Psychoanalytic Concepts and Technique in Development

Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience and Physics

Florence Guignard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429589645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalytic Concepts and Technique in Development offers a clear and thorough overview of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and clinical technique, from a largely post-Freudian, French perspective, but also informed by the work of Klein, Bion and Winnicott. Drawing on the French tradition, Florence Guignard sets out a comprehensive guide to the major drives and concepts in classical psychoanalysis, and how these are understood and employed in contemporary psychoanalytic training and practice, whilst looking ahead to the future of the discipline and drawing upon findings from related fields.

Guignard explores the premise that the way psychoanalysts conceptualise their theoretical field and technical tools conditions the way their therapeutic discipline is practised. She argues that because their main instrument for healing is their own self, it is of utmost importance to update conceptual tools to think about this. To do so, psychoanalysts can draw on the latest discoveries in related disciplines like neurosciences and physics. Topics covered in this book include

• agenealogy of the drives,

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• the deconstruction of the Oedipus Complex in our contemporary societies,

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• the role of the psychoanalyst's infantile part when (s)he is at work,

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• links between sensorial elements and elements of thinking,

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• links between psychoanalysis, the neurosciences and physics.

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Combining significant insights with an accessible style, Psychoanalytic Concepts and Technique in Development will appeal to psychoanalytic psychotherapists and psychoanalysts of all levels.

1
Genealogical Organisation of the Drives

If the concept of the drive has a central position in psychoanalysis, it is because it concerns each hour of the clinical work of its practitioners. In fact, the evaluation of the instinctual drive tension of the link between the analyst and the analysand is both indispensable and fraught with obstacles owing to the complexity of the transference/countertransference situation.

As a frontier concept, the drive owes its richness to this very situation: the emergence of the drive in the analytic session, whether as a crest line or fault line, will make the picture that the analyst has of the landscape of the “analytic field” (Baranger and Baranger, 1964) topple over into a perpetual movement, like one of Escher’s drawings. What can be said about it will contain both the perception of an impulse (motion) and its contrary. The same may be said of its aim, which is not to be confused either with its purpose or with its aetiology but concerns the reduction of tension: the more rudimentary the means employed are, the swifter the momentary reduction of tension will be, and the more imperious the compulsion to repeat will be too, as can be seen in pornography or war. Here we find ourselves on the less “psychic” side of the concept of the drive, on the side of repetition of the act, prior to the trace.

When, for economic reasons, analyst and analysand both participate in an error of perspective, an unconscious consensus can then easily occur – a “community of denial”, as Michel Fain (1982) would have said. It is this economic situation that I conceptualise under the term blind spot: where psychic work should take place, the topical regression specific to the analytic process may give rise to tension that is so unbearable that it urgently calls for discharge. The analyst is then tempted to intervene, with the conscious motive of reducing the analysand’s suffering while, at the unconscious level, both protagonists of the treatment converge in a movement of evacuating elements of thought (Bion, 1957). For example, if the analytic situation mobilises instinctual drive energy that increases as a result of being caught in the topographical regression induced in the repetition of an infantile conflict, a reduction of tension in this area will turn the topographical regression into an end in itself rather than being an element of the analytic setting. Two reasons can be found for this flight from thought in the analytic pair: first, the cathartic dimension of analysis, that is the question of the urgency of reducing anxiety, and, second, the historical dimension of analysis, that is the question of the referents of repetition, recollected for supposedly elaborative purposes.

The unconscious wish to quickly reduce instinctual drive tension mobilises the various levels of psychic functioning in the two protagonists of the analysis. Sorely tested by the analytic process, the relations between the agencies – id, ego, superego – and particularly the relations between the logic of the conscious mind and that of the unconscious mind, are ready to do anything in order to lower the instinctual drive tension. Movements of representation can be seen emerging that range from “reverie” (Bion, 1962b) to “negative hallucination” (Green, 1977), as well as reversals in these relations between the ego and its objects, both internal and external.

As a prelude to a more detailed study of these movements, I would like to dwell here on the observation of the relations that obtain between the logic of the conscious mind and that of the unconscious mind. These relations can only be heterogeneous; at best they are conflictual, but they are more often paradoxical and subject to splitting. Moreover, their very paradoxicality is extremely fruitful for analytic work.

