Comic book writer and artist Jim Starlin created the character Thanos, the villain of Avengers: Infinity Wars, and Avengers: Endgame. In several interviews, Starlin said that he named the Mad Titan after the death instinct of psychoanalytic theory, an instinct that Sigmund Freud supposedly named Thanatos. “I went to college between doing U.S. military service and getting work in comics, and there was a psych class and I came up with Thanos." Therefore, "I had him sort of roughed out before I ever started working at Marvel."
Thanos cosplayer at San Diego Comic-Con International (2015). Source: Travis Langley In the original comic books, the character becomes infatuated with the personification of Death, who is an entity embodying all death in the Marvel Universe. This eventually leads him to gather the Infinity Stones that will let him use the Infinity Gauntlet that will let him remove half of all living beings from the universe as an offering to Lady Death. In the films, his reason is that he believes removing half of all life will make more resources available to those who remain. Even though some viewers find his reason compelling, it is a foolish notion. With the world population at 7.6 billion when he says that in 2018, that means it has less than 47 years since the population was half that amount, about 3.8 billion. On the cosmic scale, he achieves nothing. At the species level, specifically the endangered species, he probably wipes out shorter-lived creatures whose populations barely had enough numbers to sustain themselves.
It is almost certainly true that Starlin learned that Freud named his hypothesized death instinct Thanatos. That's how I learned it. A number of you surely did, too. That "fact," however, is wrong. Freud did not name it that. His colleague Wilhelm Stekel did as early as 1909. Freud argued that humans have two basic instincts: a creative life instinct (or set of instincts) that he called eros and his hypothesized, destructive death instinct(s) that he did not name. As a matter of fact, that death instinct was not exactly Freud's idea in the first place.
A great proportion of Freud's psychodynamic theory considers how our need to keep ourselves and our species alive may motivate us - a need driven by the life instinct or instincts he collectively called eros after the Greek god of erotic love. Even though he had resisted Alfred Adler's suggestion that people also have an aggression drive, Freud (1920/1955) later offered his similar proposal for a death instinct or instincts' existence without crediting Adler. Freud speculated about it being more destructive than Adler had. Because we know death is inevitable and life is the struggle against it (which would later be basic tenets of terror management theory - Greenberg et al., 2002), Freud felt we sometimes give up the struggle and give in to death or destruction.
Wilhelm Stekel (1909/1923; 1950) dubbed this drive thanatos (commonly translated all in lowercase) to refer to morbid obsession including personal death wish and destructive impulses. Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones (1953/1957, p. 273) observed, "It is a little odd that Freud himself never, except in conversation, used for the death instinct the term Thanatos, one which has become so popular since."
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