Changes

Drive

41,089 bytes added, 20:35, 17 May 2006

no edit summary

Instinctual (pre-lingual) bodily impulses or instincts, which Freud ultimately decided could be reduced to two primary drives: 1) the life drives (both the pleasure principle and the reality principle); and 2) the death drive, which Freud saw as even more primal than the life drives.

==def=

Freud, Lacan and the psychoanalytic drive

By Matthew James, M.A.

After an interval the man spoke to me. He said that my friend was

a very rough boy and asked did he get whipped often at school. I was going to reply indignantly that we were not

National School boys to be whipped as he called it, but I remained

silent. He began to speak on the subject of chastising boys. His mind, as if

magnetized again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and round its new

centre. He said that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and

well whipped. When a boy was rough and unruly there was nothing would do him any

good but a good sound whipping. A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no

good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. I was surprised at this

sentiment and involuntarily glanced at his face. As I did so I met the gaze of a

pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead. I

turned my eyes away again.

James Joyce, ‘An Encounter’

The Freudian

drive

The drive is a mythological concept

The theory of the

drives is so to say our mythology. Drives are mythical entities, magnificent in

their indefiniteness. (Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis)

The concept of the drive is a hypothesis, a strategic

assumption, a myth. Along with the related concepts of the unconscious and

transference, it represents Freud’s (perhaps unwitting) attempt to move from the

objective natural sciences of his time - physics, biology, and chemistry -

towards a theory based on subjective discourse and speech, dreams, fantasies and

symptoms.

The forces which we

assume to exist behind the tensions caused by the needs of the id are

called drives. (Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis)

Freud’s technique was to forge theory from practice,

knowledge from observation and interaction. Real phenomena such as bodily

symptoms, repetitive phrases, and apparently bungled actions form the basis of

theoretical constructions. Ça parle, as Lacan says - it, the unconscious,

speaks. Thus the idea that psychoanalysis itself was born from hysteria, the

hysteric’s discourse of Anna O. as addressed to Freud qua analyst.

We have often heard

it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined

basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with

such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in

describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify, and correlate

them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying

certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or

other but certainly not from the new observations alone. (Freud, Instincts and

their Vicissitudes)

Freud’s analytic theory represents the application of

subjectivity to science, which is precisely what science defines itself in

opposition to. In this way, Lacan will say that psychoanalysis represents

Freud’s desire.

The drive is not an instinct

We might start by making, with Freud, a provisional

distinction between animal instincts, ‘instinkts’, based on hereditary patterns

and corresponding to organic needs, with ‘triebe’, specifically human, and

dynamically variable, drives.

Laplanche and Pontalis provide a useful gloss on the two

German terms. Instinkt is “traditionally a hereditary pattern peculiar to an

animal species, varying little from one member of this species to another and

unfolding in accordance with a temporal scheme which is generally resistant to

change and apparently geared to a purpose.” Trieb “retains overtones suggestive

of pressure (treiben, to push); the use of ‘Trieb’ indicates not so much

a precise goal as a general orientation, and draws attention to the irresistible

nature of the pressure rather than to the stability of its aim and object.”

The so-called ‘hunger instinct’, the need to eat, would

thus not be the same as what Freud calls the oral drive. A better example is the

disjunction between the ‘reproductive instinct’, with its fixed aim and object,

and the panopoly of human sexual drives. The point here is not to claim that

humans are immune from the influence of instinct and biological need, but to

propose that these ‘instincts’ are mutable, colored by individual experience.

Freud’s authorized English translator, James Strachey,

renders both ‘instinkt’ and ‘trieb’ by the English ‘instinct’, a strategy which

later translators have for the most part also adopted. Thus the distinction

between the two German terms can be somewhat hard to grasp, a distinction Lacan

will take as the starting point for his work on the drive.

The structure of the Freudian drive

In his 1915 paper ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, Freud

outlines the four components of his drive: pressure, source, aim, and object.

