Back to Table of Contents
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 drive would lose, in part, its mythical character, or at least, psychoanalysts would know something about the origins of the myth. VI. Db. Carlos Sopena Carlos Sopena , a member of both Psychoanalytic Association of Uruguay and Psychoanalytic Association of Madrid, in “Pulsión de muerte y sexualidad” [Death drive and sexuality] (2001), maps some revolutionary implications both for the theory and for the practice of psychoanalysis, caused by Freud’s introduction of the death drive. He develops the following propositions, coming from discernible Lacanian perspective: 1. The study of the drives must consider the level of structuring that the psychic apparatus has reached, since it is in the way that it flows through the apparatus that the drive will find ‘dams’ and will be bound and subordinate to the pleasure principle. 2. Subduing the drive implies subjecting it to regulations (‘order’), resulting from the Oedipus complex and the assumption of castration, which articulate the drive with the wish and with Eros. The insistence on a non-mediated ‘jouissance’, in line with the omnipotent narcissistic ambition of extinguishing the wish, obeys, on the other hand, the death drive, which means a failure in the processing of the drive. 3. Eros and Thanatos are to be conceived as different forms of the work of only one drive, the sexual drive, governed by the pleasure principle or its opposite, the principle of Nirvana. 4. The death drive should not be identified with the repetition compulsion, which does not respond to only one tendency and is not always lethal, as is the case of the repetitions promoted by transference, which makes the work of
192
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online