ABSTRACT
The third period of Freud’s work is centered on the movement beyond the Imaginary principle of pleasure towards the Symbolic principle of reality and the structure of the death drive. In order to articulate this relation between the Symbolic order and the death drive, Freud’s text “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” where the structure of the drive is articulated between four elements (source, aim, impetus, object), four vicissitudes (reversal, turning around, repression, sublimation) and three fundamental oppositions (subject/object, pleasure/pain, active/passive) must be studied. All of these relations will be applied to the logical structure that developed in the previous chapters.
