Abstract: This article is available in French only. Cruelty, which is not a psychoanalytic concept, appears in different figures in Freud's work. It is first taken in the sexual current, as ephemeral “cruelty drive”, in part, or as a “predisposition” for easy cruel children, which must be contained and suppressed by morality and culture work, before appearing as cruelty of the obsessive neurotic, or as cruelty of the superego in melancholia. Will it loose from this sexual current, under the influence of narcissism, into a form, if not a figure of the death drive, or an excess of destructiveness? The concept of cruelty takes at least his “analysand” values from these Freudian trials, which leads to emphasizing its proximity, but also to its differenciation from the grip, sadism, hatred and destructiveness.


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