Laplanche and Pontalis describe the relations between these

terms by stating that the drive is “a dynamic process consisting in a

pressure (charge of energy, motricity factor) which directs the organism

towards an aim. According to Freud, a drive has its source in a bodily

stimulus; its aim is to eliminate the state of tension obtaining at the

instinctual source; and it is in the object, or thanks to it, that the

drive may achieve its aim.”

In defining the drive, Freud goes on to differentiate

between a singular external stimulus (i.e. the sight of a predator) which can be

assuaged by the body through muscular activity (i.e. fight or flight), and

internal stimuli of a more constant nature which must be regulated by the mind -

“an internal alteration of the source of stimulation” (Instincts and

their Vicissitudes) - rather than

eradicated. These responses to excitation are in accordance with Freud’s

economic principle of equilibrium, the pleasure principle, which is based on the

discharge of tension.

Freud is somewhat vague on the origins of such constant,

internal excitation - he has not yet indexed its status as fundamentally

beyond the pleasure principle - but admits that “there is naturally nothing

to prevent our supposing that the drives [i.e. the internal stimuli] themselves

are, at least in part, precipitates of the effects of external stimulation”

(Instincts and their Vicissitudes). The

idea, as Freud expresses it earlier, in his ‘Project for a Scientific

Psychology’ of 1895, is that an intelligent organism faced with an array of

confusing sensations and experiences must effectively filter and regulate this

sensory data in order to survive.

The psychic apparatus thus intervenes as a method of

defense, to ‘alter’ or redirect the internal stimulus, the instinctual drive

which cannot be mastered by the body alone, i.e. by fight or flight. The drive

“appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and somatic, as

the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism

and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in

consequence of its connection with the body” (Instincts and their

Vicissitudes). The ‘psychical representative’ of the drive, the representation

of that energetic pressure which the body redirects towards the mind, is

localized by Freud in his concept of the unconscious. The somatic pressure

itself, split off from its bodily origins, becomes manifest to consciousness as

an ‘unmoored’ quota of affective energy. Thus the essential Spaltung,

or splitting, which defines Freud’s model of the psyche.

The psychical transformations and displacements of the

pure, somatic instinct are the only means Freud has to conceptualize his ideas

on the drive:

I am indeed of

the opinion that the antithesis of conscious and unconscious does not hold for

drives. A drive can never be an object of consciousness - only the idea that

represents the drive. Even in the unconscious, moreover, it can only be

represented by the idea. If the drive did not attach itself to an idea or

manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it. (Freud,

The Unconscious)

The psychical aspects of the drive, its representations,

become a necessary foundation for Freud’s theoretical framework. This sets the

stage for the basis of Lacan’s reading of the Freudian drive as defined by its

place in a language-system, or signifying structure to use his terms.

Drive theory

in the Freudian field

Lacan and the truth of Freud

It is worth briefly examining the conceptual development of

the drive in psychoanalytic theory after Freud because, especially in his early

work, this is where Lacan himself begins. His self-proclaimed ‘return to Freud’,

by which he means a return to the truth of the Freudian analytic experience, is

characterized in part by a series of commentaries on the work of other analysts

and analytic movements he perceives as deviations from this truth.

I am not, for all

that, denouncing the anti-Freudian aspects of contemporary psychoanalysis.

Indeed, we should be grateful to the partisans of the latter for throwing down

their mask in this regard, priding themselves, as they do, on going beyond what

they, in fact, know nothing about, having retained just enough of Freud’s

doctrine to sense how significantly what they are led to enunciate about their

experience diverges from it. (Lacan, The direction of the treatment)

Lacan alludes here to a certain ‘not wanting to know’, an

effect of (in this case perhaps social and moral) repression which separates the

subject of the enunciation, the speaking subject which experiences analytic

truth, from the subject of the statement, the contemporary analytic ego through which

it is repressed.

