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In the years between 1920 and 1924, after Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud began to deal theoretically with the aggressive instinct that he had so long left out of his metapsychology, but which was quite evident in his clinical practice and in his reflections on collective psychology, civilization, and war. The enigma of self-destruction brought into evidence the ego in its most ambiguous aspects, not only as the source of self-preservation, but also as susceptible to preferring painful repetition, illness, and death. Biological references became important at this time, because the previous theoretical explanatory principles, the economic point of view, and the sexual instinct, were no longer adequate to account for the clinical realities forced into consideration by the failure of the dream work in a traumatic neurosis, or the failure of the grieving process in melancholia. The theory of narcissism of 1914 was not explicitly revised after 1920, but there was an implicit revision in the series of texts between 1920 and 1924, in which Freud's work on group psychology reintegrated hypnosis and suggestion, to place the ego and its cathexes in intersubjective exchanges and in the process of identification. The repetition principle was considered by Freud in a system of linkages independent of and more primitive than the pleasure principle. This enables the survival of the ego and its identifications, even at the price of suffering. Masochism then appears not only as the destiny of the sexual impulse, but also as the guarantee of internal bonds with past relations