The Principle of Entropy and the Death Instinct

In the psycho-analytical theory of instincts the death instinct occupies a peculiar position. Some psycho-analysts are of opinion that it is entirely superfluous, while others make use of it as of a notion based on proved clinical experience. Freud constantly reiterates that this notion is conjectural, 1 and he holds that we must not regard the instincts of death or Eros as ranking with the other propositions he has laid down in his theory of the libido. In his view, with the assumption of the death instinct that theory enters the realm of speculation, for here it oversteps the boundaries of psychological or psycho-analytical methods, since the notions of the death instinct and Eros purport to embrace biological facts—indeed, the universal behaviour of nature (the stability principle). Many uncertainties, confusions and errors arise from the circumstance that we do not always sufficiently distinguish between the different meanings attached to the one word: 'instinct' [1].

As we know, from the psychological standpoint—i.e. as concrete forces within the personality (id, ego and superego)—Freud differentiates the sexual instinct and the instinct of destruction. In antithesis to these stand the speculative biological notions of Eros and the death instinct, by which we mean not so much forces within the personality, but the most universal behaviour of living substance. They are principles, or, if you like, natural forces, but not instincts in the narrower sense of the word. The term 'death instinct' denotes the fact that everything living is of limited duration, has a beginning and an end, and it represents the course of life as the restoration of the inanimate state in which life originated. 'Eros' denotes the constant prolonging of life through reproduction and the aggregation of ever-greater organic masses in increasingly complicated unities. This clear distinction between the 'speculative' (biological) and the psychological standpoint has been frequently emp