Thanatos

    In Homer’s famous The İlliad & The Odyssey, Thanatos is the personification of death. Just like Eros, Thanatos was used by Freud as a poetic metaphor to capture a sense of an abstract concept. About Eros, Freud (1940/1986) mentions that: ‘… we have decided to assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct.’’. Indeed, what Freud was referring to as destructive instinct was Thanatos, who was working simultaneously with Eros to affect progression through the ontological procession. 

    Thanatos, the death drive tries to express itself in its pure form, aggression, and destruction. In the dual-instinct theory which consists of the life drive and the death drive, Freud tries to find a solution to the following problem: can the death drive be an isolated current drive or is it dependent on other drives, such as those associated with life or sexuality? His dualistic view is rejecting Jung’s monistic solution which defends general libidinal energy. 

    The theory of drives develops between two main forces that rule psychic life. While Freud was studying the phenomenon of sadomasochism, he discovered that two terms are fused to each other. A tendency toward violence and dissolution was apparently related to the death drive, nevertheless, it was not totally distinctive from the erotic drive. On the one hand, Eros, the erotic drive is ruled by sexual urges that aim to reproduce and to extend the units of life. The life instinct is not only explained through this, yet it also establishes the bonds that hold people in mutual relations, and it has a role in human intellect, inspiration, and creation. On the other hand, the existence of death's drive toward the destruction of life is perceived as the aim to return to the primordial condition, the phase of not being arisen to live.