Back to Table of Contents
Fernando (2023) notes that the zero process drive does not have an inherited core, but is born anew each time from traumatic experiences. It remains very much tied to the specific unprocessed, pre-symbolic, unintegrated core post traumatic memories of the specific trauma that led to its formation (see separate entries SYMBOLIZATION, REPRESENTATION, and EGO PSYCHOLOGY). The zero process drive thus does not have the malleability and plasticity of the sexual and aggressive drives. While the object and even the aims of libido can be changed quite a bit, the zero process drive remains much closer to the unprocessed memories of the trauma, even in sublimations. What the zero process drive shares with libido is that both partake in a continuous push towards the drive reinvestment and actualization of the zero process memories. This similarity leads to another key similarity: just as there are drive/defense conflicts leading to compromise formations (fantasies, symptoms, actions) related to the classical sexual and aggressive drives, so too there are zero process drive/defense conflicts. Fernando (2023) asserts that what look like simple repetitions of trauma are actually zero process drive/defense compromises . The person usually lives out early parts of the trauma that preceded the time of full traumatic overwhelming and ‘ego shutdown’. The latter is usually shifted to the future, as described by Winnicott (1974) in his paper “Fear of Breakdown,” where the catastrophe that is feared is the one that has already happened but has not been registered. Fernando (2018b, 2023) describes a specific defense related to fear of breakdown that he calls temporal shifting . This defense uses the “not yet happened” or “just about to happen” nature of zero process memories to push the height of the trauma into the future, and generates a feeling of living at some point just before this, when the ego was not shattered, and control was still a possibility. Temporal shifting is one of a class of defenses Fernando (2018b, 2023) designates as zero process defenses. These use various characteristics of the zero process, in this case its not yet happened nature, for defensive purposes. Dissociation, as another example, is a zero process defense that uses the lack of integration of zero process elements. The combination of the zero process drive to actualize the core zero process memories with defenses used to oppose this actualization - especially the zero process defense of temporal shifting - leads to the traumatized person living at a point just before the full overwhelming and shattering of the trauma, with this shattering pushed forward into the future. IV. Fc. Nancy Kulish: Contemporary Freudian Perspective on Drive and Object Kulish (2000, 2011a, b) explores the libido and drive concepts primarily through the lens of infantile sexuality (See the separate entry INFANTILE SEXUALITY.) She adheres to the definition of the sexual drives as the psychic representations of inborn, bodily sexual instincts, mediated by the ego. In her modification of Freud’s drive theory, she integrates various subsequent contributions, especially those of Compton (1981a, 1981b, 1981c, 1983, 1985), Greenberg (1991), Kernberg (2001a), and Scarfone (2015), but also Solms (2012), Ogden (1984), Laplanche (1997) and others. Kulish (2019) stresses how “Freud’s concept of the sexual drive (1915a, b), while based on endogenous and continuous excitations and pressures, is characterized by plasticity
168
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online