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Guided by Freud's definition of drives as “mythical entities” (Freud, 1933a, p. 95), the authors decipher Freud's term “sexual drive” as a mystified expression of the unconscious. They show that the unconscious has the same characteristics Freud ascribes to sexual drives. Like drives, unconscious wishes are a source from which a pressure emanates, becoming recognised in mental life on their way to substitutive satisfactions, in which the (substitutive) objects are at their most variable. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that there are no consequences for the metapsychological approach, the emergence of sexuality and the representational world if one replaces the drive concept by a modified form of Laplanche's “source-objects of the drive” (1984, p. 129; italics omitted) that he describes as non-physical phenomena.