Back to Table of Contents
proliferating in all mentation, and created anew in certain intersubjective experiences. Thus, even in its most archaic manifestations, the unconscious is never purely unfettered instinctual energy but rather drive intimately marked by, and containing the traces of, the human being’s earliest dependency on specific adult others. Many diverse authors in the French tradition, some described in the previous section, influential in North America, have been retrospectively grouped under the metapsychological rubric of ‘ Third Topography ’ by Bernard Brusset (2006). This is in reference of the two preceding Freud’s theories – Topographical (First Topography) and Structural (Second Topography) theories. With regard to the drives, Third Topography posits that, in development, the ‘two-person mind’ precedes the ‘one person internally conflicted mind’ of the Freudian subject, who recognizes his drives as his own. The ‘Third Topography’ notes that there is a state in the prehistory of the individual when the mind is dependent on the ‘good enough’ containing presence of a caretaker, allowing the baby to eventually recognize the libidinal and aggressive impulses as non-traumatic parts of himself and move from primary process thinking where wishes are fulfilled to where wishes can be experienced in a transitional space of illusion and metaphor, with a potential for dreaming, fantasizing and creating. Green, Laplanche, Scarfone, Denis, Anzieu, Anzieu-Premmereur, whose diverse theorizing on drives is exemplified below, are among this group, which also includes two English speaking authors: Winnicott and (newly added by Canadian French analysts) Loewald. Along with new additions, the theories of the French authors described in the last section are here approached anew from this “Third Topography” perspective. V. Ba. André Green In André Green’s (1997) view, the drive is the matrix of the subject, as in Freudian theory ego arose from the interaction/clash between the drives and the external world. During his visit in New York in 2004, Green stressed that when one works with patients, one works to create representations. Representations are not the basic primitive elements of the id; they are the transformations of them found in the ego. The first step is transformation from instinctual impulse to unconscious representation. This transformation operates thanks to the meeting of the instinctual impulse with the object. It is the object that favors the creation of an unconscious representation, a “thing” presentation that will be transformed into a word presentation and give the initial state of the impulse a communicable form through language. In his conceptual frame (Green 1999, 2002), representational activity links object, drives, and thing-presentations, transforming the drives into affects and thing-presentations into word-presentations. If the role that should be played by the object in this transformation is missing or insufficient (caretaking by ‘dead mother’), most of the instinctual impulses are left in a crude form, escaping transformation into meaning and the symbolic organization of the unconscious. The erogenous fixations of this type undergo the assault of destructiveness, the combination of the erotic and destructive drives affecting relations between ego and objects.
179
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online