Instead of inferring some sort of existential truth behind the persistent desire for acknowledgent, for recognition as 'who you are' etc., the whole grab bag of modern selfhood, see it rather as the outcome of an imprinted ego-drive. If you speak of a desire you embed the complex it represents into phenomenology, so that it is elaborated in narratives, draws on the logic of histories, of cases, but if you call it a drive you take away its subjective core, it becomes an irrational thing-like force, an it, which can only be misrecognised through fabulations and incoherent imaginings, There is someone implicitly in the driver's seat of a desire, but not so of a drive which does not have to resolve in a first-person narrative, or a récit, or a lyric, but might instead lean upon an explanation, a description with predictive power but no insight. Self-directed activities, circling around recognition, dominance and submission, apperception, and so on, display the kinds of repetition, impossibility of resolution, metonymic contagion, more characteristic of what we must consign to the realm of drives than they do the sorts of behaviour that progresses along confessional lines. The hero or subject undergoes stories and narrative metamorphoses but never deepens, never comes closer to being, it simply reemerges in new versions of its foundational impasse. Why this should be so, why there should be such ego-drives remains a mystery, since the very question is itself generated by and is merely expressive those very drives.