The Freudian field

The concept of the drive, and in particular Freud’s

insistence on the sexual nature of the drive, was to prove a divisive issue for

psychoanalysis. Psychology, the science from which Freud sought to differentiate

his own discipline while at the same craving its acknowledgement, would attempt

to ignore Freud’s discoveries, and then discredit them - sexuality and the body

were seen as incidental if not irrelevant to a science of the mind. Alfred

Adler, one of the first analysts to break from Freud, rejected the sexual basis

of the drive in favor of a more aggressive human principle, a drive towards

knowledge and self-perfection. Jung would propose a more symbolic, archetypal

notion of the unconscious than his mentor, and rethink the human drive, and

analysis itself, as a form of spiritual quest.

Moving forward in time, Melanie Klein will accept the

centrality of sexuality and the drives, yet according to Lacan, she imposes her

own, partially erroneous theoretical structure on top of Freud’s - one

over-emphasizing imaginary relations and the role of the mother. In America,

with the rise of object-relations theory, there is the movement from a so-called

1 person to 2 person psychology, a move away - in Lacan’s view - from the

Freudian subject of the unconscious towards a model based more on communication,

construction, and intersubjectivity. More recently, the idea of a sexual drive

innately connected to the body has been questioned by gender theorists

emphasizing the performative, and therefore potentially renegotiable, nature of

sexuality.

By contrast, Lacan will claim for himself a more

conservative role, repeatedly stating his fidelity to the texts of Freud and

their clinical implications. Whilst this claim is a matter of some debate, it is

nevertheless useful to think of the Lacanian drive as a reaction to, and a

rebuttal of, certain developments in post-Freudian psychoanalysis.

The Lacanian

drive

The drive has a central place in Lacan’s work - along with

the unconscious, repetition, and transference, it is one of the Four Fundamental

Concepts of Psychoanalysis which he proposes in his 11th annual

Seminar of 1964. In a conference paper given that same year, Lacan introduces

the concept of the drive thus:

The drive, as it

is constructed by Freud on the basis of the experience of the unconscious,

prohibits psychologizing thought from resorting to “instinct” by which it masks

its ignorance through the supposition of morals in nature. It can never be often

enough repeated, given the obstinacy of psychologists who, on the whole and per

se, are in the service of technocratic exploitation, that the drive - the

Freudian drive - has nothing to do with instinct (none of Freud’s expressions

allows for confusion). (Lacan, On Freud’s Trieb and the Psychoanalysts

Desire)

In order to define what the drive is for Lacan, as

opposed to what it is not, a little theoretical groundwork is involved.

Need, Demand, Desire

Lacan substitutes Freud’s myth of the intelligent organism

besieged by potentially harmful stimuli with his own image of a helpless child

before its mother. The child, like other animals, is subject to what Lacan terms

need, a series of biological instincts (for example hunger) which can be

satisfied by certain objects (for example milk). Lacan theorizes (non-human)

animal communication in terms of a code based on signs, which can be transmitted

and received with no risk of misinterpretation - i.e. a certain type of cry (as

defined by pitch, volume, time of day or some other consistent variable) would

convey a specific need for food, rather than say warmth or water, to the parent.

By contrast, the human animal can only express his need through speech, and a

symbolic language-system based on signifiers, which do not correspond to any

‘real’ object of need, but only achieve a semblance of meaning in their relation

to, and difference from, other signifiers. Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss

linguist whose work Lacan draws on here, gives the example of the signifier

‘cat’, whose ‘catness’, as it were, is constructed from the cumulative premises

that it is not a dog, or a horse, or a windmill, or any other signifier. Thus

Lacan will propose that ‘the signifier represents the subject for another

signifier’ in a potentially infinite signifying chain.

The human child, then, can express himself only through a

demand, which is by nature inarticulate - he is without the linguistic means to

articulate what he wants. For Lacan, this is equivalent to saying he does not

know what he wants. The child is alienated from his body, he cannot speak it.

Thus his cry, his demand to satiate whatever it is that is troubling him, to be

given whatever it is that he wants, is destined always to be misinterpreted - or

rather to be overwritten, inferred, decided for him, in a process not unlike

that of analytic suggestion, by his mother, or whoever first takes this place of

guardian, listener, analyst, which Lacan terms the Other.

