Todestrieb or Thanatos Urge

In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the Todestrieb ('death drive') is the unconcious drive towards your own death and destruction. This is often expressed through behaviors Todestrieb into his theory, Freud’s fundamental opposition was between the Ichtriebe ('ego drive') and the Sexualtriebe ('sexual drive'), a differentiation that is founded on the two-fold role of each individual being.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) first used the term in his 1920 essay Jenseits des Lustprinzips ('Beyond the Pleasure Principle'), but he 'borrowed' it from Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942), who mentioned it earlier in her paper Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens ('Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being') from 1912.

The concept of Todestrieb has been translated as "opposition between the ego (or death instincts) and the sexual (or life instincts)". The Todestrieb opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives.

The Todestrieb is sometimes referred to as the Thanatos Urge in post-Freudian thought (in reference to the Greek personification of death), complementing Eros, although this term was never used by Sigmund Freud himself.

The terminology Thanatos Urge or simply Thanatos was introduced by Wilhelm Stekel (1868-1940) in 1909, though he used the words to signify a death-wish.

Still, it is a little odd that Sigmund Freud himself never, except in conversation, used the term Thanatos for the death instinct, one that has become so popular since.

At first, Freud used the terms 'eath instinct' and 'destructive instinct' indiscriminately, alternating between them, but in his discussion with Albert Einstein about war he made the distinction that the former is directed against the self and the latter, derived from it, is directed outward.