Book, Freud the Drives and their Bilingual Destinies[LS]

Language: Brazilian Portuguese. Part of the Incomplete Works of Sigmund Freud collection, this book is a classic. When Freud wrote and published The Drives and Their Destinies, it was not possible to predict that this brief essay would become a classic. It is no exaggeration to say that the theory of drives, as well as the theory of the unconscious, is to Psychoanalysis what anatomy and physiology are to Medicine. In the text that the reader has in hand, Freud presents the concept of drive, which is at the basis of the processes that determine the ways in which we love, desire and suffer. In it we witness an obstinate effort to systematize this “fundamental concept”. As or more fundamental than the unconscious itself, the drive is a “border concept”, located between the body and the psychic apparatus. However, just as the destinies of drives are multiple and involve complex processes of transformation, the destinies of the concept of drive itself were no less dramatic. The uproar surrounding Trieb's translation by instinct is widely known. We have all become accustomed to this strange reading exercise that requires the reader to mentally replace “instinct” with “drive”. As if a terminological choice were anodyne or indifferent. In this volume, we present to the Brazilian reader, for the first time, a bilingual edition of this important text, plus translation notes and three complementary essays. The collection Obras Incompletas de Sigmund Freud not only intends to offer a new translation, direct from German and attentive to the use of concepts by the Brazilian psychoanalytic community. It also aims to offer a new way of organizing and processing texts. An invitation for the reader to be wary of the appeasing nature that the adjective “complete” entails.