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particularly Freud’s concepts of drive and Schopenhauer’s concept of will. He explores how Freud, after having acknowledged Schopenhauer’s contribution, would also distances himself from him, especially in the context of the synthetic work of “New introductory lectures” (1933). Otero’s methodology includes close comparative reading of Freud’s quotations, such as “We are not asserting that death is the only aim of life; we are not overlooking the fact that there is life as well as death. We recognize two basic instincts and give each of them its own aim” (Freud 1933, p. 107). In Otero’s view, upholding the concepts of life and death drives as one of the pillars of the psychoanalytic theory exposes the complexity of the frontiers and multiple vertexes, from which human phenomena can be theorized, with vast implications for the psychoanalytic practice and method. VI. Fc. Carlos de la Puente Carlos de la Puente (2011), in “Deseo, existencialismo y psicoanálisis. Senderos que se bifurcan y que convergen” [Desire, existentialism and psychoanalysis. Paths which fork and meet], takes up a Sartrean proposal that the desire for another person does not emerge as a 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. The criticism from mid-20 th century existentialism challenges the idea of a drive as a psychobiological force which is somehow stored in the mind. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty oppose the view that the essence of desire is an impersonal biological force, such as a drive, and the idea 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 does 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
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