ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the notion of sexual drive for, before the existence of the disciplines just mentioned, the Kleinian psychoanalytic movement had placed the accent on the drive of aggression, of destruction, as a decisive element in the dynamics of regression. The debates during the famous Controversies which took place in England during the Second World War were on the scale of the issues at stake between Kleinians and those who asserted that Freud had never changed his point of view on the necessity of linking regression and sexual drive. The introduction of the death drive gave rise to a second reorganisation of the theory of the drives, after the first relating to the introduction of narcissism. The chapter illustrates certain problems raised concerning the factors of repetition and change in a situation that is sufficiently illustrative to show that even at the level of the therapeutic consultations these modes of functioning can already be mobilised.
