IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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Yet another strand of Latin American thoughts on the subject focuses on the correlation of the life and death drives using the conceptualization of the unconscious as a language. There, death, for psychoanalysis, opposes the word and knowledge, with silence at its core. The words of the Other, to be articulated, require an effort of life, construction, and symbolization to come out of the deadly illusion of integrity and a narcissistic unity. In North America , many facets of Freud’s evolution of his drive theories continue to reverberate in the contemporary psychoanalytic culture, where the interaction of drive, affect, internalized object relations, and external object relationships in the development of psychic structure is viewed as paramount to developmental continuities and transformations from variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. Reviewing historical divisions between object relations and drive theory, many authors point to a ‘false dichotomy’ between them, as they are both interwoven in development and throughout life. In contemporary North American psychoanalysis of all orientations, there is a growing recognition that the initial formulations of the drive theory did not take sufficiently into account the real attributes of the object and identification with the real object. Among contemporary reformulations and innovations are efforts to integrate Freud’s Early and Late dual drive theories; reformulations of the Late dual drive theory according to pleasure-unpleasure principle ; conceptualization of zero process drive as part of a specific traumatic configuration of zero process drive - zero process defenses in traumatized individuals; and conceptualizations of libidinal and aggressive drives as constructed by integration of primary affective motivational systems, with ‘the SEEKING system’ seen as a basic drive that couples with both rewarding and aversive affective systems . Among fruitful variously conceptualized contemporary controversies, is the extent to which the drives themselves are shaped or constructed by the interaction with the ‘other’. Another important standing controversy and a field of continuing psychoanalytic research is the relationship between drives and affects. The multiplicity of contemporary theorizing also includes the complicated relationship of drives with the biological, somatic and neurobiological underpinnings, and their various destructive as well as creative expressions in a societal, group and cultural context. *** Overall, in all regions, the view of mutually exclusive dichotomy between drives and objects (and the ‘other nearby’) is gradually giving way to variously conceptualized interaction between them , in development and in the analytic process. However, the degree to which ‘multiple dualities’ of drives are shaped or constructed by such an interaction remains a contemporary controversy. Related to the above is an intense contemporary theoretical and clinical interest in variously conceptualized drive expressions, which remain psychically unmetabolized, uncontained, unsymbolized and unrepresented . In life, the vagaries of bodily experiences

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