Keywords
Abstract
This article revisits the Freudian concept of drive, analysing its fundamental characteristics. In particular, it highlights the decisive role played by the selfpreservation drives in the constitution of the Ego and in offering an objective basis to the sexual drives, providing them with support and guidance towards the retrieval of drive objects. The components of the drive – source, drive, goal, and object – are analysed through Baldini’s formalization of the Freudian concept of the drive as a vector. At the same time, a precise analysis is carried out of some excerpts from the 13th and 14th chapters in Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in which a deviation from Freudian drive theory is detected, despite Lacan’s initial declaration of a return to it.