This talk by Dr. Adrian Perkel integrates current neuroscience with psychoanalytical theory to explain the death drive and how it functions in the human psyche. It explores the function of aggression in both perverse and normative ways in its role of binding free energy when frustration is increasing through unmet needs, linked to defence mechanisms and their role of automatising patterns through regression to encoded implicit memory. These lead to symptoms, and current insights give us a different way of thinking about how we both formulate symptoms and psychopathology and modify treatment as a result.