Let us recall, for memory’s sake, the chief characteristics of the logic of the unconscious, a theme in which a number of authors have shown interest since Freud (1915e), in particular, Wilfred R. Bion (1962b), Ignacio Matte Blanco (1975), and Michel Neyraut (1978). The logic of the unconscious is unaware of contradiction, hence the absence of negation; it treats asymmetrical relations as if they were symmetrical, hence the absence of temporal/spatial succession; it is unaware of organisational and hierarchical interconnections linking the part and the whole, the beginning and the end, hence its functioning in infinite loops. Its activity is simultaneous with that of the logic of the Cs. and the field of tension created between these two logics constitutes an anal-ogon of the field linking unconscious phantasies with dream-thought. Their relations take place in the mode of what René Roussillon (1995) has referred to as a “hiatus”. A hiatus, then, may be observed between an unconscious containing repressed material and a primal unconscious, a hiatus between what is thinkable and what is unthinkable/suitable for being evacuated, a hiatus between what can be symbolised and pertains to repression and what cannot be symbolised and which is merely subject to splitting and, finally, a hiatus between a splitting of the ego and of the objects whose primary functionality announces that of secondary repression and a splitting of the ego resulting in foreclosure.

Recognising the existence of a logic of the unconscious makes it possible to go beyond the conscious/unconscious Manichaeism that is superimposed most of the time on the opposition logical/illogical. Such recognition returns its normality to paradox, a mode of functioning very boldly described by Diderot (1784), who makes the comedian the emblematic figure of the human being and of the irreducibly contradictory links that unite his emotions with their secondarised expression. In our binary civilisation, it is a matter of urgency to recall that, contrary to the formatting of artificial intelligence, human psychic functioning will always suffer from its ignorance of the “remainder” that is implied by every Manichaean operation of splitting.

Instincts, drives and the unconscious

As a frontier concept between the biological and the psychical, the drive may be considered as the dynamic of the instinct. Illustrating the continual movement of the psyche, the frontier between the two is porous and osmotic. We can form an idea of it similar to that which Freud gave of sublimation: the relations of the drives to instinct may be compared to the point at which water is transformed into steam.

The relations of the drives with the unconscious and with repression are complex, especially when considered in terms of the second topography and Freud’s second drive theory. Thereafter, the concept of the unconscious is no longer limited only to the psychic space of the repressed but also includes the locus, mechanisms and processes of the evolution of everything that constitutes the psyche: even when they are never formulated, the drives, wishes, emotions and thought in statu nascendi are henceforth part of it.

The instinctual drive comes from the inside – and not from the outer world. It exerts constant and vectorised pressure that is never exhausted by satisfaction. It strives to unite with one or several other drive elements, internal to the subject or internal to the object towards which the drive orients itself in order to obtain satisfaction. In optimal conditions, it is capable of transforming itself in almost infinite ways while preserving its original force. Starting from this mysterious power of transformation based on the intrinsic quality of the drive to cathect an object with the aim of finding other drive elements in it, Freud (1924b), in “The Economic Problem of Masochism”, provides us with a key that allows us to go further in the recognition of the structural, functional and relational characteristics of the drive. That is the subject of this chapter.

The constant pressure of the drive

It was in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” that Freud (1950 [1895]) discovered the functional specificity of the drives. This essay, “for Fliess’s private use”, is contemporaneous with the Studies on Hysteria (Freud & Breuer, 1895), a theoretical and clinical work “for public usage”: today it can be considered as its complement insofar as it contains everything that Freud had not dared to make public concerning his intuitions of the moment. For example, while, in the Studies on Hysteria, he characterises the effects of intermittent excitation due to sensory perception, felt to originate in the outside, he discovers in the “Project” that the excitation due to the drive results in constant pressure which is felt to originate from the inside of human mental functioning.

Although his definitions of sensory perception have not really left their mark on the history of mental functioning, it is striking to note that, throughout the subsequent recastings of his theorisations, Freud never disavowed this specificity of the functioning of the drive. He first discovered the libidinal aspect and then, equally, the destructive aspect of the constant pressure of the drives to which the human being is subject.

Principles and processes of drive functioning

Seeking to describe the nature of the compromises that the human being is led to make between the internal pressure of his drives and the environment in which he lives, Freud (1911) ventured a formulation that has the defects of its qualities: he distinguishes between two principles that govern the course of mental events: one concerns the pleasure/unpleasure axis and the other the axis of “reality”. Later, he was to add a third, the “principle of Nirvana”.

Furthermore, on the basis of his impressive work of self-analysis and the richness of his research on dreams and hysteria, Freud makes a significant distinction between two sorts of processes: primary processes, which have the task of organising the unconscious level of functioning, and secondary processes which organise the preconscious/conscious level of functioning (see Freud, 1900, Chapter Seven).

Aporia

However, caught up in the vastness of the field that he was exploring relentlessly, Freud was not always careful to make a clear distinction between the processes that govern mental events and the principles that govern the drives. He thus faces us with an important aporia when he considers that it is the influence of the “external world” that modifies the pleasure/unpleasure principle – “the demands of the libido” – in order to produce the reality principle.

