Back to Table of Contents
Following contemporary authors, who suggest that the vitalizing or thanatic quality of aggression will be granted by the color of the libido of the adjacent sexual drive, Marcano asks: is the vitalizing quality of an interaction between subject and object thanatic or erotic-libidinal? In the context of such theoretical inquiries, Marcano responds, that the psychoanalyst, as a sensitive spectator, with an offer of affective elements as expressions of the life drive can perhaps transform the common empirical object, a reflection of the death drive as the subject of acts and not of words, into an esthetic object
VII. INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES
To advance his theoretical progress, Freud frequently called upon other fields, such as biological sciences, anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, art, literature, etc., basing himself on their analogical links without confusing them. Accordingly, there is a wide acknowledgement within the contemporary psychoanalytic discourse that if the differences between the fields of inquiry with their different methodologies and terminologies are recognized and not confused, the interdisciplinary connections, applications, and cross- fertilization between psychoanalysis and other fields of inquiry can lead to fertile analogies and new hypotheses. VII. A. NEUROBIOLOGY OF DRIVES AND AFFECTS The connection between the drive/affect and object is approached in the recent synthetic work of Otto Kernberg (2015), correlating the drives, affective systems and object relations theory of personality and development with neurobiological development and activity. In view of recent neuroscientific discoveries of Wright and Panksepp (2014) of the SEEKING system, Kernberg updates the Freudian dual-drive theory, referring to it as a supraordinate integration of the SEEKING system, which he now sees as a basic drive that couples with both rewarding and aversive affective systems . Further drawing on Wright and Panksepp (2014), Krause (2012) and others, Kernberg (2015) postulates the integration of the major primary affects into several affective systems. Major primary affects, including joyfulness, rage, disgust, surprise, fear, sadness and sensual excitement, emerge in the first few weeks and months of life. They are grouped into systems of eroticism, play-bonding, fight-flight, attachment, separation-panic, and SEEKING. SEEKING (Wright and Panksepp, 2014) is a basic nonspecific motivation for stimulus gratification, which may attach itself to any of the other affective systems. Because of its lack of specificity, Brian Johnson (2008), too, has held SEEKING as a contemporary version of Freudian drive. Reviewing earlier work of Panksepp (1998),
202
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online