ABSTRACT
The forerunner of Freud’s death drive was his earlier self-preservative drive, which was egoistic and narcissistic in nature and was directed inwards towards the preservation of one’s own self. This self-preservative drive, which would later become the death drive was already libidinally invested, foreshadowing in a curious way the much later fusion of both the life and death drive which Lacan would eventually articulate with his concept of jouissance. In “The Three Essays on Sexuality”, Freud introduces a new perspective, by privileging the drive over the object; he argues that there is an initial stage of auto-eroticism, a drive that is not directed towards other objects but to the infant’s own body as a pleasurable zone. In this same text, he also mentions for the first time the idea of self-preservation, an antecedent of the later death drive and he puts forth the idea that sexual activity attaches itself to functions of self-preservation and becomes independent of it later.
