Freud

July 25, 2025

Granted, Freud’s century-old model of the human mind has been subject to heated debates over almost a century. It appears, though, that it is not always understood.

Here’s an iconic photo of Freud:

Love and Death = Life

Freud’s name has become inextricably tied to a stereotypical image of a pryting emotionless psychotherapist that attempts to explain every single thing with the person’s irresistable innate prurient interests in his or her own parents. However, it appears, that people now tend to interpret Freud’s explanation of this basic drive as a literate desire of children to… well, you get it. This idea that Freud had been trying to put into words, is far more complex and make a lot more sense if explained from a different, simpler, angle.

What’s the difference between the barren valleys on Mars and the lush meadows on Earth? Life. It’s one of the biggest mysteries people over the centuries have been musing over – how life appeared and how come it hasn’t been since snuffed out. How indeed? While the first question out of scope of psychotherapy, we can still theorotise about the second. As the modern science instits, the premordial soup was swarming with various compounds that for some inexplicable reason were attracted to one another to form one whole. This whole was much more stable than those compounds separately, and so the life had begun. As the life got more and more sophisticated, single cell organisms found it even more manageable to stick to other cell organisms. Again, one piece of life drawn to another to ultimately become better. Life evolved even more, and now each organism also had its own unique memory of how to regulate itself (DNA/RNA) and cells began sharing and joining these valuable blueprints to form something even better. And that worked. Million of years have passed since then, but the principle is still the same: I like your material, I want to join efforts and become one to keep the life on Earth going. This very premise, although completely out of awareness most of the time, is at the bases of mating and love in animals, plants, bacteria, and fungi. Humans, being animnals, operate on the same idea: I like you (I don’t always know why) and want to make babes with you. This is the first basic drive described by Freud – Eros (libido) or love.

The second drive – the death instinct (Thanatos) – is also critical for preserving life on Earth. If faulty oragnisms were allowed to go on all the time, the “Life Project” on Earth would’ve been in jeopardy. Faulty organisms either couldn’t find a mate, or withered away. What makes organisms wither willingly? An underlying idea, which has existed long before nervous systems could accomodate consciousness, driving an organism from within towards self-destruction because life of many is more important than the life of one. If an organism is useless or faulty, life itself leaves its body, protecting itself as a bigger system. Freud linked depression to this life instinct, suggesting that people suffering from it diminish their own value and thus the death instinct is turned on. In humans, superego (ego ideal as proposed by Freud) that represents conscious and unconscious values (including those instilled by parents and community) could be the operator of the death instinct: If you don’t comply, you are a danger to the society and should be eliminitated.

This is an elegant model and one hard to argue with. How are these Eros and Thanatos linked to the human mind then? When Freud descirbed the Oedipus complex and the drive towards the parents, I don’t believe he meant the same literal sexual drive that exists between a couple. No. He meant that primordial instinct to join with someone you believe is great. Children, for whom their caregivers are the first and primary representatives of life, feel that attraction to them. Although love can be reduced to the purely sexual drive when we speak about microorganisms and most animals, in humans it has evolved into something more sophisticated. If not the bodies, sometimes people want to join souls, and Eros attracts us to each other. When we aren’t loved and appreciated, Thanatos steps out from the shadows, stretching its long bony fingers, and dragging us away from the boisterous commotion of life.

Since caregivers are the first attachment figures, main objects in life for quite a while, we learn life from them by observing them, their reactions, their attitudes and their way of living. It is only natural that all our later attachments in life are somehow linked to that first experience of love. So, although the question ‘Tell me about your mother’ does sound a bit threadbare and irksome, it is helpful to know what a person’s first experience of life had been, where it broke and how to fix it now to help this person more forwards, and as far from Thanatos as possible.