Truth and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis by Civitarese Giuseppe

Author:Civitarese, Giuseppe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-35578-6
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Psychic representatives of the drive47

Despite taking a monistic view of their relationship, not even Freud can avoid the conceptual opposition between mind and body. Even for him the leap from one to another is a leap across a gulf. To bridge this gap, Freud devises a kind of a walkway and invents the concept of drive. He speaks of drives in the plural as ‘mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness’48 (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967, p. 216). Their indefiniteness lies in the fact that, by definition, the concept of instinct lies ‘on the frontier between the mental and the physical’ (Freud, 1905, p. 168). At its origin, the drive is by nature organic and results from the excitations of the body that cause unpleasant increases in tension. To reduce the tension, it sends its psychic representatives (psychische Repräsentanz or Repräsentant) as delegates to the psyche, the place from which it is rigorously excluded.

The instinct thus has a source, it exerts a pressure, it searches for an object in order to achieve the goal of reducing tension, but in itself it is a force that is not, nor can it become, properly psychical. Once it reaches the threshold of the psyche, it stops and even if it participates in the decisions that are taken in that forum, it does so only by proxy. The word ‘psychic’ does not specify in which compartment the delegation of the drive is hosted, whether in the central offices of the ego, that is, in the Prec-C compartment or, already dismantled and rejected, in the prison of the Inc.

But why does Freud speak of drives and not simply of instincts? The only reason that suggests itself to explain what might have led him to talk not of instincts but of drives49 is that he wanted to insert what might at first glance seem like an automatic reaction to a stimulus, such as we find in animals, into a pre-symbolic frame, that is, into a ‘procedural’ or semiotic symbolic order, which is then symbolic in the true sense of the word. This amounts to saying that the concept of drive has no meaning outside language, outside human sociality and its laws. The state of being between the somatic and the psychic, then, is not so much a question of something purely corporeal suddenly meeting a culturally mediated and non-automatic (instinctive) response – it would be difficult, and even logically impossible, to identify the exact threshold of the transition from nature to culture – but something/a push that stands between a pre-symbolic culture, in the sense described above, and a properly symbolic culture, because both are immersed in what Heidegger would call Existence (Dasein). If we did not concede that the body is already, and has always been, shaped by determinations of a social nature, we would fatally fall into a nefarious mind/body dualism. The drive then is an impulse that starts from the body, but from a body that cannot ever be thought of as pure materiality.

The delegation

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