Title: Eight: Applied Art: Driving Psychoanalytic Theory to Distraction
Abstract: Libido is a fundamental energy, but it must be shaped, and the consequences of this construction are inevitably tragic. (Dimen, 2003, p. 161)THE CONCEPT OF THE DRIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF BEGINNINGPsychoanalytic metapsychology inevitably gets entangled in problems of origin, of what comes first, what is most essential or central - issues that Derrida (1967) defined as inherendy (centrally, essentially, originally) metaphysical. It is impossible escape these organizing metaphors, yet necessary be aware of their potentially deceptive role in discourse.Freud admitted extra-scientific fallibility when he described the instinctual theory (by which he meant drives [Trieb]) as our mythology. He grappled all his life with the question of what is primary. In fact, it is difficult think of another important thinker who was more obsessed with this question of what comes first. This was because he had hit upon the idea of psychological becoming, of mental life in time - not merely as a combinatorial process involving fixed entities or faculties, such as the faculty of reason, nor as a purely contingent process, as imagined by Locke and the behaviourists, but as an emergent process that is rooted in the human biological organism and yet somehow transcends it in the sense that it cannot merely be extrapolated from existing biological knowledge in a linear fashion. He thought he could get a handle on this very complex developmental phenomenon by discerning, in conceptual form, its approximate psychological beginnings.Psychoanalytic theory starts off with this struggle over what comes first. Was it the father's seduction of his daughter that initiated the hysterical process? This was what Freud first thought must always be the case. Or was the child already imagining seduction in a wishful way? In the end, this question turned out be a kind of inherently undecidable one, meaning effectively that the determinate cause is secondary its psychesomatic elaboration (Levin 1987): psychologically, some form of symbolization precedes substance (what stands under in causal terms). To make sense of this requires, as Dimen (2003) has argued, an openness awareness of particularities and contingencies that are often eliminated in the name of theoretical efficiency. Psychoanalytic thinking depends on a constant struggle maintain the dialectical tension of both/and, though it leaves us in uncertainty and doubt. The therapeutic aim is eventually find one's way beyond doer and done to (Benjamin, 2004). What is psychologically is probably a retroactive valuation reflecting the fact that the initial circumstances of the neonate, contingent, heterogeneous, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable, will never be cathected in the same way at the outset of any given life (Levin, 1989), making the outcome of the impossible foretell (except in extreme cases of environmental deprivation or abusive overstimulation). As Winnicott (1962, p. 56) once wisely quipped, the beginning is always a summation of beginnings.Drive theory and libido theory, the pleasure /unpleasure principle and the reality principle, primary process and secondary process, object libido and ego libido, the constancy principle, the idea of wish and conflicting defence, or conflict over opposing wishes - these are examples of basic Freudian approximations of what is first or, if not first, then what is central. It is a cliche that for Freud, everything significant is somehow rooted in the sexual. He insisted on this, but fretted over whether libidinal organization began with auto-erotism or primary narcissism, whether narcissism was the secondary result of sexual drive cathexis of the ego, or whether there was an earlier, more profound sense in which the essential makeup of the psyche was grounded in a narcissistic state of being governed not by the sexual but the self-preservative instincts. Later these two kinds of instincts were folded together into Eros, and the story goes on. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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