For the external world, in itself, is neither a process, a principle, nor a drive.…

It could perhaps be considered as an object. But this object is far too immense, polymorphous and changing to be taken as such as the sole object of cathexis of infantile psychosexuality. The second drive theory (Freud, 1920b) adds a further constraint on our thinking: indeed, there can be no question of reducing the basic drive dichotomy to a double genealogy of two families of drives that would never meet. Consequently, the postulate of the existence of a destructive drive (or death drive) requires us to consider the effects of the “fusion” (Mischung or Vermischung) of these two drives at the level of each of their drive derivatives, as well as at the level of each of the principles that govern the drives and at the level of each of the processes that govern psychic events.

So, on one hand, we cannot take it for granted that such a mixture always constitutes a real drive fusion (intrication) – with the lasting characteristic that this term denotes in the French language – and on the other, we must examine closely what Freud calls the “influence of the external world”.

For example, in “The Economic Problem of Masochism”, Freud (1924b) highlights what he calls “a small but interesting set of connections” (p. 160). He then asserts that the principle of Nirvana expresses the tendency of the death drive, while the pleasure principle expresses the demands of the libido: finally, the modification of this demand, that is to say, the reality principle, is said to represent the influence of the external world. Freud adds that none of these three principles is invalidated by either of the others and concludes that the pleasure principle is the guardian of life. He thereby adds an implicit temporal and transformational dimension to his argument, for there is no question that the transformation of the pleasure principle into the reality principle plays a major role in what is generally called the instinct of preservation.

We may note the continual conceptual shifting of Freud, who passes from the drives to the principles that govern mental events that are dependent on them. Thus, it is not the libido but the pleasure principle that is defined as the guardian of life. Moreover, it is not easy to know if Freud made an elision by omitting to speak of unpleasure or if he implicitly placed it on the side of Nirvana. Be that as it may, since he made principles the representatives of the drives, it is important to ask ourselves what this permanent oscillation between these two terms reveals.

Personally, I see this as one of the aporias characterising the functioning in infinite loops of the logic of the unconscious. It is precisely these aporias that led me to conceive of “concepts of the third type” (Guignard, 2001, 2002b, 2004a).

The qualitative aspect of the drive

As we know, Freud (1920b) was to return later to the question of principles in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but it was only in discovering the qualitative aspect of the drive that he was able to go beyond this aporia, by writing, in 1925, his article on “Negation”¹ (Freud, 1925). It was in this contribution that he formulated an astounding discovery according to which the object of the drive is qualified before being recognised as existing, on the model of “if it is good, it is swallowed; if it is bad, it is spat out” (p. 183). In other words, the judgement of attribution necessarily precedes the judgement of existence.

Among its numerous implications, this discovery is of interest here inasmuch as it confirms the nature of the “frontier concept” of the drive. Indeed, if we assess the situation accurately, it becomes questionable to claim that the drive is blind. It may certainly be more comfortable to push the problem back to the level of the instinct, but in any case, positivism has since been checked by scientific observation, and the quantitative aspect can no longer go it alone without taking into account the qualitative aspect. This observation, which has been largely confirmed in the domain of quantum physics (Ortoli & Pharabod, 1984), leads us to relativise even further the existing opposition between conscious and unconscious and to refine our observations in this frontier zone, this in-between area, that Freud called the preconscious.

Genealogy of the drives

The “small but interesting set of connections” left unexplored by Freud in favour of his work on principles, has continued to hold my interest. It seems to me to be an unaccomplished attempt to propose a genealogical organisation of the drives. I have thus strived to bring this attempt to its conclusion by studying more closely the successive fusions or mixtures (Mischung) that give rise to the fabric of the drives:

• THE FIRST GENERATION (which always remained hypothetical for Freud, who refers to it as “Ur-Ur-Triebe”) is composed of a life drive and a death drive or, at the very least, a destructive drive. Thanks to their biological tendency for fusion, the union of these two drives will give birth to a…
• SECOND GENERATION formed by the sexual drives. It is at this precise point that drive fusion makes use of its quality of vectorisation to look for the entanglement of the infant’s libido with what Freud denotes with the vague phrase “influence of the external world”. We will see how, logically, it can only be an analogous element situated in this external world, namely the drive organisation of the person closest to him, whom we will refer to as “the mother”. From this first exogamic union will be born a…
• THIRD GENERATION composed of the ego-drives, whether it is a matter of the drives of self-preservation, the drive for mastery or all the other drives relating to the subject’s ego.

First generation

As the text he wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Freud, 1926b) shows, the first generation of the fabric of the drives (libido and death drive, Eros and Thanato...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Genealogical organisation of the drives
• 2 The birth of psychic life
• 3 The question of splitting
• 4 An introduction to projective identification
• 5 Sadomasochism, a conceptual chimera
• 6 The epistemophilic impulse
• 7 From the drives to thought
• 8 The contemporary relevance of neurosis
• 9 Oedipus with or without complex
• 10 The adolescent Oedipus
• 11 The depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions revisited
• 12 The concept of the infantile
• 13 The infantile-in-the-psychoanalyst: blind spots and stopper-interpretations
• References
• Index