Thanatos: The hidden side of love. An investigation in the function of Freud's 'Todestrieb' as illustrated in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'

This dissertation describes the opposing but overlapping roles of Eros and Thanatos and their vicissitudes, representing the final version of Freud's theories, which is then used to interpret Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. Freud's portrayal of life as a series of victories of Eros over Thanatos until the latter prevails is profoundly mythological and solicits religious reflections. Such a reflection, from a Christian Anabaptist Sitz im Leben, constitutes the last part.;Thanatos drives the psyche to seek immediate pleasure through discharging free energies; bringing the organism to death. Eros strives to bind and tame free impulses in accordance with reality; bringing lasting satisfaction. This aligns Thanatos with primary psychological processes, frenetic sexuality, lethargy, and aggression, while Eros precipitates secondary processes, sublimation, working through, love and affection. Should Thanatos overpower Eros, its impulses to primary, frenetic joining until exhaustion, and Thanatos takes over.;For Garcia Marquez' Buendia family, the postponement of pleasure was intolerable. No one faced reality, grieved losses, or worked through their past. Their responses were repression and flight. The vicissitudes of the drives are analyzed in each family member on their circuitous routes to disintegration. Only Aureliano Segundo and Petra sublimated immediate pleasure, worked through the reality of their poverty, and discovered new vigor, love, and contentment.;Freud maintained that sublimation transformed libidinal impulses into aims higher than sexuality, thus coming to the horizons of psychoanalysis. In spiritual reflections, Thanatos parallels the Anabaptist concept of sinful human nature striving towards death with no unmediated escape, while Eros parallels Divine Agape Love, which implodes the human condition with transforming power; enabling one to postpone pleasure and walk in love--even to love one's enemies (a Freudian absurdum). Since the field of psychology encompasses the libidinal drives and their vicissitudes, religious expressions of spirituality can be analyzed, but the spiritual source and content must always remain an absurdum.;Freud dealt with dualities between free and bound psychic energies: first, between self-preserving instincts and drives; second, within the drives themselves; and third, between the life and death drives--which over-arch the former drives without eliminating them.