Tennis and the Death Drive

So I'm reading this article in the New York Times about how tennis star and meth user Andre Agassi collaborated with a Pulitzer Prize winning memoirist, J.R. Moehringer to write Agassi's autobiography when .... suddenly Freud pops up. Here's what they say:

Gradually, though, Mr. Agassi loosened up. Mr. Moehringer, meanwhile, was reading Freud, Jung, mythology — anything he could find that would help explain Mr. Agassi’s tortured psyche. “Freud was a big help,” he recalled. “Especially ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ and the idea of a death instinct. One of the pillars of Andre’s personality was his self-destructiveness, and I realized that I had been pushing away the idea that this could be an organic part of his nature."

Here's the full story.