What do you want of me? Are you hungry, thirsty,

tired, wet? The Other, unable to comprehend, or thus to satisfy, the child’s

abstract demand, provides a series of substitute objects for him. Oh, you must

need ‘x' - the breast, the bottle, the toy. The child in his turn determines

these responses as demands from the Other, answers to his primordial

questions, pointers to his place in the world. What do you want of me?

Oh, you must want me to suck, crawl, speak, shit. The signifier is thus reduced

to a sign in these primitive encounters with the demand of the Other. Lacan

theorizes demand as essentially a demand for love, an impossible, narcissistic

demand for access to a ‘real’ object in the Other, unmediated by language, which

would act as a sign of love, a gift bringing complete satisfaction.

Demand in itself bears on something other than

the satisfactions it calls for. It is a demand of a presence or of an absence -

which is what is manifested in the primordial relation to the mother. Demand

constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs,

that is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are

satisfied. This privilege of the Other thus outlines the radical form of the

gift of that which the Other does not have, namely, its love. In this way,

demand annuls the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting

it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are

reduced to the level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love.

(Lacan, The Signification of the Phallus)

This closed, circuit-like structure of demand bears very

closely on the drive, as we shall see. The mutual co-dependency of mother and

child, subject and object, cosseted in a womblike world which attempts to suture

over the cuts of language, Lacan will term imaginary, a retroactively

constructed fantasy created by the ego. This fantasy enables the speaking

subject, the subject of language, some partial and temporary access to what

Lacan names jouissance, the satisfaction, or complete enjoyment, which

language denies him by separating him from his body, and thus the body of the

Other. However, as a mode of being, a way to live in the world, such a fantasy

is untenable, or, strictly speaking, impossible in the Lacanian sense - an

existence ‘in the real’ without the supporting structure of a symbolic

language-system, a Wittgenstinian private-language game. Such is the Lacanian

definition of psychosis.

The way out of such a traumatic dead-end, and the entry

into a signifying system which alienates while providing a necessary structure,

is theorized by Lacan as an acceptance of, or at least a confrontation with,

what he calls the Nom du Père, to be heard as both the ‘name’ and ‘no’ of

the father. This localization of the Freudian Oedipus and castration complexes

in the signifier of paternity and the law bears the essential function of a

prohibition. The child is forbidden its secret trysts with the maternal

love-object, its games of signs and seductions, and forced to recognize the

existence of a third term in its dyadic universe, and thus by expansion the

potentially infinite number of such terms. This paternal ‘metaphor’, as Lacan

calls it, acts as the catalyst which will transform the child’s signs into

signifiers, allow him to negotiate with the world  and be negotiated by it,

experience acceptance and rejection, love and loss - in short to enter the

symbolic system as a desiring subject. The infantilizing trajectory from

need to demand and back is thus dialecticized by what Lacan terms desire, which

he defines as that which is left over when need is subtracted from demand, i.e.

the specifically human wunschen or wishes which suture over the

frustration of an impossible demand.

The drive as the relation of the speaking subject to the

demand of the Other

During the late 1950s, Lacan formulates his first attempts

at a visual topography of the subject in a series of ‘graphs of desire’. The

final version of the graph, as detailed in the 1960 conference paper ‘The

Subversion of the Subject’, defines the drive as ($<>D) - the relation of (<>) the speaking

subject ($) to the demand of the Other (D). As we have seen, this relation forms

a circuit-like structure, based on a mutual co-dependency of terms. The drive

might be described as a compromise formation in that both subject and Other

depend upon each other to exist, to be recognized as existing. Thus the absolute

subjection to demand implies the dissolution of the subject into an object - an

object which makes the Other exist, exemplified in Schreber’s psychotic

delusion that he was the target of neuron rays sent by God to impregnate him.

