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Freud's contribution on the death instinct in his work Beyond the Pleasure Principle was one of his most imaginative works but one that, unlike virtually all his other works, suffered from incredulity among almost all his followers. Freud did not chide them or insist on their loyalty to this idea, as he had about his other works. Most of his followers felt that his notion of the death instinct was self-referential because of the simultaneous onset of his cancer of the mouth and self-reflective because of the aftermath of World War I. Most felt that the death instinct constituted a recondite biologism and was neither a sound metapsychological concept nor a practical clinical entity. Karl Menninger and Melanie Klein were to become its only adherents, whereas others “traded it in,” so to speak, for the concept of an aggressive instinct, which was thereafter to begin to flourish especially in the school of American ego psychology.
Klein took the concept so seriously that it became perhaps the fundamental hallmark of her psychoanalytic enterprise. Loyal in all regards to her analyst, Karl Abraham, she nevertheless disagreed with him with respect to his notion of a “preambivalent” developmental phase. She believed that the experience of innate destructiveness due to the operation of the death instinct emerges in the infant's psyche from the very beginning of life and reveals itself as a primordial anxiety. Bion later expanded on her notion and proffered the concepts of “container/contained” and maternal “alpha function” as transducers of the infant's inchoate “fear of dying,” which it must projectively reidentify in mother for her alpha function to contain, transform, and ultimately inform the infant. Moreover, Klein later discovered the theoretical and clinical importance of envy and associated it as the mental manifestation of