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- of the hold - but on the contrary, he links them. The drive movement begins with a rise in libidinal excitement, which is first invested in the exercise of a hold on the object in order to bring it into contact with the erogenous zone, to exert on it an action that will lead to an experience of satisfaction, to a discharge. If we take the example of the infant, the rise of a libidinal excitation leads him to give voice to a motor agitation that has the effect of bringing a breast on which he will exercise a vigorous hold: the motor efforts of the suckling stimulate the oral erogenous zone and produce in an experience of satisfaction, not only a “discharge” but an achievement. Denis notes that at the beginning of the organization of the psyche, the drives are said to be “partial drives” insofar as they are initially focused for the child on a part of himself and are only interested in objects that are only fragments of the world. Correspondingly, one may speak at this stage of “partial objects”. Things become more complex when the child’s caretaker is invested as a whole; the drives are assembled in bundles in relation to her/him, who then constitutes a ‘total object’. Addressing to issue of aggression, Denis states that if satisfaction does not occur, the efforts to hold on to the object may be accentuated to the point of violence towards this object which refuses to be used (or towards which the subject does not manage to experience satisfaction). At the maximum, ‘a madness of hold’ can appear that nothing can stop. This is what Freud indicates when he rejects a “special instinct of aggression” proposed by Adler: “I cannot bring myself to admit a special instinct of aggression alongside the already known instincts of self-preservation and sexuality, and on a par with them. It seems to me that Adler has wrongly put as a hypostasis of a special instinct what is a universal and indispensable attribute of all instincts, precisely their ‘instinctive’, impulsive character, what we can describe as the capacity to set the motricity in motion. Of the other instincts there would then remain nothing more than their relation to a certain goal, since their relations to the means of attaining it would have been taken away by the ‘Instinct of aggression’. In spite of all the uncertainty and obscurity of our theory of the instincts, I prefer to hold provisionally to our present conception, which leaves to each instinct its own faculty of becoming aggressive, and in the two instincts which have been repressed in Hans I am inclined to recognize long-familiar components of the sexual libido” (Freud 1909b. 140-141). Freud would later introduce the death drive and derive the drive for control from it. But Denis considers that the “death drive” as introduced by Freud is not a drive at all: it has no source, no goal, no energy of its own, and introduces confusion into the theory. The opposition Eros / Thanatos, - one constituting ever larger wholes and the other disuniting them - can, at best, be considered as the two poles of a functioning principle: a principle of organization / disorganization. It is the rise of the unsatisfied - or, for some reason, unsatisfiable - libido that can destroy. In Denis ‘view, Freud evoked the ‘scandal’ raised by the death drive - yet the opposition of life versus death is an old moon of all religions - whereas it hides the real scandal of psychoanalysis: it is the libido that can kill, it is the energy that feeds love, that can also destroy.
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