Sex, Death and Adolescence

Freud argued that almost everything boils down to sex or death. Okay, that’s something of an over-simplification. What he actually said was that our behaviour is driven by unconscious instincts, which he called the sex drive and the death drive.¹ The sex drive, or libido, can also be thought of as the life drive. It governs our innate survival instinct, including instincts for hunger and thirst, as well as our desires for pleasure, including sexual pleasure, and our predisposition to avoid pain. Freud’s concept of the life drive has clear links with evolutionary theory because the main aim is survival, both of the individual and of the species to which it belongs. The life drive compels us to engage in activities that sustain life – such as eating, drinking and keeping ourselves safe – as well as prosocial activities, such as co-operation, love and sex.

As an aside, for all the criticisms levelled at Freud regarding misogyny and heteronormativity, which may well be valid, he drew a distinction between pleasure-seeking and reproductive drives in his earliest work² and acknowledged sex as both a gratifying activity as well as a reproductive one.

The death drive, on the other hand, manifests as aggression, either towards others or towards the self. Freud is famously quoted as stating that “The aim of all life is death”.¹ Death is inevitable for all living species, of course, but the idea that we are driven towards it is difficult to contemplate. My understanding of Freud’s proposition is that, for most people, most of the time, our life and death instincts operate simultaneously and in harmony. The reason that most of us survive into adulthood and old age is because our life instinct is stronger than our death instinct, and our desire to live outweighs our desire to die. So, we seek out relationships and experiences that are life-enhancing, healthy and essential for survival. Evidence of the death instinct manifests in harmful activities that pose a threat to life, which might manifest as violent behaviour towards others, such as fighting, or towards the self, such as self-injury or suicidal behaviour. Or it might take the form of risk-taking behaviour, for example through the misuse of drugs or alcohol.

According to Freud, the ultimate motivation of the death drive is a desire to return to a simpler state of being “un-born”, prior to the pain of separation. Put like that, I think the theory makes sense and I think that everything probably does boil down to sex and death, especially for adolescents.

For adolescents, it’s a balancing act between the self-satisfying, life-enhancing, pleasure-seeking Eros and the antagonistic, aggressive, risk-taking Thanatos. For them, everything matters, and everything feels like a matter of life or death. This is true for ordinary adolescents developing in an ordinary way in an ordinary enough family,³ but throw in an unexpected or unwelcome variable – perhaps the loss of an important relationship, a major illness, or other trauma – and the effects can be catastrophic.

Psychoanalytic literature argues that the adolescent process involves a renegotiation of every part of the relationship with external (real world) objects and internal (psychological) objects. The adolescent must “pick up each particular aspect…explore it, remember it and face the loss [of it] in order to let it go”.⁴ This process is akin to Freud’s idea of mourning which is about acknowledging the lost object and our feelings associated with the loss, and contemplating the self as both separate from and changed by the experience. For young people who were experiencing this ordinary stage of developmental mourning during the pandemic, their sense of loss was amplified. They might not have realised it at the time; they certainly wouldn’t be thinking about it in these terms, but they will have been aware of difficult feelings, an overwhelming sadness, acting out/fight/flight behaviour or acting in fearful/freeze behaviour. It makes sense to think of those experiences as ordinary adolescence but bigger; teenage angst but bigger; fear of death, fear of failure, fear of an imagined future, but bigger. The pandemic and its aftermath were difficult for everyone to navigate, no matter our situation, life stage or age, and for adolescents, whose lives had already been upended by the very fact of adolescence, they were monumental.

Extracted from: Connor, J. (2024). You’re Not My F*cking Mother and Other Things Gen Z Say in Therapy. PCCS.