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“aggression, like sexuality, not as a push from within but as a response to others, biologically mediated and prewired, within a relational context” (p. 363). Emmanuel Ghent (1989) distinguished among the notions of needs, motives, and drives in the metapsychological sense, and drives in the sense of hard-wired organismic thrust, and he related these distinctions to one- and two-person psychologies. For Lewis Aron (1997), sexuality, the body, aggression, oedipal conflicts are reconfigured and understood within the context of the relational field. “It is not that relational analysts do not consider sexuality and aggression (the drives) to be critically important; rather, it is that they do not consider them the fundamental basis on which to reductively explain everything else. For relationalists, they are drives, but not “Drives,” by which I mean that they are not the be all end all by which everything else is explained. Of course, we should not dismiss the importance of the drives, but what relationalists claim is that we should not build all of psychoanalytic theory on the basis of a narrow dual drive theory….” (Ibid, 889). Not radical proponent or opponent of a drive theory, instead of ‘dual drive theory’, he is ‘inclined toward a drive theory consisting of “multiple universal dualities”’ (ibid, p.890) as suggested by Hoffman (1995). Setting out to offer an alternative to conceptualization of hatred being a derivative of a primary aggressive drive, within infant-research- informed Motivational Systems Theory (one of Contemporary branches of Self psychology), Joseph Lichtenberg and Barbara Shapard (2000) postulate that “in earliest infancy, an aversive motivational system develops in response to the need to react with antagonism and/or withdrawal to any internal or external stimulus that is dystonic” (p. 345). In insecurely attached infants, this aversive motivational system undergoes an early pathogenic organization, whereby the needs and desires of any other motivational systems might trigger persistent negatively toned affect. Such early organization of the aversive motivational system then becomes an anlage from which hatred and other persistent patterns of antagonism and withdrawal emerge. When such a foundation forms, the background of aversive organization of insecurely attached infants resembles an aggressive drive (Mitchell, 1993), or a drive-like impetus to react antagonistically . Lichtenberg and Shapard note that these rigidly organized aversive networks can be activated at any age, in response to overwhelming traumatic experiences. Adrienne Harris (2019) highlights a controversial history of the concept of primary destructiveness. She references psychoanalytic writings of Freud (1915e), Sabina Spielrein (1912/1994), Victor Tausk (1919/1933), and Sandor Ferenczi (1928/1980), together with works of world literature and philosophy, tracing an evolution of the concept of death drive from its first uses in World War I to the present day. Sexualization of violence in the societal context is complemented by several clinical examples, which further exemplify the common theme: “Eros and Thanatos, life and death, excitement, transformative and annihilating wishes interweave” (Harris 2019, p. 89).
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