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psychobiological force but as a result of wanting to own the other’s subjectivity: their desires, their phantasies, their multiple possibilities as human beings; to engulf or swallow their freedom and their capacity for movement. For Sartre, the problem of the desire is that by reducing it to the drive, the responsibility that human beings have in their desiring is ignored. From a somewhat dated view of Freud’s work, Sartre’s criticism centers around a ‘mechanistic view’ of desire, reducing it to drive. From this perspective, psychoanalysis forgets that desiring is also the result of a choice. Then, as it regards the concept of drive, the criticism from mid- 20 th century existentialism consists of a drive, as a psychobiological force which is somehow stored in the mind. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty challenge the view that the essence of desire is an impersonal biological force, such as a drive, and the fact that the drive can be something that can exist apart from what it is directed at. Wittgenstein pointed out that one can talk about the mind only if one do not understand the mind as a mysterious entity, conceptually independent from personal circumstances. Similarly, one cannot see or have an intuition of the ‘desire’ either, without perceiving what is desired at the same time. Least of all, one can consider ‘impulses’ or ‘drives’ as entities that do not depend conceptually on the contexts in which they find existence. Among psychoanalytic theoreticians of drives who come close to Sartre and Merleau- Ponty’s philosophical perspectives, De La Puente references Fairbairn, Kernberg, Lorenzer, Winnicott, Loewald and Marcia Cavell. For Kernberg, affective states activate impulses, in the presence of the subject’s own presentations and of an ‘object’. Here, an impulse cannot be conceived of outside of an intersubjective drama, which coincides with Sartre’s ad Merleau- Ponty’s view that the “impulse” cannot be conceptually distinguished from either the interactions or the relations between people. In De La Puente’s view, there is a crucial element in Kernberg’s theory that brings him even closer to the existentialist writers, which is that this “dyad”: image of the self-image of the object, united by a bond between impulse and affect (self-affect-object unit) can be used defensively by the ego.” (See the specific explication of Kernberg’s theory above in the North Anerican section.) De la Puente also asserts that Lorenzer comes close to Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas because, like them, he does not think it is possible to experience a “drive” outside the intersubjective environment. “Drives can only be experienced in object relations (staged in reality or in phantasy), that is, in an interaction with the object, whether it is real or phantasized. Neither the structures of the ego, nor the drives form the id can be apprehended, as far as the needs of psychoanalysis are concerned, other than as “presentations’’, bonds of meanings that are understood as interaction.” (Lorenzer 1977, p. 127). De la Puente suggests that Lorenzer has also taken a step in the direction of conciliating the psychoanalytic explanation and an explanation that can highlight the dialectical relation that exists between the world and the mind. He concludes, “My proposal is that psychoanalysis must gradually overcome Cartesianism, in a path that has been followed by, among others, Fairbairn, Kernberg, Lorenzer, Winnicott, Loewald and more recently Marcia Cavell (2006), who claims that any theory about self-knowledge must consider that the external world is part of the manufacture of our internal world and that ‘internal world’ is something that develops necessarily through interaction” (De La Puente 2011, p. 184). Overall, De La Puente brings the psychoanalytic concept of drive into the intersubjective context.
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