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Following work with traumatized patients during World War I, whose nightmares could hardly be explained only on the basis of the pleasure principle, drives were re-organized in an opposition between life drives and the death drive. The former aim to keep up and enhance life processes, the latter to quiet down and negate living. Life drives were characterized and reformulated as an attempt to build bridges and bind together: to make new connections and form ever bigger wholes. This is the Eros principle . The death drive has a ‘negating quality’, and is characterized by breakdowns of connections, or hindrance of any traffic in existing bridges. There are thus two regulating principles in psychic life: the tendency to bind together and raise the energetic psychic level on the one hand, and the tendency to undo, terminate connections and reduce the level of energy to ‘zero-level’ on the other. Drives have now become something quite different from the demand for psychic work due to the body´s psychic integration. They have now become the principles regulating this work : the two basic ways of relating to the demands of psychic life. They are not entities but fundamental regulatory principles, or, as Freud (1933) writes in later his New Introductory Lectures , they are “our mythology” (p. 95). Overall, Freud’s late drive theory is more complex than the first one. The dualism of this era (1920-1939) encompasses Eros and the Death drive. The energy of the former is called libido . Death drive has no energy; it is “quiet”. The death drive is first directed to the ego (as in primary masochism), later it often becomes deflected outwards as an aggressive destruction. To the late Freud, life and death drives fuse (more or less), and they always go together (even though in varying proportions). Freud adhered to this last drive dualism for the rest of his life. Towards the end, however, one may see a new interpretation of the phenomena involved. Revisiting the compulsion to repeat in his last (posthumously published) writings, Freud (1937, 1940[1938], 1998) stressed that people repeat mainly early, and thus, poorly elaborated, experiences. When such repetitions are stereotypical, they do not lead to anything new. They may, however, also lead to an integrative movement. In the latter case, the structure until now clung to is opened – destroyed – and the early experience comes to be part of a bigger whole. For the very late Freud, destruction may thus be part of integration, ‘put on the move’ by repetition. III. Abc. From Interdisciplinary Sources to Complex Theoretical Conjecture – Latin American Perspective In the Late Drive theory, Ego drives, and narcissistic libido get closer to the point of becoming not distinguishable, which led to defining libido as the only expression of instinctive life. Freud finds it doubtful to reach full understanding of drives based on the elaboration of psychological material. Borrowing from biology experiments with monocellular organisms, in a series of theoretical derivations, he proposes that what is definite about the drive is its conservative character: “ It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it
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