ABSTRACT
In order to illustrate the different vicissitudes of the sexual drive, Freud examines two pairs of opposites: sadism-masochism and scopophilia-exhibitionism. In both cases, the turning around upon the subject’s self converges or coincides with a transformation from activity to passivity, which in sadism-masochism is additionally accompanied by a reversal of content: love is transformed into hate and at the same time the object is changed while the aim remains the same. For the vicissitudes of repression and sublimation, too, the characteristics of the antagonistic drives – the cathecting, binding, and fusing capacity of the sexual drive and the unbinding, decathecting, and defusing tendency of the death drive – play an important role. The conservative nature of the death drive seems to be also in the service of the reality principle, by taming, silencing, and structuring “loud” aggression, as a product of the fusion with the life drives.
