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VI. C. DEATH DRIVE REVISITED IN VENEZUELAN PSYCHOANALYSIS
VI Ca. Guillermo Teruel Guillermo Teruel (1984), a Venezuelan psychoanalyst who was trained in London, suggests that the death drive, or trieb , is the term that corresponds to the human being’s innate destructive capacity. As such, drive is inborn and it is inherited. He adds that we all can accept the idea if we take it as something external that mobilizes aggression, though this is not a widely held view. For Teruel all terms other than trieb , such as “drive” ( pulsión ), “impulse” ( impulso ), “drive” (in English in the original text), “aggression” ( agresión ), “aggressiveness” ( agresividad ), etc., would be euphemisms, a form of acceptance without actual commitment. He points to fundamental quality of this drive, which is the fact that it is silent, and for this reason, analysts do not take any prudent measures to protect themselves, as psychoanalysts, from its dangerous quality, found in the projections from/of psychotic patients and their families. What protects analysts are the setting, the analytic stance of neutrality and the “reverie” function, after the incorporation of this destructive-psychotic part by using countertransference. Restricting the number of psychotic patients is a measure for protection as well. Because of the death drive, the analyst can become disorganized and lose her capacity to organize the time of the setting. Frustration raised by regression increases instinctual thanatic forces, as could be observed in members of families of people suffering from organic illnesses or disabling traumatisms. Teruel writes that it is an illusion to believe that analysts have vast reservoirs of Eros to protect them and neutralize their own thanatic aggressive components together with those projected into them via projective identification. Analysts are protected by the reinforcement of their suitable love bonds with people and with themselves, and by not moving towards manic grandiosity or omnipotence.
VI. D. URUGUAY – ORIGINS, DEATH AND SEXUALITY
VI. Da. Enrique Gratadoux In his paper “ Un origen probable de la noción de pulsión ” [A likely origin of the notion of drive] Enrique Gratadoux (1987) finds the root of the concept of the drive in the working through and enrichment of the model of the ‘normal processing of the physical tension’ in Freud’s “Draft E” (1894). Noting the importance of the somatic energy for the psychic life in the concept of drive, Gratadoux wonders when, why and how Freud started to study the subject. He offers partial answers: When? Around 1894. Why? Because he had to explain a hallucinatory pathological phenomenon: anxiety. How? Based on the assumption of the etiological connection between sexuality and anxiety, Freud subsequently needed to develop a model of the processing of endogenous excitation. Retrospectively reasoning this way, Gratadoux hopes to have established a clinical origin of the speculations that led to the model, which, in turn, resulted in the conceptualization of drive. If these considerations are valid, the
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