Back to Table of Contents
two-person encounter. For these retrospectively dubbed “third model” thinkers, a one-person mind is an achievement, a fluctuating one which may be lost under internal or external stress.
V. Bea. The Object, the Real Other, and the Drive While the opposition posited between “object-seeking” and “pleasure-seeking” in the constitution of the psyche stimulated a burst of creative post-Freudian thinking in the United States, a significant body of reflection has from the beginning questioned this opposition. A similar assessment might be made concerning the controversy about the relative importance of “real” persons/objects versus internal objects or the need to address “deficit” rather than “drive.” No psychoanalytic theory can spare itself a confrontation with the double status of the object (Green, 1975): fantasied and real, internal and external, represented and perceived. