Back to Table of Contents
of a “good object” to tolerate anxiety. Jarast further theorizes that the analyst has the task of allowing the traumatic situation, silent until then, develop, to make it comprehensible and historicizable. In this way, the analysis will be a process that runs contrary to the death drive, as noted by Baranger and Mom (1987). For this purpose, the approach will be different from the “traditional one”. Overall, Jarast views the analytic process – at the service of Eros – promoting the vital potentials of the individual to warn him against the paths that the death drive can seduce him into following. VI. Bg. Samuel Arbiser In “Psicoanálisis y guerra” [Psychoanalysis and war], Samuel Arbiser (2013) agrees with Freud that all human behaviors contain Eros and Thanatos, and that these vital engines mutually need each other. It is naïve, as Freud warns, to promote Eros at the expense of Thanatos or to try to repress or suppress the latter. As for the structural consequences in the psyche, one cannot disregard the relation between Thanatos and the Superego and the moral conscience, the result of identifications, consequent to the Oedipus complex. When Superego absorbs the excesses of this dangerous instinctive/drive ingredient, one can find the paradoxical circumstance that a more severe moral conscience would inhibit aggression more and would lead to a larger internal accumulation of the death drive, harmful to an individual. In Arbiser’s view, Freud follows, to some extent, the widespread popular idea of a more exuberant sexuality or violence in the less educated or sophisticated social groups, which is consistent with his belief of the opposition between instinct/drive and culture. While Freud himself posits the opposition in complex terms of culture attenuating the drives (1921), in Arbiser’s opinion, it is an elementary simplification to present instincts/drives and culture, as the notion of drives itself already implies a radical transformation of the instinctual biological baggage at the request of the human environment.
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 ‘death drive’, or trieb , is the term that corresponds to the human being’s innate destructive capacity. As such, he sees drive as inborn and inherited, while accepting the idea that something external may mobilize aggression. For Teruel all terms other than trieb , such as drive ( pulsión ), instinct ( instinto ), “impulse” ( impulso ), “aggression” ( agresión ), “aggressiveness” ( agresividad ), etc., are euphemisms (mild alternatives, understatements). He points to fundamental quality of this aggressive drive, is that it is frequently silent, and for this reason, analysts do not take any prudent measures to protect themselves from its dangerous quality, found in the projections of psychotic patients and their families. What protects analysts from countertransferentially internalizing and identifying with such destructive-psychotic
191
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online