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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 historical dichotomy betwee n drive theories and theories of object relations is gradually giving way to variously conceptualized interaction between drives and objects , seen as interwoven 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 during development and as a result of illness and trauma are considered a crucial impetus to, and limitation of, psychic metabolization and development. Theoretical conceptualizations of ‘non-metabolized trauma’ presenting as ‘eternal repetitions of what was never experienced as pleasurable’, configurations of ‘zero process drive/zero process defenses’, and various conceptualizations of ‘death drive’, a force of destruction in psychic life that resists both evolution and taming in individual and societal context, are among many examples. The evolving multiple dualities inherent in the formulations of the drive concept mark a theoretical acceptance of the limits of psychoanalytic understanding. At the border between the somatic and the psychic, the concept of drive implies a view of the mind that is not unitary. A border concept, it drives a ‘movement’ towards the limits of psychoanalytic theories and definitions. Ancient and yet more than modern, the concept of drive, at the edge of the knowable, not only marks the continuity between theory and clinical practice, it also breaks this continuity open and exposes gaps and disjunction between them, which drives the continuing push for ongoing elaboration to close the very gap. The human subject’s radical dependence on others, particularly in early childhood but partially throughout life as well, is appreciated by psychoanalysts of all theoretical orientations. But the particular articulation between, and weight of, constitutional factors/potentialities, drives and their expressions, and the human environment in the structuring of the psychic apparatus and their technical implications in the analytic process remain hotly contested and lie, depending upon the theorist, all along the “complemental series”, outlined by Freud.
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