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to achieve its aim, which can be the disappearance of the sexual drive that seeks expression from the unconscious. In this case, aggression, at the service of the Ego drives,’ kills’ the sexual drives. The dramatization of the fight can be represented within the subject himself, who assumes the role of the repressing Ego and is, at the same time, the object of its own repressed sexual drives. It can also be represented by an interactive bond with an external other where it can play the role of the aggressive Ego drive that ‘kills’ the sexual drive in the other, or also the sexual drive that ‘kills’ the individual’s ego or self-preservation drives, destroying the symbolization processes, and eventually, life itself, when such ego drives oppose the exclusive search for gratification of the sexual drives that have become sadistic. In any case, aggression only plays a secondary role here, within the dynamic and economic process of the sexual drives and the Ego or self-preservation drives. Before 1910, Ego drives were exclusively self-preservation drives, and therefore, Freud uses these terms interchangeably. The difference between both drives is fundamentally based on the source and the aim. Thus, for example, the source of the oral self-preservation drive is the metabolic processes that generate the need and the hunger for food to supply for the caloric needs of the body and the aim is the satiation achieved by food intake. On the other hand, the source of the sexual oral drives is the stimulus of the oral erotogenic zone, and the aim is the pleasure produced by sucking. The object of the self-preservation drives is the breast that provides with milk or an equivalent, whereas, for the sexual drives, it can be the breast, the nipple, the finger, or any other object that makes sucking possible, even the tongue itself. Clear articulation of the antithesis between the sexual drive and self/ego preservative drive appears in 1910, in “Psychoanalytic View of Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision” , and 1911a, in “ Psychoanalytic Notes of an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia ” (Freud 1910, 1911). In “Psychoanalytic View of Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision”, Freud (1910) for the first time makes use of the term ‘ego-drives’ explicitly identified with the ‘self-preservative’ drives and ascribed to them a vital part in the function of repression. In “Psychoanalytic Notes” (Freud 1911a), he states: “…We accept the popular distinction between the ego instincts and sexual instincts…such a distinction seems to agree with the biological conception that the individual has a double orientation, aiming on one hand as self-preservation, and on the other, at the presentation of the species. III. Aab. Second phase/ period/ ‘step’: 1914 – 1920 In this evolution of the drive theory, the element that moves to the foreground is the concept of object . In the first period of the drive theory, aggression had been considered a partial component of any drive. In the second period, it is being being studied according to the subject-object relations, the relations between the Ego and external reality, between pleasure and displeasure and the affects of love and hate that such relations generate.
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