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importance of object relations and relations to ‘the other’ are not in opposition to drive theory but the possibility of a vital dialectic connection where one constitutes (or ‘leans on’, shapes) the other (sometimes while negating it), exists. This may translate into individualized clinical approaches where a variously formulated two-person perspective can be integrated into drive theory. Contemporary integrations of drive and object relations theory by inclusive post- Freudian authors who employ post-Kleinian and multi-theoretical approaches exploring the unique utility of death drive on a phenomenological level, and contemporary approaches coming out of French tradition in Europe exemplify this very point. Common to these approaches is the area of working at the limits of symbolic representation. In Latin America , the contemporary conversation about drive starts usually as a dialogue with Freud and ‘each other’. Such dialogue covers a wide range of hypotheses, including theory development, methodology, as well as their consequent implications for the clinical analytic process. Diverse challenging points of view involve theoretical and clinical contributions, especially regarding the concept of the Death drive . In the context of theory development, starting with the debate concerning the translation of the word Trieb as instinct instead of drive, there has also been a search for a more accurate scientific basis for the concept and its psychoanalytic scientific position. To that end, Latin American theoreticians explore especially how such notions as the somatic source of the drive and its representation in the psyche, and the dualism of the concept - including the dualism of the Life and Death drives - relate to Freud, his medical training and his classical education. Specifically, they inquire what is the relative weight of Freud’s scientific training in biology, physics and chemistry, and as a doctor, compared to Freud as a thinker, intellectually nurtured by his readings in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and mythology. In other theoretical and clinical developments, there has been a search by for support of the notion of death drive and ‘ death within the drive’ in the phylogenetically inherited biological sphere, as one of drive’s components. Others attribute a purely psychoanalytic lineage to the concept. Here one can find the Freudian search for integration in his paradigmatic concept of the Complemental Series . Others suggest a kind of eternal struggle of forces between what tends to return to the absence of life, which is death, and to which Eros, whose force is the libido, opposes. Other proposals emphasize the human being’s mental functioning emerging from a bond with an ‘other’ and other human beings in object relations which become internal by identifications, leading to the equation between the intersubjective, the intra-subjective and the trans- subjective. Some suggestions consider that the death drive contains the human innate tendency to destructiveness. Others consider both drives different forms of operation of the drive related to the death drive. They distinguish in it (as in masochism) an erogenous component that is pro-life, as it deconstructs the established connections and creates new ones, which are subsequently symbolized. This could also be found in the dialectic of different proposals between the pro-life and its figurability, and its contrary, what tends to non-life, the irrepresentable, which are concepts developed out of Freudian notions of binding versus unbinding. All these suggestions imply the study of pairs of opposites in a permanent struggle.
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