Death Instinct Quotes

Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct.

the anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct.

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism.

We are born knowing death.

I think most generations tend to learn the lesson of war the hard way. There is a deep attraction to the empowerment. Freud is right: societies either become locked in a collective embrace of Eros, as individuals do, or a collective embrace of Thanatos, the death instinct. They swing between the two. The notion that societies are naturally prone toward self-preservation is wrong. Self-annihilation can be deeply addictive, intoxicating, enticing. So I take a darker view of human nature, that war is probably always going to be with us. I think history bears me out.

There are the spiritually consumptive ones: hardly are they born when they begin to die, and long for doctrines of lassitude and renunciation.

I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.

Reproduction is more pleasurable than death.

Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.

The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.

You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.

We must be born with an intuition of mortality.

Eroticism is the approval of life unto death.

Most creatures in nature die consciously. Cobras, for instance, choose a particular place on a particular branch of the tree. Many a times, I would try to force-feed them out of my misplaced compassion, but they would just puke and go back to sit on the same branch.

Our life-style contains more Thanatos than Eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity.