Abstract

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud elaborates a critique of a vitalistic notion of the drives. Drives are not only a source of excitation, but forces that resist change. Freud gives a remarkable name to the conservative tendencies of the drives, viz. the death drive. I intend to show that Freud was led to develop a non-vitalistic conception of drives by means of a study of different repetition phenomena. I focus on one particular claim of Freud where he suggests that the ego-drives are the “myrmidons of death‘. To clarify this claim I consider a remark he makes on the viscosity of the drives and melancholia in his short essay ”On Transience’.