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V. FRENCH PERSPECTIVES: FRANCE, CANADA AND THE US
French psychoanalytic tradition on both sides of the Atlantic questions the opposition between the ‘object’ and ‘drive’, ‘object-seeking’ versus ‘pleasure-seeking’, as well as ‘internal object’ versus the ‘real’ person/other, in the constitution of the psyche. Just as the object is understood to be a revealer of the drive (Green, 2002), no psychoanalytic theory can spare itself a confrontation with the double status of the object (Green, 1975): fantasied and real, internal and external, represented and perceived. V. A. DRIVE IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYSIS IN FRANCE In French psychoanalysis, drive is still one of the fundamental concepts. In this tradition, however, the function of the object has more and more come to be seen as an important organizer of the drive. This line of thought has found many forms. Jacques Lacan (2004) recast Freud’s terminology of representations as signifiers, borrowing the concepts of language as a structure form Ferdinand de Saussure. The emphasis is on the infinite combinatory possibilities of the signifier, which determine the ultimate expression of drives. In his version, the unconscious consists of repressed signifiers that in turn control access to drive derivatives. This might be viewed as a less biologically determined and ultimately more culturally sensitive model of the psyche than one based on supposed erogenous sources of activation. In Lacan’s writings the importance of the object can be seen in the great Other, considered as “the treasure of signifiers,” which gives shape to the “return loop” (through which the subject gets back its drive messages in inverted form). André Green proposes to exchange the classical system drive/defense with the system drive/object. In the latter, one takes into account the influence of the response of the external object on the shaping of the subject´s drive life. Jean Laplanche sets out to seek the origin of the subject’s sexual drive in the “enigmatic signifiers” transmitted by the mother. This transmission is called “the fundamental anthropological situation’. More recently, René Roussillon , sensitive to the characteristics of the forms of symbolization within human communication, emphasizes the importance of another component of the drive by proposing the idea of a “messenger function” and therefore a “language” of the drive. These four models – which all stress the importance of the object in drive life formation – do not oppose, but complement, each other.
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