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III. Bc. Further and Contemporary Developments in Europe
III. Bca. Integration Of Drive Theory with Object Related Concepts: The Question of Motivation From the 80’s, the place of drive became (especially in the English-speaking psychoanalysis) part of the discussion on human motivation . Motivation is evidently one of the basic dimensions of psychoanalysis (as analysts try to look for what makes people think, feel and act as they do; what drives people?). Moving to modern times, object relations have taken central stage in the psychoanalytic theory of motivation. 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 experiences 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 which have not been mentally represented and therefore express themselves 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’ (Borgogno 2013), which may all be understood as facilitations of life drives.
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