[1][2] It was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein in her paper "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being"[3][4] (Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens)[5] in 1912, which was then taken up by Sigmund Freud in 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
In a sense, the death drive is a force that is not essential to the life of an organism (unlike an "instinct") and tends to denature it or make it behave in ways that are sometimes counter-intuitive.
[15] Three main types of conflictual evidence, difficult to explain satisfactorily in such terms, led Freud late in his career to look for another principle in mental life beyond the pleasure principle—a search that would ultimately lead him to the concept of the death drive.
When Freud worked with people with trauma (particularly the trauma experienced by soldiers returning from World War I), he observed that subjects often tended to repeat or re-enact these traumatic experiences: "dreams occurring in traumatic patients have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident",[16] contrary to the expectations of the pleasure principle.
[26] Seeking further potential clinical support for the existence of such a self-destructive force, Freud found it through a reconsideration of his views of masochism—previously "regarded as sadism that has been turned round upon the subject's own ego"—so as to allow that "there might be such a thing as primary masochism—a possibility which I had contested"[27] before.
Even with such support, however, he remained very tentative to the book's close about the provisional nature of his theoretical construct: what he called "the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses".
At the close of the decade, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud acknowledged that "To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way".
Schopenhauer's pessimism led him to believe that the affirmation of the "will" was a negative and immoral thing, due to his belief of life producing more suffering than happiness.
In a letter of 1919, he wrote that regarding "the theme of death, [that I] have stumbled onto an odd idea via the drives and must now read all sorts of things that belong to it, for instance Schopenhauer".
[33] Ernest Jones (who like many analysts was not convinced of the need for the death drive, over and above an instinct of aggression) considered that "Freud seemed to have landed in the position of Schopenhauer, who taught that 'death is the goal of life'".
[34] However, as Freud put it to the imagined auditors of his New Introductory Lectures (1932), "You may perhaps shrug your shoulders and say: "That isn't natural science, it's Schopenhauer's philosophy!"
[44] In 1937, he went so far as to suggest privately that 'We should have a neat schematic picture if we supposed that originally, at the beginning of life, all libido was directed to the inside and all aggressiveness to the outside'.
[49] The importance of integrating mortido into an individual's life, as opposed to splitting it off and disowning it, has been taken up by figures like Robert Bly in the men's movement.
Artistic images were seen by Joseph Campbell in terms of "incestuous 'libido' and patricidal 'destrudo'";[56] while literary descriptions of the conflict between destrudo and libido[57] are still fairly widespread in the 21st century.
[60] Mortido was introduced by Freud's pupil Paul Federn to cover the psychic energy of the death instinct, something left open by Freud himself:[61] Providing what he saw as clinical proof of the reality of the death instinct in 1930, Federn reported on the self-destructive tendencies of severely melancholic patients as evidence of what he would later call inwardly-directed mortido.
[67] Eric Berne, who was a pupil of Federn's, made extensive use of the term mortido in his pre-transactional analysis study, The Mind in Action (1947).
As he wrote in the foreword to the third edition of 1967, "the historical events of the last thirty years...become much clearer by introducing Paul Federn's concept of mortido".
[72] Jean Laplanche has explored repeatedly the question of mortido,[73] and of how far a distinctive instinct of destruction can be identified in parallel to the forces of libido.
[75] Indeed, Ernest Jones would comment of Beyond the Pleasure Principle that the book not only "displayed a boldness of speculation that was unique in all his writings" but was "further noteworthy in being the only one of Freud's which has received little acceptance on the part of his followers".
"[83] Eric Berne too would proudly proclaim that he, "besides having repeated and confirmed the conventional observations of Freud, also believes right down the line with him concerning the death instinct, and the pervasiveness of the repetition compulsion".