IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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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 of what tends to return to the absence of life, which is death, 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 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. 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 like a language. There, death drive, with silence at its core, opposes the word and knowledge. The articulation of the words of the Other requires 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 .

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