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hallucinatory as the child’s encounter with the external world is buoyed up by the creative illusion of his own drives. From this point of view, the death drive is the toxic by-product of the failure of the infusion of representation with drive. A contemporary of Lacan, Winnicott and Green, Loewald in the U.S. also rejected the independence of object relations and drives in a “revison of the instinct concept itself” (1972, p 324). “It is suggested 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” (p 324). 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.” In this way, he seems to echo Winnicott’s notion of “ego needs” about which Winnicott complained that “[a] great deal of misconception has arisen out of the slowness of some to understand that an infant’s needs are not confined to [the mere satisfaction of] instinct tensions, important though these may be” (1965, p 86). Though he uses the Strachey translation of “Trieb” as “instinct”, Loewald’s thinking belongs under the rubric of 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 autochthonous forces seeking discharge, which discharge is understood as some kind of emptying of energy potential, in a closed system or out of it.” (Loewald 1972, p 321f). Loewald was also explicit about the necessary asymmetry in the “two levels of psychic organization” involved in this process: mother/child, analyst/patient. It is an indication of the continuation of reflections about the two solitudes that Roussillon can publish a paper in 2013 with the title “The function of the object in the binding and unbinding of the drives” which does not contain a single reference to Loewald’s work. The ineluctable asymmetry of the “fundamental anthropological situation”, was also a point Laplanche (1999) was adamant about, though he was less concerned with the taming than with the disruptive sexual character of the caretaker’s unconscious intrusion. Both of these functions have to be taken into account in order to englobe the entire range of the object’s impact upon the subject. In Seulin’s (2015) opinion, the “demonic” character of (some) sexuality insisted upon by Laplanche and Freud is more a consequence of the object failing in its role than of the enigmatic quality of its “messages”. See, however, Stein (2008) for an opposing point of view.
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