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Quotation from The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud
“What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death-instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not protect itself from the tyrant in time by a revulsion into mania”
The Ego and the Id, Ch. V, 'The Subordinate Relationships of the Ego', trans. Joan Riviere (1927)
Freud's account of the merciless self-condemnation of melancholia and the suicidal danger it carries, with mania as the ego's escape.
Citation: "What is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death-instinct, and in fact it often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not protect itself from the tyrant in time by a revulsion into mania" — Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, Ch. V, 'The Subordinate Relationships of the Ego', trans. Joan Riviere (1927). (id freud-the-ego-and-the-id-q9)
