The Death Drive in Psychoanalysis: Decoding Three Prominent Theories from Spielrein, Freud and Klein

The death drive is a concept used by a number of psychoanalytic theorists with very little consensus on what this drive actually is or does. When each psychoanalyst makes use of the term it is unclear whether they are even referring to the same thing. In this thesis, three main theories on the death drive from Sabina Spielrien, Sigmund Freud, and Melanie Klein are examined. This thesis seeks to make sense of what exactly each thinker believes the death drive to be despite the complexity and sometimes lack of clarity in their works. Throughout each chapter, comparisons and differences between each psychoanalyst are drawn in order to find what is held in common between them. By tackling each theory this way, this thesis seeks to formulate some idea of what can be said concretely about the death drive.