Death Wish (Noun)
Meaning
(psychoanalysis) an unconscious urge to die.
Classification
Nouns denoting goals.
Examples
- His self-destructive tendencies led his analyst to suspect that he harbored a deep-seated death wish.
- The patient's reckless behavior on the highway was seen as a manifestation of his unconscious death wish.
- Freud's theories on the death drive proposed that all humans have an innate death wish that must be managed by the ego.
- The artist's fascination with mortality was interpreted by some as a symptom of his own unacknowledged death wish.
- The woman's series of ill-fated relationships and self-sabotaging choices were understood by her therapist to be a product of her unresolved death wish.