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Attempting to reconcile trauma and drive theory of psychopathology, Scarfone (2017), re-examines the general notion of trauma and highlights in Freud’s theory of war neurosis his brief proposal (1919) that repression itself is an elementary form of traumatic neurosis. Scarfone (2017) agrees with Freud that the drives involve the body, but in line with Laplanche and differently from Freud, posits that the drives do not stem from the body as their biological source . The ‘untranslatable’part of the message that cannot be utilized by the rest of the ego structure is the part that about which the subject will always remain in-fans (lacking the words). This explains why the sexual drive is intrinsically traumatic, but since some translation is achieved, a structuring process exists by which both a coherent architecture (ego or self) and a now internal irritant (the drives) are installed. While drives are not emanating from biological sources, as Freud (1915b) maintained, this view of the drives does not deny the role of the body, because the enigmatic part of the message exerts its exciting/traumatic role by affecting a psyche that is inseparable from the excitable, erogenous body. The sexual is thus implanted in the biopsychological dermis of the psyche. For all its unspeakable form—or actually because of that—the enigma is the carrier of an excitation that can be felt – as a disturbance, a turbulence, indeed an as-yet unspeakable affect – at the level of the body because the psyche itself is in fact a body-psyche From there on, repeated efforts at making sense will result in various scripts that try to enlist, contain, and give a face and a meaning to the affect in question. It is in this context that Scarfone (and Laplanche) view how children develop the sexual theories and fantasies constitutive of infantile sexuality (Scarfone 2017, pp. 38-39). While in disagreement with Freud’s biological vision of the drives, Scarfone sees the notion of the drives to be indispensable to account for the experience of being driven by something in the individual, yet not under his/her conscious control. He now believes that one error concerning the drives is to consider them as an obscure force located “behind” the psychic reality of unconscious presentations and somehow “fueling” them. The notion of libido as energy is, in his present view, often mistaken for a kind of “fuel” for the work of the psyche. Instead, he suggests that libido is the energy (the movement, indeed the momentum ) of representations themselves. Hence the quantitative aspect of the drives is inherent to them, while their representational aspect is a psychic “coating”. Therefore, the two psychic “representatives” of the drives according to Freud –affect and representation– are not operating at the same level, they are not equal in their role as representatives and, as Freud (1915) said, the ultimate goal of repression is not so much to avoid having a representation, but to avoid the unpleasant or painful affect that the representation would trigger. Scarfone is presently (2022, unpublished paper) working on the idea that the drive for power (or mastery) i.e., Freud’s Bemächtigungstrieb, is an essential component of the sexual drive; it is what makes the sexual drive problematic making it a sexual drive for power, at once sexual and destructive, similar to Laplanche’s sexual death drive but emphasizing the element of power . It is problematic inasmuch it requires rendering the object (the other human) instrumental to one’s enjoyment rather than acknowledging him/her as an equal
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