(Trieb) A compulsion to act originating in the psyche which does not have a specific object. In contrast to the instinct, it cannot be satisfied. Although there is considerable dispute about it in psychoanalysis, it is clear that in his work Freud, Anna maintained a clear distinction between instincts and the drive. Unfortunately, this distinction was obliterated in English at least by James Stracheyâs unhappy decision to translate both Instinkt and Trieb as drive. The drive differs markedly from instinct in that it is variable in both formation and action, but more particularly because its aim is its object. Take for example, the nutrition instinct (one of the seven basic instincts according to ethology), its aim is to provide sustenance for the body and its object is food. When we eat we satisfy that instinct. So why do some of us have such difficulties with eating---either we eat too much, or donât eat enough? The answer is that eating is not purely a matter of instinct; there is another dimension to it which needs to be thought in terms of desire, which is the drive. Understood as a drive, the nutrition instinct becomes a kind of oral drive for which eating is something that is enjoyable in itself, the object is no longer food it is the mouth itself, but it is not a proper object in that it does not extinguish the drive or provide satisfaction. Now there is no aim except the joy of eating. The paradox of the drive, as its keenest theorist Lacan, Jacques tirelessly argued, is that it is driven by what it cannot have; it is, in other words, motivated by lack. What it lacks is precisely an object that could give it satisfaction. Freud argued that there were two basic types of drive, which he called the life-drive (Eros) and the death-drive (Thanatos), that exist side by side in a state of equilibrium. Pathological symptoms emerge, according to Freud, when these drives fall into a state of disequilibrium.