Sigmund Freud rather used a dualistic approach to describe Eros and
Thanatos. Since they are contradictory in one another, but could be turned to one another as well like flipping of love and hate, crying and laughter.
That is why Freud postulated, "the aim of all life is death" and Antigone by Anouilh is an embodiment of
Thanatos. Even with Haemon while referring to love-making, she employs metaphors of path.
Freud also postulated that Eros is counterbalanced by the death drive,
Thanatos.
Thanatos refers to the drive in the (human) creature to forsake its specific and afflicted life in favour of a return to the indeterminate, the inanimate, and the pre-organic.
Another frame of reading that spread with the photograph was related to the dualism of eros and
thanatos: the dialectic imagery of love against death and violence made visible in the disparity between the lovers and riot police.
The masculine Minotaur-like figures in his paintings seem to embody the principle of
Thanatos while the erotic feminine evidently reflects Eros.
As Gross puts it in the film, "Freud's obsession with sex probably has a great deal to do with the fact that he never gets any." Jung and Freud's ideas have given solace to millions, so it's fascinating to see the two struggle as they try to shape their inchoate musings into concepts like the anima,
thanatos, and the collective unconscious.
Thus the common description of the uncanny as the "return of the repressed." It is no coincidence that at the same time he was writing his essay on the uncanny, Freud was also completing Beyond the Pleasure Principle, wherein he replaced the libidinal and egoistic drives of his earlier work with the more potent and contestable pairing of eros and
thanatos (2)--life and death, pleasure and aggression.
In his astonishing, seemingly boundless desires--in the course of the novel, Lucien describes his varied intimacies with men and women, adolescents, even newborns, his love objects bound only by the commonality of death--"the necrophiliac" melds Eros and
Thanatos into one terrible whole, all the while insisting that the amalgamation cannot be undone.