Excerpt:

The death instinct is a controversial and troubling aspect of Freud's thinking, but we can see it arising inevitably from the physicalist tradition to which he, in large part, belonged. Of all the streams of psychoanalytic theory, only the Kleinian school seems to have taken up the death instinct with any degree of enthusiasm, and even here Melanie Klein developed the concept in her own way, as innate destructiveness. For Freud the death instinct was primarily an expression of "an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things", so that a primal state of non-life appeared to be the ultimate historical aim of all life Sulloway, 1979 p.413). Destructiveness was a secondary manifestation. W.B. Yeats' poem The Wheel, published in 1928, expresses the Freudian view most eloquently:

Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come –
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.

In his summarising paper Psycho-Analysis (1926) Freud declared that psychoanalysis offered a science of man and his unconscious mind rather than a mode of psychotherapy. He had come to believe that the power and persistence of the death instinct provided a firm counterweight to therapeutic zeal. But then we must remember that therapeutic zeal was quite foreign to Freud's nature. At the very beginning of his psychoanalytic work, in Studies in Hysteria, he had declared soberly the aim of psychoanalytic therapy was to turn "hysterical misery into ordinary human unhappiness." (Emphasis added.) http://psychoanalysis.mylithio.com/d..._helmholtz/pdf

So then, if we cannot achieve a primal state of non-life at least there is hope for ordinary unhappiness. Of course, the controversy over recovery will involve a determination to see if our unhappiness is sufficiently ordinary.