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Only a few of Freud's metapsychological concepts are as controversial as that of the death drive. Still fewer are as obscure, and none can match it in unpopularity. Taking into consideration the difficulty in discerning its actual meaning, one might easily be led to assume that many psychoanalysts who reject the existence of a force worthy to be called Thanatos have refrained from exploring its signifieance, feeling deterred a priori by its repulsive name.
Freud did not make it easy for his followers to accept his third and last version of the drive theory, and in the following years, it turned out to be highly inconvenient to himself as well. His difficulties reveal themselves in the fact that his attempts at integrating it into the theoretical cornerstones of psychoanalysis remained fragmentary. Maybe he had a presentiment that it might cause dangerous cracks. Nevertheless, my hypothesis is that the main obstacle can be located in the fact that the concept of the death drive was, from the very outset, ambiguous. Consequently, Freud was left with a feeling of discrepancy, no matter in which context he tried to incorporate it. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an elucidation of what Freud was really aiming at with his new concept. Mere quotations are not sufficient. One has the read between the lines and, to some extent, criticise and reinterpret what Freud wrote.
In a panel discussion on aggression at the IPA Congress in Vienna 1971, the chairman, Martin H. Stein, recapitulated the differences of opinion in the following way (Panel, 1972). Some psychoanalysts follow Freud's original formulation and presuppose the existence of a death