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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 partner, a subject. Scarfone draws on Paul Denis’s work on inseparability of the sexual drive and the drive for power (‘emprise’, in French– see below), but, differently from Denis, he does not believe that the object/the other dimension of the drive pertains to the experience of satisfaction. The drive, he notes, cannot be thought of separately from repression and is ordinarily partially inhibited as to the aim, but if one imagines it operating alone, the sexual drive for power could be seen aiming at possessing, dominating, subjugating and, if this is not possible, destroying its object. Historic tragedies such as the Holocaust and other genocidal massacres have amply illustrated that this can indeed happen when the drive is given free rein. V. Bd. Paul Denis Paul Denis (1992, 1997, 2011, 2015) of Paris Psychoanalytic Society, influential in French Canada, revisits the theory of the libido and the notions of the experience of satisfaction and the drive for mastery introduced by Freud, and proposes the following model: the drive takes shape in the combination of two currents of libidinal cathexis, one which takes the paths of the ‘apparatus for obtaining mastery’ (the sense and motor organs, etc.) and strives to appropriate the object, and the other which cathects the erotogenic zones and the experience of satisfaction through stimulation in contact with the object. In Denis’ reading of Freud’s drive theory, at the beginning of Three Essays (1905), Freud had introduced the notion of the “instinct to master”, the Bemächtigungstrieb , associated with a bodily apparatus that corresponded to it, the “apparatus for obtaining mastery” (p. 159), Bemächtigungsapparat , bringing together motor skills, the organs of the senses, touch, vision, and hearing. This apparatus is both active and receptive, capable of perceiving and receiving/apprehending another’s efforts to hold on to it. The other apparatus described by Freud is that constituted by the erogenous zones, capable of providing an “experience of satisfaction”, the major model of which is orgasm. There are thus two possible investment paths for the libido, the paths of the apparatus for obtaining mastery on the one hand, and on the other hand the erogenous zones with the sensations that they have the power to trigger. The pathways of the apparatus allow the investment of elements of the external world. The result of this combination of cathexes constitutes a ‘representation’, the subsequent evocation of which makes it possible to tolerate for a certain period of time the absence of a satisfying object. On the basis of this conception, Denis distinguishes the representations proper, vehicles of satisfaction, from ‘imagos’ and traumatic images which give rise to excitation that does not link up with the paths taken by the drives. This model makes it possible to reconcile ‘object- seeking’ and ‘search for pleasure’, and to understand object-relations in the context of infantile sexuality. Destructiveness is considered in terms of ‘mastery madness’ and not in terms of the Freudian hypothesis of the death drive. Denis states that adequate pleasure and satisfaction can only be fully obtained by an action exerted on the object. This is the role assigned to appropriative conducts, and to efforts
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