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Jean Laplanche’s ambitious reformulation of the ‘foundations of psychoanalysis’ (1989b) offers another view of the relationship between object and drive. Laplanche (1999a) criticizes the ‘Ptolemaic’ character of the Freudian vision, which placed the individual psyche at the center of his destiny. Rather, Laplanche claims that the fundamental ‘anthropological situation’ of early childhood is completely decentered by the ‘priority of the other’ , making the little person ‘Copernican’ in her revolution around the adult. The drastic asymmetry between adult and infant emphasized by Laplanche because of its huge consequence for the infant’s psychic structure is the fact that the adult is a sexual and speaking being with an unconscious whereas the baby is neither sexual nor able to speak and is not as yet internally divided. Barely intuited by the adult is the triggering of his or her unconscious infantile sexuality in primary intimacy with the infant body. This unconscious sexuality “contaminates” intimate exchanges with the infant in the form of “enigmatic messages” which the baby does not have the cognitive, emotional, or corporeal means to decode and which create drive and unconscious fantasy in the form of an internal “pressure for translation”. For Laplanche, this infantile sexuality, enigmatic in nature, is not innate but an implantation from the real other, though the reality which counts -- in a highly critical derivation and reworking of Lacan – is the reality of the “message”, a third reality Laplanche adds to those of the Freudian psychical and material realities. Thus, for Laplanche human sexuality – by which he means sexuality mediated by fantasy – comes from the other and is ‘ other ’, alienated, and foreign to the ego. (Laplanche’s metapsychological approach to intersubjectivity will be specified below.) Loewald in the U.S., recent addition to the group by Canadian Francophone analysts (See the separate entry OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY), and, besides Winnicott, its only non-French analytic theoretician, also rejected the independence of object relations and drives in a ‘revision of the instinct concept itself’ (1972/1980). He suggests that instinctual drives, understood as psychic forces, are to be conceptualized as becoming organized through interactions within the primitive mother-child unitary psychic field rather than as constitutional or innate givens. In his emphasis on the Freudian concept of “binding”, Loewald realized the relational implications that are not apparent in Freud where fusion and defusion, binding and unbinding, might be taken to occur in an objectless vacuum. Loewald saw that binding of instincts requires the object’s ‘mediation’ both in the sense of ‘taming’ of them and in the sense of their representation. Though he uses the Strachey translation of ‘trieb’ as ‘instinct’, Loewald’s thinking is seen by contemporary North American French analysts as consistent with the Third Topograpy/third model contributions as the following extended quote illustrates: “Anything we can call instinctual drives, as psychic forces, arise and are being organized first within the matrix of the mother-child unitary psychic field from which through manifold interactional processes within that field, the infantile psyche gradually segregates out as a relatively more autonomous center of psychic activity. In this view instinctual drives in their original form are not forces immanent in an autonomous, separate primitive psyche, but are resultants of tensions within the mother-child psychic matrix and later between the immature infantile psyche and the mother. Instincts, in other words, are to be seen as relational phenomena from the beginning and not as autonomous forces seeking discharge, which
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