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IV. F. EXAMPLES OF CONTEMPORARY AND EMERGING DEVELOPMENTS
IV. Fa. Drives and Affects Revisited and Reformulated The relationship between drives and affects remains a controversy within certain strands of North American psychoanalytic thought. Below are two approaches to the issue.
IV. Faa. Otto Kernberg – Contemporary North American Object Relations Theory As Object relations became a more central interest, there were original efforts to integrate Ego Psychology/Structural Theory and Object Relations. Kernberg (1982, 2015a) formulated a view of pre-oedipal unconscious intrapsychic conflict considered characteristic of borderline individuals in which the unconscious conflict is between internalized opposing units of self- and object representations and their respective affective/drive dispositions . Within this conceptualization, affects, which are gradually integrated into the drives, are considered to be a primary (unconscious) motivational system. In his “Self, Ego, Affects and Drives”, Kernberg (1982) proposes the modification of late dual instinct theory, in the context of relation between Ego and Self, early development and structure formation. Here, affects are seen as the primary motivational system, in the sense that they are at the center of each of the infinite number of gratifying and frustrating concrete events the infant experiences with his environment. Affects link a series of undifferentiated self-object representations so that gradually a complex world of internalized object relations, some pleasurably tinged, others unpleasurably tinged, is constructed. Libido and aggression, in turn, become hierarchically supraordinate motivational systems which express themselves in a multitude of differentiated affect dispositions under different circumstances. Affects are the building blocks or constituents of drives; affects eventually acquire a signal function for the activation of drives. Libido and aggression manifest themselves clinically in a spectrum of concrete affect dispositions and affect states. “Also, affect states and their corresponding object relations can be traced clinically to aggression, libido or, at later stages of development, to condensations of these two drives. The relation to an object changes under the influence of the biological activation of new affect states which emerge throughout development and cause the quality of the drives to shift. For example, preoedipal libidinal strivings for mother change under the impact of newly emerging sexually tinged affect states of the oedipal stage of development. These affects organize themselves into genital urges operating in continuity with earlier libidinal strivings, but with a changed subjective quality and different motivational implications. Similarly, aggression, directed toward the same libidinal object, also manifest in various component aggressive affective states, transcends each of these concrete aggressive affects, and—particularly after condensation and integration of aggressive and libidinal drives—brings about or contributes to a new complexity of object relations and a new set of higher-level or more complex, integrated affect states (such as sadness, tenderness, guilt, longing, etc.)” (Kernberg 1982, p908f.).
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