ABSTRACT
The Freudian death drive lies at the heart of Jacques Lacan's earliest work, at least from the time of those texts that clearly fall within the field of psychoanalysis. The figure of the sphinx is, thus, very apt to imply that this motion falls within the remit of what Sigmund Freud himself qualified as "mythology". To underline the aporetic character of Thanatos is to say that a question was brought to the fore through the Freudian discovery: an enigma, and not really a solution. The archives of the Societe Francaise de Psychanalyse bear the traces of his early attempts to counter the biologising drift of the post-Freudians, and particularly the Bonaparte–Loewenstein couple, who openly dreamed of such marriages, pregnant with future confusions. Lacan was to draw on all of those texts in which Freud demonstrates the all too human character of the sexual aberrations and perversion, as much in the young child as in the adult pervert.
