IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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Joseph and Anne-Marie Sandler (Sandler and Sandler, 1998) started out with a classical ego psychological understanding of motivation, but gradually came to integrate internal objects in their theory. The basic motivational factor is the wish, instinctual or not. Wishes are psychological constructs in which the self usually is imagined doing something with an object. In his interactions with people the subject tries to actualize this (often unconscious) construct. This is done through various attempts to influence the object. The object conforms, more or less, to these pressures, a phenomenon called “role responsiveness”. When the expected role relationship is put on stage, the subject perceives the actualized wishful construct. As in dreams the wish is fulfilled. The wish may be instinctual, but according to the Sandlers, there are also other wishes, like the one for safety. In this regard the Sandlers approach the standpoints of Fairbairn and Bowlby. III. Bcb. Death Drive Revisited Contemporary European authors of varying theoretical leanings attempted to re-examine the concept of death drive, its clinical manifestations and its utility for clinical psychoanalysis. The prototype of such work is Freud’s clinical observation of repetition-compulsion and negative therapeutic reaction as staring points of his underlying metapsychological assumption. Rosine Perelberg (2003) explores the transference – countertransference ramifications while working with patients who exemplify either a lack or excess of affect that has not been mentalized. In both cases, the absence of words and emotions point to the drives that express themselves not through representation but through repetition compulsion. In this vein, Michael Šebek (2019), in “Death Drive, repetition compulsion and some corridors of psychic change” presents an overview of ‘enlivening’ interventions when the treatment is blocked by impasses, understood as caused by influences of the death drive. Such interventions may be given different names, depending on the theories espoused by various authors. Examples are ‘reclamations’ (Alvarez 2012), ‘the enlivening object’ (Director 2009), ‘rehabilitation’ (Fonagy and Target 1994), and ‘a birth’ (Borogno 2013), which may all be understood as facilitations of life drives. David Bell (2015), in “The Death Drive: Phenomenological Perspectives in Contemporary Kleinian Theory” , attempts to demonstrate how the concept of the death drive provides an explanation for clinical phenomena not adequately accounted for by other existing theories. He suggests three models of clinical processes, whose phenomenology is distinct: 1. Violent acts of destruction/annihilation including internal phenomena such as the annihilation of thought; 2. The seductive lure into a world of non-thinking, Freud’s pleasant ‘Nirvana-like’ state; and 3. The sadistic control of objects preventing any movement, this associated with a peculiar pleasure. Bell concludes: “The concept of the death drive still attracts much opposition, but although we may be less certain now as to whether it is helpful to conceive of it in biological terms, the existence

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