At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the Austrian Sigmund Freud, physiologist and psychiatrist, laid the foundations of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method through his studies, revolutionizing the way modern people perceive concepts such as consciousness and sexuality.

In the work Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips), written in 1920, Freud combines psychoanalysis with philosophy and evolutionary biology, recognizing a genetic characteristic of drives as the tendency to restore a former state of the individual, which is none other than death.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]