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III. H. Non-Lacanian French Authors
Jean Laplanche (2004) proposed a theory of psychic conflict, which rests on his theory of the unconscious and the drives, centering on the primordial relation to the adult other, the sender of enigmatic (unconscious sexual) messages. Starting from the pivotal opposition of love and hate , Laplanche proposes that there exists, at the level of the sexual unconscious, an opposition between the unbound (erotic) sexuality and bound (narcissistic and/or object-related) sexuality, both on a level of unconscious fantasy. Both are in a dialectical relation to the pre-psychic level of self- preservation, indicating the pre-existence of some psycho-physiological ‘wiring’, characterized by natural tenderness and aggressivity. In human infants, such ‘wiring’ is immediately invaded by the enigmatic messages of the other. At the level of self-preservative functioning, one could situate tenderness (Freud’s term), or attachment. The second level is that of the erotic, whose description dates from the Three Essays. Finally, the third is that of the love of the total object, of Eros at once narcissistic and object-related (Laplanche 2004, p. 468). The messages of adults do not keep to a single, consistent level - that of care and tenderness. In this situation of a close physical contact, the sexual fantasies of parents awaken and force or insinuate themselves into the heart of the self-preservative relation. The messages are ‘compromised’ - in the psychoanalytic sense of the term - and are so in a way that is unconscious to the sender himself. The child who tries to master these enigmatic messages goes to recover them via the codes he has available. In this sense, the so-called death drive is in effect that ‘pure culture’ of otherness that we detect in the deepest layers of the unconscious. This is certainly so in the most inaccessible layers of the id. But very soon, from the activity of the ego and with the help of the cultural environment, there appear fragmentary scenes, pieces of fantasmatic sequences, which will be progressively absorbed by the great organizational forces, the complexes of the Oedipus and castration. The forces of binding in the psyche are no less sexual than the other forces. Nevertheless, they always take as their source certain totalities: the totality of the fellow human as unified being; the totality of the ego, of its form and its ideas. Thus, in the grandiose opposition of life and death drives, the opposition of binding and unbinding is at work on the inside of the psychical apparatus. The newborn child strives to translate the seductive, enigmatic messages of the adult, without allowing too great an unbinding of the stimulus. From then on, the battle for binding is waged against the internal other - the unconscious and its offshoots (Laplanche 2004). André Green’ s (1975, 1998) conceptualizations of the ‘dead mother’, ‘work of the negative’, the ‘analytic object’, dynamic interconnectedness between the object and the drive, intrapsychic and intersubjective, ‘antagonistic cooperation’ between the representation and affect, are firmly rooted in the notion of either localized psychic conflict or more general conflict state .
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