ABSTRACT
The Papers on Metapsychology are at once a point of arrival and a point of departure from the point of view of the evolution of Freudian thought. Freud defines the drive as a pressure with a source, an aim, and an object. Freud devotes a significant part of "Instincts and their vicissitudes" to the question of love and hate, and thus to ambivalence. As for the origin of hate, according to Freud it is to be found less in sexual life than in the ego's struggle for self-preservation, that is, in the hate felt towards the object which does not satisfy the drives of self-preservation. In normal mourning, the subject is capable of giving up the "lost" object – a real person or an ideal – and of withdrawing his libido from it, so that the free libido can be displaced on to a new object.
