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Psychological Construct of the Death Instinct |
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The purpose of this research is to compare the views of two theorists Ernest Becker and Sigmund Freud on the psychological construct of the death instinct. The plan of the research will be to set forth the philosophical and psychological background from which analyses of the topic as a construct emerged, and then to discuss the elements that describe differences between the views of Freud and Becker. As appropriate, reference will be made to other psychological constructs that may from time to time intersect with the construct of the death instinct. How the psychology of death is perceived by psychological practitioners and philosophers is important to understanding the meaning of death as well as helping the community at large to deal with it. But the community at large is the culture, individuals are part of the culture, and certain cultural attitudes frame the concept and analysis of the death instinct. The attitudes of various religious groups toward death appear to both reflect and determine attitudes of persons within the dominant culture. In primitive societies, where religion and culture were for all practical purposes the same thing, death was tied to life in a cyclical way. That is, death would lead to rebirth or resurrection in one form or another. Frazer's analysis of primitive culture describes rituals connected with the agricultural and seasonal cycles that in some measure sought to discover meaning in the cycles of human life as well. In effect,
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In other words, the attractions of immortality are decisively outweighed by the safety of self interested aggression. To be sure, the aggression itself may be neurotic, but that is a matter apart. It is the tension between the impulse for life and the impulse for death that is presently at issue.
The death instinct as Freud describes it is something like a concept in which the stakes of neurosis have been dramatically raised. In particular, Freud positions the death instinct, which surrounds, protects, but perhaps also torments the individual, against the erotic instinct (Eros), which becomes the vehicle of individual extension into and connection with the world. But he also asserts that Eros, to the degree it functions because of a wish for physical self gratification, is in part an extension of the aggressive component of the preoccupation with death. Freud explains that he concludes that
besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it
into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary
instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back
to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as
Eros there was an instinct of death. . . . It was
Category: Psychology - P
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Elsewhere Freud, Manson Hitler, Ching Becker, Civilization Discontents, World War, Freud Becker, Christian Bretall, Eugene Ionesco, Eden Oriental, Allen Manhattan, death instinct, becker 1973, freud 1930, unto death, sickness unto death, death death, sickness unto, human existence, modern christian, death rebirth, christian view, construct death instinct, york modern library, forms death denial takes, frazer 1981 pp,
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