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ideas owe a debt to Edelman (1987), who imagines that human experience begins with quite simple, uninflected, primitive behaviors (turning to light and warmth, for example) that gradually become imbued with what Edelman terms values . In a developmental cascade that quickly becomes complex, small, subtle experiences (not consciously intentional) emerge as elaborated motivational systems. Sexuality, aggression and safety are outcomes, not preset engines of development. According to Edelman, conflict is emergent, not preset at an unconscious level. Ghent and Harris think of conflict through the lens of nonlinear dynamic system theory, or chaos theory, in which conflict is the very provocative initiator of change. Within chaos theory, there is a theory of transformation. Disequilibrium arises out of conflict. Conflict is a source of change, movement, and understanding. Conflict in the service of growth or transformation takes different forms. Conflict, even at the unconscious level, between ways of being or ways of relating, can usher in a destabilization of pattern and negotiated experience. But there is a point in analytic work at which conflictual contradictions, either of mental representations or of object relations, are held in mind unflinchingly—a point where conflict may hover just at the edge of chaos. This is perhaps most acutely present in work with patients experiencing mourning and object loss. III. G. French Lacanian Perspective To explore the role of conflict in Lacan’s work, a term that has no particular currency as such within Lacan’s writing and teaching, David Lichtenstein (Christian, Eagle & Wolitzky, 2017; pp.177-194) looks instead to the idea of subjective division and the structure of that division as Lacan sees it. In so doing, he illustrates both what it is in Lacan’s work that derives from the classical idea of intrapsychic conflict and what departs from it. A fundamental concept in Lacan’s theory of the divided subject is that of lack. The word in French, manqué , conveys both ‘loss’ and ‘lack’ but also ‘void’ and ‘emptiness’. Lacan viewed the psychic encounter with loss as essential to the formation of the human subject. Indeed, the subject as such comes into being by encountering and representing loss and without it the formation of the subject does not occur. This is essential in Lacan’s theory of the subject. It is rooted in Freud’s view of primal repression as expressed in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud, 1920) and takes this process as being essential to the formation of subjectivity per se. The ‘primary experience of satisfaction’ that Freud refers to is a mythic point of origin since there is no representation of it and thus no experience of it in the psyche until it is lost. The effort to regain this lost moment is a defining principle of subjectivity. It is rooted in the human capacity for representation and in this sense at the core of this distinctly human function is the principle of lack, i.e. of lost satisfaction. There is a dialectic relation in Lacan’s thought here that draws upon Freud: the primary repression of the lost satisfaction can only occur once there is a representation to be repressed, but there can only be a representation of it as already lost, that is repression and representation must arise together: the lost object comes into being as already lost .
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