What Changes During Adolescence?

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Behaviour is driven by unconscious instincts, including the sex drive and the death drive.

The life drive governs hunger, thirst, pleasure and avoidance of pain.

The death drive manifests as aggression towards self or others.

Adolescence is a period of mourning

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........

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