Freud concludes the two works ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) and ‘Civilization and it’s Discontents’ (1930) in a similar way by asking whether Eros, the lifedrive, has an answer and can make itself heard against all destructiveness, against personal grief and loss, and against the decay of society and culture in the aftermath of the First World War. We want to take up the challenge of discussing Eros, and the role and potential of the lifedrive in general, on an individual level, in psychoanalysis and for society and culture at large. We are faced with a conceptual question, how to define Eros the lifedrive? Our point of departure is that it emerges as an emotional presence, feeling alive, wanting life and respect for integrity. Perhaps we can say that our concept of drive concerns the ego/self, and in contact with his or her affective life, a sense of life, developed through encounters with others, at living boundaries. Openness in contact with integrity becomes the distinctive feature of the lifedrive also as a humanism. Indeed, this is what we work with in our practice, the lifedrive as a concept that is highly relevant to our clinical work.