And in turn the freedom of the subject from the demand of the Other - this is

one way in which Lacan theorizes the aim of analysis - requires the

dissolution of the Other as existing, its dematerialization as a

locus of meaningful signifiers.

The speaking subject - which we can specify here as the

subject who comes to speak in analysis (we might say that the psychotic, rather

than speaking, is spoken) - exists in a sort of limbo between these

two extremes, pure subjectivity and pure objectivity, and is thus for Lacan

fundamentally split, fissured, lacking in substance. The subject of the

unconscious exists only as the gap, the alterity, between the signifiers which

represent it to consciousness. If desire can be theorized as the metonymical

attempt to sustain these signifiers, to condense and displace them, break them

up and put them back together again, then demand, by contrast, can be thought of

as an oppositional process which attempts to mortify the signifier, fixating it

in the unconscious as a sign. The drive is precisely the orbital movement around

such a sign qua drive-object.

The following case vignette by the Lacanian analyst Marie-Hélène Brousse provides a clinical application of the ideas we have just

been discussing:

I have a patient who is

grappling with her mother’s desire because she can’t decide whether or not to

have a baby. In reference to her mother’s desire she can only remember one

sentence. It’s a memory of her mother being furious with her children, running

after them saying ‘I’m going to kill you’. The signifier of her mother’s desire

is ‘I’m going to kill you’. In a sense, my patient was constituted on the basis

of those signifiers, to kill a child. It’s her interpretation of the Other’s

demand. The Other’s demand is ‘die’!

In the case of my patient

and her mother, the Other’s demand is quite simple: the definitive silence of

the children. She demands that they be quiet, and that is the ultimate

consequence. In that case, the mother’s demand, ‘be quiet’, can be understood as

‘be dead’ – the object of the patient’s fantasy. In her fantasy she always

appears as disappearing. What is her object? Her own disappearance as an object.

(Brousse, The Drive II)

All drives are partial drives

Lacan follows Freud in stating that the object of the drive

is variable, which is to say it has no natural object:

This is what Freud tells us.

Let us look at what he says - as far as the object in the drive is concerned,

let it be clear that it is, strictly speaking, of no importance. It is a matter

of total indifference…How should one conceive of the drive, so that one can say

that, in the drive, whatever it may be, it is indifferent? As far as the oral

drive is concerned, for example, it is obvious that it is not a question of

food, nor of the memory of food, nor the echo of food, nor the mother’s care,

but of something that is called the breast…If Freud makes a remark to the effect

that the object in the drive is of no importance, it is probably because the

breast, in its function as object, is to be revised in its entirety. (Lacan,

Seminar XI)

For Lacan, this function of the object is to mark the place

of a primordial lack or void created by the subject’s accession to language, a

piece or fragment of the real body which eludes both imaginary representation

and symbolic elucidation. Thus the breast will be theorized in terms of a lost

object, an absence for the subject to recreate in his fantasy. Lacan writes this

lost object as a (autre, or 'other'), defining it as the object-cause of desire, the

traumatic object of separation which the subject ($) attempts to refind in a

fantasized image ($<>a) and thus annul. Its horizon is that of a cut at

the edges of the body, where the subject attempts to define inside and outside,

subjectivity and Otherness:

Let us note that this

characteristic of the cut is no less obviously prevalent in the object described

by analytic theory: the mamilla, the feces, the phallus (as an imaginary

object), and the urinary flow. (An unthinkable list, unless we add, as I do, the

phoneme, the gaze, the voice…and the nothing). For isn’t it plain to see that

the characteristic of being partial, rightly emphasized in objects, is

applicable not because these objects are part of a total object, which the body

is assumed to be, but because they only partially represent the function that

produces them. A common characteristic of these objects as I formulate them is

that they have no specular image, in other words, no alterity. It is to this

object that cannot be grasped in the mirror that the specular image lends its

clothes. (Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject)

