ABSTRACT
Eros, the force of life, has become a part of Psyche; the psychical apparatus has absorbed Eros. A first psychical expression is important to define precisely the part played by Eros in the id. Sigmund Freud sees in drives ‘the ultimate cause of all activity’, and lays emphasis on their conservative nature. Eros, the force of bonding, would bind simultaneously the internal world—the psyche—and the object relation situated in the external world, but produced through incorporation into the internal world. The disposable energy of Eros, the very energy at work in love, is libido. In Empedocles, the field of Eros covers both nature and the psyche—the two principles, love and strife, ‘governed events in the life of the universe and the life of the mind’. Eros will have brought about the ‘drive destination’ called sublimation, to mark the psyche with its seal through those phenomena which «ire ostensibly the most far removed from it.
