death instinct

NOUN
  1. (psychoanalysis) an unconscious urge to die

How To Use death instinct In A Sentence

  • Freud postulated that we all have a death instinct as well as a life instinct.
  • In fact, it is the death instinct in the form of the imbalance between id, ego and superego that drives Gallimard to his final suicide.
  • Death instinct generates attack, destroy, war, and other wrack and ruin behavior.
  • I find laziness a very unenjoyable experience but once I'm in a lazy state I find it very difficult to get out of it, as if the death instinct is dominating over the pleasure principle.
  • Furthermore, most cultures do have real or imagined varieties of religion that are malign in purpose, or which celebrate or are at least somehow expressive of what Freud called Thanatos, the "death instinct. Archive 2006-01-08
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