The object a, as a hollow, an empty husk at the

limits of the body, can thus be represented in the drive by any specular object

of consciousness, but this representation remains partial, incomplete, in the

same way that the 1 can only partially represent the 0, and the signifier can

only partially represent the real. In a sense, every drive-object is by nature

fetishistic in its veiling of the anxiety-provoking object a which it

embodies. This essential disjunction between the object and its function leads

Lacan to rethink the hypothesis of a series of partial ‘component’ sexual drives

(i.e. oral, anal, etc) which integrate to form a ‘developmentally mature’ genital

drive in the subject. In place of this teleology, denounced variously as a

normalizing social construct and an idealistic fantasy, Lacan affirms the logic

of Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversion’. Any part of the body can become

sexualized. All drives are partial to the extent that they ‘know nothing’ about

the imaginary unity of the subject (or indeed the ‘sexual responsibilities’

instated by his super-ego) - instead of this ‘Gestalt’ they form a ‘montage’ of

discontinuous elements which in Seminar XI Lacan compares to a Surrealist

painting.

The structure of the Lacanian drive

If the drives are not a product of nature, if they are

‘constructed’ in some way, this is not to say that they are therefore

‘malleable’, that they can be changed or reformulated at will. We touch here on

the Lacanian critique of recent gender theory such as the work of Judith Butler.

The relation of the subject to jouissance, to the satisfaction produced

by the drive, is for Lacan a very intimate one, and on an unconscious level it

is often a relation the subject wants to know nothing about, let alone change.

Let us recall Freud’s image of the mind as the site of an ongoing archeological

excavation, the deepest layers being all but inaccessible to consciousness. We

might speak of a subject ‘in thrall’ to, and ‘enthralled by’, the drive. This

notion of servitude, ‘thralldom’, indexes the degree of attachment which bonds

the subject of the drive to the Other.

In neurosis, there exists an unconscious equation between

demand and lack. To demand something is to be without it. As far as the neurotic

is concerned, the demand of the Other, as expressed in its signifiers, thus

indicates the nature of its lack. However, according to the logic of the

signifier, this nature is destined to remain opaque to the subject, mysterious,

always represented by another signifier - we might say that it is experienced as

the desire of the Other (What does the Other want?). This desire is precisely

what is intolerable for the obsessional, who always does his best to reduce it

to a demand, and thus himself to an object. By contrast the hysteric cannot bear

the intransigence of the Other’s demand, depending instead on the

desire of the Other in order to exist as a subject.

Lacan will formulate the desire of the Other as S(<s>O</s>),

the signifier of a lack in the Other. A signifier is always missing, the

signifier which would complete the subject by allowing him to satisfy the

Other’s demand (That’s what the Other wants). The subject of the drive

attempts to locate this missing signifier in the Other’s demand by

identifying with the object of that demand (i.e. by ‘being dead’ in the case

of Brousse’s patient). The logic of the drive resides in this movement of

identification, a reflexive movement from subject to object and back again,

whose aim is to return to its source.

<!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75"

coordsize="21600,21600" o:spt="75" o:preferrelative="t" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe"

filled="f" stroked="f">

<v:stroke joinstyle="miter"/>

<v:formulas>

<v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"/>

<v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"/>

<v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"/>

<v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"/>

<v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"/>

<v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"/>

<v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"/>

<v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"/>

<v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"/>

<v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"/>

<v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"/>

<v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"/>

</v:formulas>

<v:path o:extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect"/>

<o:lock v:ext="edit" aspectratio="t"/>

</v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_s1025" type="#_x0000_t75" alt="" style='width:3in;

height:240.75pt'>

<v:imagedata src="drives_files/image001.jpg" o:title="drive0"/>

[[Image:Goal.jpg|center]]

(Lacan, Seminar XI)

La pulsion en fait le tour as Lacan says in French,

the drive always misses its object - precisely because the object itself is a

lack, it has no corresponding signifier. We might say that the pervert takes the

http://www.nosubject.com/Special:Upload

Upload file

neurotic’s identification to its logical conclusion and becomes the

object of the Other’s demand, working ceaselessly to make of the Other a pure

subject of jouissance. Lacan will write the perverse fantasy as an

‘inverse’ neurosis (a<>$) - freed of neurotic guilt, the pervert is thus

all the more certain of his own satisfaction.

