Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Destrudo is the opposite of libido—the urge to create, an energy that arises from the Eros (or "life") drive—and is the urge to destroy arising from Thanatos (death), and thus an aspect of what Sigmund Freud termed "the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction".
The essay, marking Freud's major revision of his drive theory, elaborates on the struggle between two opposing drives. In the first few sections, Freud describes these as Eros, which produces creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation; and the "death drives" (what some call "Thanatos" [4]), which brings destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self ...
Depiction of Thanatos by Mexican artist Mauricio García Vega Hypnos and Thanatos: Sleep and His Half-Brother Death, by John William Waterhouse, 1874. According to Sigmund Freud , humans have a life instinct—which he named " Eros "—and a death drive, which is commonly called (though not by Freud himself) "Thanatos".
While Eros is used for basic survival, the living instinct alone cannot explain all behavior according to Freud. [8] In contrast, Thanatos is the death instinct. It is full of self-destruction of sexual energy and our unconscious desire to die. [9] The main part of human behavior and actions is tied back to sexual drives.
Freud concludes this book by expanding on his distinction between eros and thanatos: "When an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt", [10] and he ponders on how the eternal battle between these heavenly powers will play out in mankind.
The term thanatophobia stems from Thanatos, the personification of death in Greek mythology. Sigmund Freud hypothesized that people express a fear of death as a disguise for a deeper source of concern. He asserted the unconscious does not deal with the passage of time or with negations, which do not calculate the amount of time left in one's life.
The term libido was originally developed by Sigmund Freud, the pioneering originator of psychoanalysis. With direct reference to Plato's Eros, the term initially referred only to specific sexual desire , later expanded to the concept of a universal psychic energy that drives all instincts and whose great reservoir is the id .
According to Freud as well as ego psychology the id is a set of uncoordinated instinctual needs; the superego plays the judgemental role via internalized experiences; and the ego is the perceiving, logically organizing agent that mediates between the id's innate desires, the demands of external reality and those of the critical superego; [3 ...