Libido as the life drive

Libido as the life drive is the concept through which Sofia Zetterlund considers desire both as a basic motive for living and as a force whose expression can be distorted by trauma. She distrusts sweeping psychological theories, yet retains an interest in Freud’s account of libido and the life instinct. As the idea moves from an abstract discussion with Jeanette Kihlberg to Sofia’s private reckoning, it becomes a way to ask what kept her alive, what she has wanted, and what the Reptile has enabled her to do.

Definition and Theoretical Limits

Sofia treats libido broadly: it is not restricted to sexual desire but includes motivation, longing, appetite, and the impulse to want anything at all. In her explanation to Jeanette, desire is a condition of human existence; without wanting, a person would have no reason to continue living. She also considers Freud’s ideas about the life instinct and sexual desire relevant, and sees libido alongside aggression as among humanity’s strongest drives. Attraction, yearning, desire, and lust can coexist with violence rather than standing apart from it.

Her interest is selective. While reading Psychopathia Sexualis, an old survey of sadism and sexuality, she finds its long-winded English difficult and its conclusions largely obsolete. The book has remained in good condition partly because it is seldom taken out. Sofia has been skeptical of Freud since she was seventeen, particularly of symbolic explanations and rigid theories. She has also rejected writing about women’s feelings and desires because, in her view, it has been produced without exception by men. Her continued interest in libido therefore does not amount to an acceptance of psychoanalysis as a complete explanation: she keeps one idea while resisting the authority and generalizations surrounding it.

Desire, Disruption, and Sublimation

In conversation with Jeanette, Sofia outlines a theory in which libido can be stunted or made unhealthy and may then find expression in forms of behavior considered deviant, including unusual sexual fantasies. She begins to describe the possibility of libido directed inward, associating it with narcissism, but Jeanette interrupts to ask her to explain the concept more fully. Sofia then defines it in practical terms—as what a person longs for or wants—rather than relying on abstract terminology.

Sofia also describes the belief that destructive relationships in childhood, particularly with parents, can disrupt libido. In the example she gives, a compulsion such as fear of germs or incessant handwashing can make cleanliness the dominant desire: the person’s energies gather around an urgent need to become clean. The idea resonates with Sofia’s thought that Victoria has struggled for cleanliness throughout her life. Yet the conversation does not establish a simple cause-and-effect rule. Jeanette points out that troubled relations with parents do not turn everyone into a serial killer, pressing Sofia to distinguish a possible psychological mechanism from a universal explanation.

Sofia is more receptive to Freud’s concept of sublimation. She explains it as a defense mechanism through which repressed needs find expression in creativity and artistic activity. Jeanette responds by connecting the idea to the writing of a book about inhuman murders and asks whether such creative work could have diverted its author from becoming a serial killer. The exchange makes sublimation concrete without resolving the question: creative expression may provide an outlet, but the conversation offers no general guarantee about what it can prevent.

Sofia’s Personal Reckoning

The theory is difficult for Sofia to present because it is not only about another person. As she speaks, she feels herself becoming cold and distant; she is discussing someone who takes satisfaction in tormenting others, but recognizes that the subject touches what she herself has suffered and the person she believed herself to be. Jeanette’s curiosity and appetite—for knowledge and experience as well as food—strike Victoria as signs of an intact, undisturbed libido, and as qualities to envy. That response places desire beside deprivation: one woman’s appetite becomes a contrast with another’s damaged relationship to wanting.

After leaving Jeanette, Sofia sits at her kitchen table waiting for a taxi and returns to the question of libido as the life instinct. She wonders when it stops and what her own consists of. A fly crawling up the window gives the question a concrete, hypothetical form: if she were starving and had nothing else to eat, would she eat it? The moment does not supply an answer, but shifts the idea from a theory of sexual or psychological behavior to the more elemental problem of survival and appetite.

The Reptile and Survival

A later realization connects libido to the hierarchy of needs. The woman reflecting on this account recognizes that her captor has systematically denied her food and sleep, security, love and belonging, and esteem; even the idea of self-actualization seems beyond her grasp. Against that deprivation, she understands the Reptile as a self she created in order to eat and sleep. The concept of libido thus acquires a specific function: a divided self becomes a means of preserving access to basic needs when the person’s circumstances deny them.

The Reptile’s role later extends to intimacy. When she and Lars Magnus Pettersson slept together, the Reptile made it possible for him to enter her life physically because it was the only way she could enjoy a man’s body. The Reptile also had group sex with him at a nightclub in Toronto. By contrast, she is quite sure that the Reptile was absent when she slept with Jeanette, and that distinction fills her with intense joy. The contrast suggests that the question is not simply whether desire exists, but whose desire is present and whether intimacy can occur without the protective alternate self.

The realization leaves an unresolved question: what else has the Reptile done, and has it killed? The evidence presented here does not answer it. Instead, libido serves as a bridge between desire, survival, trauma, and divided identity. It offers Sofia a vocabulary for thinking about the Reptile’s protective purpose, while also exposing the limits of any theory that would turn one person’s history into a universal formula.