Macbeth is Shakespeare's imaginative representation of the death drive in action. The death drive operates in his mind addictively, in a repetitive process of instinctual fusion and defusion as he tries to obtain what he believes he lacks. He deflects his death-driven destructiveness onto an external object, justified in his mind by an omniscient narcissism that substitutes for his superego. Under the influence of the death drive, he commits patricide, regicide and deicide; fratricide and sorocide; and infanticide and filicide (with Lady Macbeth), to further his ends. In the course of the play, he loses his conscience, both as moral agency and knowledge of the self. He exists finally in a nocturnal world of sensation, unrelated to others. Macbeth leaves the members of the audience in a state of tension common to the workings of the death drive at the conclusion of the action. They are left with a quantity of affect not altered by outcome of the action, in what can be thought of as a negative catharsis.