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V. Be. Christine Anzieu-Premmereur (2015, 2017) Christine Anzieu-Premmereur is a French analyst working in New York, who in her psychoanalytic work with infants and their parents explores early disturbances in the emerging libidinal organization. Relevant to her work, she explicates Didier Anzieu’s (1979) metaphor of ‘Skin ego’, that combines Bowlby’s and Freud’s thought, in terms of libido and drive theory. In his original synthesis, Anzieu posits a complement to the libidinal theory with its emphasis on satisfaction obtained from an exciting object. This complementary drive, whose origin is expressed in signals received through the quality of touch, holding, the softness and rhythm of contact, originates in early interactions with the body and its surface, the skin. This drive is the starting point of’ ’primary narcissism’ and develops through the double envelope of ‘stimulation-excitement’ and ‘communication’. Anzieu-Premmereur (2017) explores further the infant’s internal world and usefulness of some classical Freudian concepts in helping the analytic work with dyads and triads of parent(s) with their infant. Based on the assumption of the existence of the ‘primary narcissism’ as well as drive theory, she explicates how instinctual needs and the tension associated with them enlist the mother as a part of the process of instinctual gratification and economic balance of the quantities of tension and pleasure in the baby’s primitive internal organization. In this vein, she explores (and clinically exemplifies) the role of libidinization of the body and maternal destructiveness within the early container-contained interaction, using Winnicott’s (1967) and Hoffer’s (1949) pioneering work, and Grotstein’s post-Bionian conceptualizations, in the context of transference in babies, early superego organization, masochistic reactions in helpless infants, body ego, and libidinal cathexis.
VI. DEVELOPMENTS AND HISTORICAL REVISIONS OF THE CONCEPT IN LATIN AMERICA
Inspired by Freud’s ‘work in progress’ character of his drive conceptualizations and definitions, reflected in his statements “The advance of knowledge, however, does not tolerate any rigidity even in definitions.” (1915a, p. 117); “the total absence of any theory of the instincts which would help us to find our bearings” (1914, p. 78); referring to drive as “the most obscure element of psychological research” (1920, p. 34), and as “an obscure subject.” (1923/26, p. 265), Latin American analysts continue searching for clarity of the continuously redefined ‘obscure elements’ and ‘obscure areas’, including life and death drives and their clinical manifestations.
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