In Seminar XI, Lacan draws on Freud’s work ‘A Child is

Being Beaten’ to underscore the grammatical edifice of the drive, its existence

as a combinatory of subject ($), verb (<>), and object (D) - in this way it

embodies dialectically the logical structure of fantasy ($<>a). The

alternating status of the verb, represented by the lozenge, as both active and

passive is rendered in French as ‘se faire’ - to make oneself be (seen, heard,

shitted, sucked etc). There are thus two moments to the drive - the scopic

drive is both voyeuristic (making oneself be seen by the Other) and

exhibitionist (making the Other be seen by oneself). The masochist enjoys his

own pain from the position of the sadist, and the sadist enjoys the pain of his

victim from the position of the masochist.

In a sense, the circular nature of the drive offers no way

forward, its logic is binary. The ‘constant pressure’ is resolved by an

alternation between two terms - everything and nothing. Thus Lacan states that

every drive is a manifestation of the death drive, its compulsion to repeat

encapsulated in the image of a serpent chasing its own tail.

<a></a>

Conclusion: from Drive to Desire

In concluding I would like to refer to a distinction

Jacques-Alain Miller draws between drive and desire in a commentary on one of

Lacan’s papers:

The subject is happy. The

want-to-be is on the side of desire. But on the side of the drive, there is no

want-to-be. What Freud calls the drive is an activity which always comes off. It

leads to sure success, whereas desire leads to a sure unconscious formation,

namely, a bungled action or slip: ‘I missed my turn, ‘I forgot my keys’, etc.

That is desire. The drive, on the contrary, always has its keys in its hand.

(Miller, Commentary on Lacan’s ‘On Freud’s Trieb and the Psychoanalysts

Desire’)

Implicit in this distinction is an opposition between old

and new. If the drive succeeds, it is because it has nowhere to go, it has been

there before, its route is already decided. Desire, on the other hand, can

always take a detour, reformulate its signifiers, interpret its own mistakes. In

this sense, it can function as a learning experience, allowing the subject, in

the words of the writer Samuel Beckett, to ‘fail again...fail better’.<a></a>

Bibliography

Brousse, Marie-Helene

‘The Drive (I)’ and ‘The Drive (II)’ in Reading Seminar XI, in R.

Feldstein, B. Fink, M. Jaanus (eds.), Reading Seminar XI, State

University of New York Press, 1996

Freud, Sigmund

The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, 24  volumes,

ed. James Strachey et al., The Hogarth Press and the  Institute of

Psychoanalysis, 1953-74

Lacan, Jacques Écrits: A Selection,

trans. Alan Sheridan, Routledge, 1977

Ibid. The Seminar.

Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan

Sheridan, Hogarth Press, 1977

Ibid. ‘On Freud’s “Trieb”

and the psychoanalyst’s desire’, trans. Bruce Fink, in R. Feldstein, B. Fink, M.

Jaanus (eds.), Reading Seminar XI, State University of New York Press,

1996

Laplanche, Jean and

Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand The Language of Psychoanalysis, Karnac Books,

1996

Miller, Jacques-Alain

‘Commentary on Lacan’s ‘On Freud’s “Trieb” and the psychoanalyst’s

desire’’, trans. Bruce Fink, in R. Feldstein, B. Fink, M. Jaanus (eds.),

Reading Seminar XI, State University of New York Press, 1996<a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a><a></a>

== References ==

[[Category:Terms]]

[[Category:Concepts]]

[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]-->

Riot Hero

Root Admin, Bots, Bureaucrats, flow-bot, oversight, Administrators, Widget editors

24,656

edits

Changes

Drive

Navigation menu

Personal tools

Namespaces

Variants

Views

More

Search

Navigation

Sigmund Freud

Jacques Lacan

Slavoj Žižek

Alain Badiou

Links

Advertisements

Advertisement

Toolbox