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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. Green portrayed the economic scheme of the psyche in which the unconscious consists of a branching network of drive derivatives (as representations of things) seeking a pathway toward discharge. The dynamic nature of these representations that represent a primary form of the drive, move them toward action or consciousness. The moving, dynamic aspect of the body-based drives of the unconscious always seeking discharge and determining the actions of the individual has everyday clinical resonance (Green, 2002). In Green’s (1985) theory of affect, affect represents a different way of conceiving of the presence of the body in speech. V. Bb. Jean Laplanche Jean Laplanche’s ambitious reformulation of the ‘foundations of psychoanalysis’ (1989b) offers another view of the relationship between object and drive. Laplanche (1999a) criticizes the ‘Ptolemaic’ character of the Freudian vision, which placed the individual psyche at the center of its destiny. Rather, Laplanche claims that the fundamental ‘anthropological situation’ of early childhood is completely decentered by the ‘priority of the other’ , making the little person ‘Copernican’ in her revolution around the adult. The drastic asymmetry between adult and infant emphasized by Laplanche because of its huge consequence for the infant’s psychic structure is due the fact that the adult is a sexual and speaking being with an unconscious whereas the baby is neither sexual nor able to speak and is not as yet internally divided. Barely intuited by the adult is the triggering of his or her unconscious infantile sexuality in primary intimacy with the infant body. This unconscious sexuality “contaminates” intimate exchanges with the infant in the form of ‘enigmatic messages’ which the baby does not have the cognitive, emotional, or corporeal means to decode and which create drive and unconscious fantasy in the form of an internal ‘pressure for translation’. For Laplanche, this infantile sexuality, enigmatic in nature, is not innate but an implantation from the real other, though the reality which counts -- in a highly critical derivation and reworking of Lacan -- is the reality of the “message”, a third reality Laplanche adds to those of the Freudian psychical and material realities. Thus, for Laplanche human sexuality - by which he means sexuality mediated by fantasy - comes from the other and is ‘ other ’, alienated, and foreign to the ego. (See also separate entry INTERSUBJECTIVITY)
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