Drive

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Drive (pulsion, Trieb) Lacan reinstates a distinction, already clear in Freud, between the wholly psychical pulsion 9Trieb) and instinct (Instink), with its 'biological' connotations. As Lacan has poitned out, Freud's English translators blur this distinction by tranlsating both terms as 'instinct.'

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Freud's concept of the drive (Trieb) (pulsion) lies at the heart of his theory of sexuality.

For Freud, the distinctive feature of human sexuality, as opposed to the sexual life of other animals, is that it is not regulated by any instinct (a concept which implies a relatively fixed and innate relationship to an object) but by the drives, which differ from instincts in that they are extremely variable, and develop in ways which are contingent on the life history of the subject.

Lacan reaffirms the Freudian distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt).

Instinct denotes a mythical pre-linguistic need. Drive is completely removed from the realm of biology. Drive, unlike biological needs, can never be satisfied. Drives do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually round it.

Lacan argues that the purpose of the drive is not to reach a goal (a final destination) but to follow its aim (the way itself), which is to circle round the object. Thus the real purpose of the drive is not some mythical goal of full satisfaction, but to return to its circular path, and the real source of enjoyment is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit.

Lacan reminds his readers that Freud defined the drive as a montage composed of four discontinuous elements: the pressure, the end, the object and the source.

The drive does not refer to "some ultimate given, something archaic, primordial." The drive is a thoroughly cultural and symbolic construct.

Lacan incorporates the four elements of the drive in his theory of the drive's 'circuit'. In this circuit, the drive originates in an erogenous zone, circles round the object, and then returns to the erogenous zone. This circuit is structured by the three grammatical voices

1 The active voice (e.g. to see) 2 The reflexive voice (e.g. to see oneself) 3 The passive voice (e.g. to be seen)

The first of these two times (active and reflexive voices) are autoerotic: they lack a subject Only in the third time (the passive voice), when the drive completes its circuit, does 'a new subject' appear (which is to say that before this time, there was no subject). Although the third time is the passive voice, the drive is always essentially active, which is why Lacan writes the third time not as 'to be seen' but as 'to make oneself be seen'. Even supposedly 'passive' phases of the drive such as masochism involve activity. The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.

Freud argued that sexuality is composed of a number of partial drives (Ger. Partieltrieb) such as the oral drive and the anal drive, each specified by a different source (a different erotogenic zone). At first these component drives function anarchically and independently (viz. the 'polymorphous perversity' of children), but in puberty they become organised and fused together under the primacy of the genital organs. Lacan emphasises the partial nature of all drives, but differs from Freud on two points.

Lacan rejects the idea that the partial drives can ever attain any complete organisation or fusion, arguing that the primacy of the genital zone, if achieved, is always a highly precarious affair. He thus challenges the notion, put forward by some psychoanalysts after Freud, of a genital drive in which the partial drives are completely integrated in a harmonious fashion.

2. Lacan argues that the drives are partial, not in the sense that they are parts of a whole (a 'genital drive'), but in the sense that they only represent sexuality partially; they do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension of enjoyment.

Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive, the anal drive, the scopic drive, and the invocatory drive. Each of these drives is specified by a different partial object and a different erogenous zone.

The first two drives relate to demand, whereas the second pair relate to desire. In 1957, in the context of the graph of desire, Lacan proposes the formula (SO D) as the matheme for the drive. This formula is to be read: the barred subject in relation to demand, the fading of the subject before the insistence of a demand that persists without any conscious intention to sustain it.

Throughout the various reformulations of drive-theory in Freud's work, one constant feature is a basic dualism. At first this dualism was conceived in terms of an opposition between the sexual drives (Sexualtriebe) on the one hand, and the ego-drives (Ichtriebe) or drives of self-preservation (Selbsterhaltungs-triebe) on the other. This opposition was problematised by Freud's growing realisation, in the period 1914-20, that the ego-drives are themselves sexual.

He was thus led to reconceptualise the dualism of the drives in terms of an opposition between the life drives (Lebenstriebe) and the death drives (Todestriebe).

Lacan argues that it is important to retain Freud's dualism, and rejects the monism of Jung, who argued that all psychic forces could be reduced to one single concept of psychic energy. However, Lacan prefers to reconceptualise this dualism in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary, and not in terms of an opposition between different kinds of drives. Thus, for Lacan, all drives are sexual drives, and every drive is a death drive. Since every drive is excessive, repetitive, and ultimately destructive.

The drives are closely related to desire; both originate in the field of the subject, as opposed to the genital drive, which (if it exists) finds its form on the side of the Other. However, the drive is not merely another name for desire: they are the partial aspects in which desire is realised. Desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are partial manifestations of desire.

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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.

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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 11^th 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(O), 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.

 

(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.

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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>

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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

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