[The Dualism drive in Freudian theory].

The author discusses Freudian dualistic conception of drives and contends that it can be reduced to a monistic one, on the basis of modern conceptions of Biology, and after scanning the original writings of Freud on the subject of drive and instinct. The word Trieb (drive) is used by Freud as compared with Instinkt (instinct); in 1915 the concept is defined through its attributes: thrust, source, objet and goal; being object and goal contingent for the drive and fixed for instincts. The first dualism is love vs. hunger; the drives are either sexual or autoconservative. But Biology demonstrates today that all life movements are autoconservative. The second dualism, love vs. hate, and the third one, Eros vs. Thantos, interpreted through Biology, show that there is always a prevailing therm, the first one. In this view, instinct should be but one successful drive, "frozen" through time because of its very success, and transmitted through philogenetic channels, in order to be enlivened in each ontogenetic process.