The emergence and unfolding of the psyche

This paper is a short exposition of Freud's concept of the sexual drive. My motivation for going back once more to the first introduction of sexuality understood as drive is the seeming lack of interest in the classical concept in much contemporary psychoanalytical thinking. To my mind, this prevents us from finding satisfactory solutions to such concepts as narcissism, sublimation and even the emergence and unfolding of the ego. Reading for example Winnicott's enchanting account of play, one gets the impression that Winnicott saw playing as something separate from instinctual satisfaction, from sexual fantasying and from physical sensation. Looking at this important activity in the life of young children from the point of view of drive theory, one might argue, that here we see one of the first expressions of sublimation. However, in order to fully understand this, I found it necessary to undertake a re-reading of Freud's theory of the sexual drive.