. Longevity is the holy grail; early death is a tragedy. Aside from preserving and lengthening life, we generally seek to create it. We pass on our genes and continue our species, a phenomenon any living organism has a propensity for.

At some point, the human mind came up with the idea that life is to be cherished; it’s a gift and a miracle to be alive, a privilege some attribute to God. But when we look at life honestly, it’s difficult to deny the inherent suffering that comes with it. Different thinkers have pointed out this suffering, although they all came to different conclusions regarding solving it.

Thousands of years ago, for example, a prince who eventually carried the name Buddha walked the Earth and acknowledged that suffering lies at the core of being alive. He presented a solution to the suffering of sentient beings, which would lead to enlightenment, which is the end of suffering and the escape from the cycle of rebirth. Much later, in the twentieth century, lived a highly pessimistic Romanian philosopher named Emil Cioran, who experienced life as unbearable, not something to be enjoyed or lived to the fullest, but as a catastrophe to be endured.

In his work The Trouble With Being Born, he criticized the fact humanity, in general, considers birth as the “sovereign good” and death as the misfortune that comes at the end. But Cioran saw birth as the real evil and death as the mere ending of it. He stated: “If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?” End quote.

Now, we can’t exclude Arthur Schopenhauer from this essay. This nineteenth-century philosopher claimed that life’s suffering far outweighs its pleasures and that we’re better off not existing, a claim embraced by the anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar, who explains in his book Better Never to Have Been that coming into existence accompanies serious harm, so much so that it’s immoral to give birth to new beings.

In his book, Benatar presents a very rational approach toward life and death, carefully comparing the pros and cons of both conditions, leading to his conclusion: that it’s better not to come into existence. He stated: “We infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born child—pain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur.” End quote.

What characterizes these branches of thought is this: a recognition of a significant degree of suffering in life and, more interestingly, a tendency toward non-existence, either through the elusive escape from the cycle of rebirth as a consequence of ascetic practice or through not being born in the first place. According to Schopenhauer, there’s a blind, irrational urge to exist and self-sustain despite life’s ingrained misery, which he called the will to live, which is extremely difficult to bypass.

We can do as we will, but we can’t will as we will, according to Schopenhauer, which explains why we tend to live in ways that so obviously generate suffering. Consider our unsatiable desires for power, social status, and wealth; when satisfied, the feeling of contentment is only temporary, and we’re thrown back into the cycle of desire and discontent rather quickly. Thus, our lives become this perpetual chase of satisfying desire after desire, always leading to another want or need, never bringing lasting fulfillment.

So, when we look at life’s conditions, isn’t there something to be said for the views of Schopenhauer, Benatar, and Cioran? How liberating is it to be bereft of life when the ongoing dissatisfaction with existence fades as if an unbearable bad movie finally ends? In non-existence, there’s nothing to worry about. Minor concerns like choosing what to wear or eat and more pressing issues such as war, poverty, and illness all come to a halt. If death grants us such relief, isn’t it something to look forward to then?

Here’s where Freud’s death drive comes into play: a force that opposes the life drive and entails an unconscious desire to escape life’s ongoing suffering. So, could it be that the case for non-existence observed in thinkers like Schopenhauer, Benatar, and Cioran is not just a product of rational thinking but also originates from an unconscious force that longs for annihilation?

Could it be that besides our conscious attempts to survive and thrive, there’s an underlying propensity to return to an inorganic state? Now, let’s take a closer look at Freud’s theory. We’ve all witnessed in other people or, perhaps, even personally experienced a curious interest in self-destruction. It could be the urge to take copious amounts of intoxicants as a means to tune out, accompanying the risk of poisoning and other potentially long-term health consequences.

Or what about the inexplicable desire for self-harm, such as picking at a scab or engaging in more violent, self-damaging behaviors that cause physical harm? What’s the allure of these forms of self-destruction? Could they arise from a mysterious, elusive inner longing for demise? As mentioned, Freud’s views on human motivation shifted after he became aware of certain self-destructive tendencies that he couldn’t reconcile with his earlier thinking.

It became apparent to him that the totality of human pursuits couldn’t be traced back to survival and pleasure alone; there seemed to be a more sinister, darker layer to what drives us. Could it be that, besides our inherent will to live, there’s also a will to perish? We’ve explored earlier the allure of non-existence as an argument favoring Freud’s death drive. It explained why we might consciously and unconsciously prefer death over life.

