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drive would lose, in part, its mythical character, or at least, psychoanalysts would know something about the origins of the myth.
VI. Db. Carlos Sopena Carlos Sopena , a member of both Psychoanalytic Association of Uruguay and Psychoanalytic Association of Madrid, in “ Pulsión de muerte y sexualidad ” [Death drive and sexuality] (2001), maps some revolutionary implications both for the theory and for the practice of psychoanalysis, caused by Freud’s introduction of the death drive. He develops the following propositions, coming from discernible Lacanian perspective: 1. The study of the drives must consider the level of structuring that the psychic apparatus has reached, since it is in the way that it flows through the apparatus that the drive will find ‘dams’ and will be bound and subordinate to the pleasure principle. 2. Subduing the drive implies subjecting it to regulations (‘order’), resulting from the Oedipus complex and the assumption of castration, which articulate the drive with the wish and with Eros. The insistence on a non-mediated ‘jouissance’, in line with the omnipotent narcissistic ambition of extinguishing the wish, obeys, on the other hand, the death drive, which means a failure in the processing of the drive. 3. Eros and Thanatos are to be conceived as different forms of the work of only one drive, the sexual drive, governed by the pleasure principle or its opposite, the principle of Nirvana. 4. The death drive should not be identified with the repetition compulsion, which does not respond to only one tendency and is not always lethal, as is the case of the repetitions promoted by transference, which makes the work of remembering possible. Such transferential repetitions must be distinguished from the more drive-promoted repetitions that work in favor of death. 5. What defines the death drive is the fact that it operates silently and is opposed to any activity of symbolizing, localizing, binding, signifying, that is, opposed to the category of what can be spoken of and thought about. 6. Eros and Thanatos are considered as related to the tendencies for binding and unbinding, respectively. They are both conditions of life. VI. Dc. Mirta Casas de Pereda , Mirta Casas de Pereda, in “ El Trauma y el Inconsciente ” (1996) (Trauma and the unconscious) offers a multi-theoretical review of the death drive theory and clinical practice, through the lens of original Lacanian perspective. She contends that starting with Freud, where castration is comprehensively equaled to every loss that the drive convokes (oral, anal, phallic, the love of the object), and following with post-Freudian authors of different theoretical
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