Instincts and Their Vicissitudes

The first of Freud’s metapsychological papers of 1915. It defines the drive as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, the psychical representative of stimuli arising within the organism, and distinguishes its pressure, aim, object and source. Freud keeps the dualism of ego drives and sexual drives, and describes four vicissitudes the drives may undergo: reversal into the opposite, turning round upon the subject’s own self, repression and sublimation. He illustrates the first two with the pairs sadism and masochism and scopophilia and exhibitionism, and ends with a study of love and hate.