In Freud's Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film, Teresa de Lauretis addresses the classic Freudian concepts of the unconscious and infantile sexuality, articulating them with queer theory and what feminist theorists have termed the sex-gender system. Drawing on literature and film, while never abandoning the discussion initiated by Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), she explores Freud's configurations of the concept of drive.

This book reaffirms the relevance of Freud's theory of drives to the present through contemporary expressions such as the biotechnological extension of human life, the use of stem cells, international adoption, and a certain bourgeois surge in so-called reproductive rights. This speaks both to the enthusiasm for life and, perhaps, to its own decline, also expressed in global war and mass genocide. Freudian speculation on the presence of life and death drives in the psyche and in human society as ways of understanding the world acquires new meanings in De Lauretis, which in his review of Djuna Barnes's work, Nightwood, which weaves social representations about gender and sexuality, along with films like Crash and eXistenZ by filmmaker David Cronenberg, constitute a true guide for a new look at Freud's drives.