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V. Aa. Jacques Lacan Jacques Lacan’s reflections on the drive are complex. One of his major elaborations on the subject is to be found in “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis” (Lacan, 1978). Firstly, for Lacan the drive is not in the register of the organic; it is a psychic force. More than a myth, Lacan considers drive a convention, or rather, a fiction. He differentiates the drive from need, which is organic and obeys a rhythmic pulsation. In contrast, the drive is animated by a constant force. It corresponds to a form of potential energy of investment, the aims of which cannot be reduced to the single question of discharge. Sublimation is indeed one of the vicissitudes of drive; even though the drive aim is inhibited in sublimation, it leads to drive satisfaction. No material object can satisfy the drive. This is an essential point in Lacan’s thinking. Even so, the object is the cause of desire. Mobilized by the object, the drive aims are elsewhere. According to Lacan, drive makes a “turn” around the object: it does not reach and get a hold of it. Thus, the object remains relatively indifferent to the drive. Secondly, according to Lacan the drives are all partial drives within the realm of biological sexuality. This imposes a link of drive to sexuality. Drive is the montage through which sexuality participates in psychic life. Drives are always partial because of their place in a structure of circular exchange. E.g., there is the experience of being seen to be seen (the subject sees that he is seen by the object). Lacan attempts to overcome the opposition of activity and passivity and defines the subject through the path of a circular exchange process, a process of reversibility. This is an essential point in Lacan’s conception. For Lacan “what we look at, is what can’t be seen.” The drive aims for an absent object, still missing. If drives are always partial, it opens the questions of the places of genital drive and love. For Lacan, genital drive and love belong to another logic than that of partial drives. They are part of a narcissistic logic in which the “love/to-be-loved” couple occupies a dominant place. This logic can be grasped in the organization of the Oedipus complex and that of kinship. It refers to culture and the communication systems that are at its center. It is in relation to what Freud has named “ego drives” (which for Lacan are not drives) that the question of love must be asked. The “self”, the “self as subject” ( das Ich ) is not drive. But the partial drives nevertheless participate in the transformation of self-preservative drives into “sexual” drives by appropriating the motions and “drives” of the field of self-preservation. This is Lacan´s interpretation of Anlehnung/anaclisis , also elaborated by Laplanche (see below). For Lacan, life and death drives are only two different aspects of (every) drive functioning. Lacan separates the death drive from biology: it is an effect of language and not part of an economic dimension. The death drive develops from the hostility present in parental discourse (to be learned beyond verbal language), from the discourse of the Other ( L’Autre ). The infans is confronted with messages well before understanding them. These messages will determine the repetitions to which he will be constrained in his later life and which will present themselves as coming from the superego.
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