The death drive or the drive toward death is a well-known Freudian term which many directions of Psychoanalysis have already abandoned today.
There are things that make a person want to live: joy, love, children, pride on something, success, a feeling of happiness, intimacy with another person, feeling a part in common cause - this is all the drive toward life. But there are things, situations that cause feelings of emptiness, uselessness, meaninglessness of everything, longing - this is the drive toward. When the second one wins, we experience pain, not physical, but such an aching anguish. Everyone experiences it in any given situation. As if something is tearing apart from the inside. When you think if it lasts a little bit more you will not take it. It calls for something to be done to make this feeling go away. Freud called this the "death drive."