According to Freud, the ‘death drive’ is a biological drive in living organisms, also called Thanatos, the Greek mythological personification of death, as opposed to Eros, referred to as the ‘life force’ or ‘life drive,’ which includes self-preservation, reproduction, and creativity. The death drive is an inherent desire to return to the inanimate, an initial state from which the living entity once departed. Freud wrote: “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that 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.’” End quote.

The death drive is more than simply our journey toward death; which is more of a biological fact, as we all die eventually. The death drive is an active force. Aside from our immanent journey from the cradle to the grave, it’s an unconscious longing for demise, or, as we could say, the wish for this journey to end sooner than biologically determined. It’s the tension that arose by departing from nothingness that tries to cancel itself out, a drive to return to where it came from.

So, we could look at Icarus’ actions not as bravery or youthful recklessness but as a manifestation of the unconscious death drive to escape from the domain of tension into nothingness. “Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown,” wrote Cioran, to which we could say that death is the ‘great known,’ the state that’s plain as day, as there’s nothing there, nothing to attain, nothing to run from, nothing to endure, nothing to worry about, which makes this great nothing so liberating.

But Freud’s death drive and manifestations within human behavior are more complex than a blunt desire for non-existence (even though this drive could manifest as an explicit death wish nonetheless). The death drive also expresses itself in other behaviors, which caught Freud’s interest. Such behaviors are irrational forms of destructiveness rather than direct attempts to escape life. An example of such behavior is the concept of ‘repetition compulsion.’

Freud saw that his patients often repeated self-destructive patterns or traumatic scenes, even when aware of this behavior. Personally, I tend to listen to music occasionally that evokes traumatic past experiences, including emotions such as sadness and melancholy. These are usually pieces of music I listened to during the times I had these experiences. Bringing back all these memories doesn’t make sense; they’re hurtful and don’t contribute to my happiness and well-being. It’s something I’d be better off not doing, in the same way I’d better not put my hand on a stove. Yet, there’s something strangely satisfying about it.

In this case, it’s a tendency to seek pain instead of pleasure, which Freud saw as a subtle manifestation of the death drive. Such endeavor comes across as conflicting with the notion that the death drive seeks relief from life’s tension, as it, through repetition compulsion, maintains and even increases the tension. These contradictions make this concept so difficult to grasp and probably contribute to the fact that Freud’s death drive is one of his work’s most controversial and debated concepts.

Freud also believed that the death drive doesn’t purely direct itself inward. It also projects itself outward in the form of aggression toward others. According to Freud, aggressive behavior comes from a desire to destroy outside of the self. The phenomenon of sadism is an expression of the death drive as well, as opposed to masochism, which refers to a desire for pain and self-destruction.

As we’ve explored in the previous chapter, within the wish for non-existence hides a more profound longing for relief – peace, essentially. A curious expression of such longing (one that I’ve had plenty of experience with) is substance abuse. Why would someone drink himself into a coma? Why would people inject poisonous substances into their bodies? When we think of it, it’s absurd.

From the perspective of the death drive, this behavior is merely another manifestation of the unconscious longing to revert to the inanimate, given that the primary appeal of these substances is their ability to help one escape from reality. Freud’s controversial concept received much criticism, and many psychoanalysts rejected it. Critics stated that there wasn’t enough empirical evidence to prove the existence of such a drive.

Also, other theories could explain self-destructive tendencies or outward aggressiveness, such as attachment theory, behaviorism, and cognitive theories. Cultural and societal factors may also influence how we view self-destruction and outward hostility. Still, there have been thinkers who further developed Freud’s death drive, such as Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek.

Lacan, for example, rejected Freud’s notion that the death drive is biological. Lacan saw it as a fundamental aspect of the symbolic order: the realm of symbols, language, and social norms that shape our reality. So, according to Lacan, the death drive takes place more on the level of thought than biology. Žižek sees the death drive similarly but expanded this idea, including a focus on the role of society (consumerism specifically) arousing the death drive.

The death drive remains a topic of discussion. The concept challenges us to confront our self-destructive tendencies and the irrationality that often hides behind them. Are these behaviors random, or products of conditioning, or trauma? Or could there indeed be a force at play that longs for self-destruction or even death?

I was also thinking about the topic of loneliness and social isolation in light of the death drive: could the tendency to isolate oneself from others also be a manifestation of it? What do you think? Please let us know in the comment section. Thank you for watching.