Destrudo
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Destrudo, or Destrado, in Freudian psychology, is the energy of the destructive impulse. It is the opposite of libido. While libido is the urge to create, an energy that arises from the Eros (or "life") drive, destrudo is the urge to destroy, an aspect of what Sigmund Freud termed "the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction" arising from the death drive (thanatos).
Destrudo is a lesser-known aspect of Freud's theory, and is usually ignored in place of better-known and better-defined theories of human emotion. Destrudo can be traced to Freud's attempt to explain the actions of soldiers in World War I. The term is said to postdate Freud himself, and to have been introduced by the Italian psychoanalyst Edoardo Weiss as an alternative to Federn's mortido: "The term mortido is taken from Paul Federn...Weiss calls it 'destrudo'".
Further reading
- Edoardo Weiss, Principles of Psychodynamics (New York 1950)