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another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life” (Freud 1920, p. 36; emphasis added). The idea that a drive is an inherent tendency in organic life that forces it to return to its previous state contradicts the idea that it is at the same time the expression of inertia, because one of them implies movement and the other one implies the arrest of movement. However, he finds the universal reach of the conservative character of the drives to be contradictory and states, “in addition to the conservative instincts which impel towards repetition, there may be others which push forward towards progress and the production of new forms” (ibid, p. 37). He tries to overcome this objection when he states that the life drives are also conservative since “ the aim of all life is death ” (ibid, p. 38; emphasis added). He will support the proposal of a death drive as it relates (paradoxically) to psychoanalytic considerations of the pleasure principle, which, in turn, he derives from Theodor Fechner’s principle of constancy in psychophysics . To further support his thesis, Freud includes the (instinctive) migratory behavior of fish and birds. He also finds that “the most impressive proofs of there being an organic compulsion to repeat lie in the phenomena of heredity and the facts of embryology ” (ibid, p. 37; emphasis added). In successive steps of highly theoretical derivations, Freud distinguishes Eros and Thanatos by their temporal characteristics: ”One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey” (ibid, p. 41). III. Abd. Late Drive Theory in the Era of Structural Theory/ Second Topography 1923 – 1940 When Freud changed his (First) Topography of the Unconscious and the Preconscious/Conscious into the Second Topography/Structural theory of the Id, the Ego and the Super-ego in 1923, it meant a thorough reformulation of the ego and the drives. The two classes of drives from 1920, Eros and Thanatos, “fused, blended, and alloyed with each other” (1923, p.41) are here located in the Id. Freud wrote: “The dangerous death instincts are dealt with in the individual in various ways: in part they are rendered harmless by being fused with erotic components, in part they are diverted towards an external world in the form of aggression, while to a large extent they undoubtedly continue their internal work unhindered” and he added, “the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal’s inclination to aggressiveness against the ego” (ibid, p.54). In the context of the Structural theory (Freud, 1923, 1926), where instincts originate in the Id, but all drives are found at work also within the Ego and the Superego, the destructive drive fuels the conflict, which rages between the unmitigated aggression of the Id and the primitive oral and/or anal sadistic Superego. The Ego mitigates the opposition between Id, Superego and the external reality. In the Id there is no representation or symbolization. The Id is made up of impulses and in Freud´s metaphor is “a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations” (Freud, 1933 p. 73).
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