Thanatos

Introduction

Freud used the term “Thanatos” to refer to his hypothesized “death instinct.” Thanatos was a frightening character in Greek mythology, and now, as a psychoanalytic term, Thanatos expresses one of the most troubling aspects of Freud’s unique vision of humanity – our innate destructiveness.

In Greek mythology, Thanatos, the god of death, was one of the “fearsome gods” for Hesiod in his Theogony (trans. 1988, p. 25). He was the son of Night and the brother of Sleep. Thanatos “has a heart of iron and a pitiless spirit of bronze in his chest. That man is his whom he once catches, and he is hateful even to the immortal gods” (p. 25). And yet he is not invincible: Sisyphus, the mythological Greek king punished by the gods for his arrogance, was able to tie up Thanatos and defeat him; also Hercules beat Thanatos in a wrestling match (Buxton 2004, pp. 89, 171).

According to biographer Earnest Jones (1957, p. 295), Freud never used the word Thanatos in his writing, only in...