ABSTRACT
In Sigmund Freud's original theory, anxiety was the signal that instinctual elements have entered the ego. The first nourishing break-through to make an impact on the ego is precisely the constant pressure of the drives. It does violence to the ego, which is no longer "master in its own house". The ego experiences the libido that invades it as an "internal foreign body". The refusal at all costs with respect to introjecting this first foreign body, the constant pressure of the drives, is the prototype for subsequent refusal at all costs of the feminine sphere. The anxiety aroused by constant libidinal pressure relates therefore to the requirement that the ego itself become drive-oriented by nature. The concept of libidinal sympathetic excitation, defined in 1905 and again in 1915, was re-introduced in 1920 into Freud's second theory of the drives: "mechanical agitation must be recognized as one of the sources of sexual excitation".
