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Life, its modes of preservation, its dangers, its periods of inertia, and above all its contradictions became essential themes for Freud from 1915 onward, to be rethought through the filter of the drives and their meeting points with sexuality, sex, and death. Without them, without the tensions they create in our decisions and orientations, existence would undoubtedly be a “dull plain,” a lost battle. One will have understood that the concept of the drive acquired an inescapable dimension over time. It is impossible in our work, he wrote, “to ignore them—the drives—for a single moment, and yet we are never sure of seeing them clearly.” Clinical examples and references to Freud’s practice and work support this text.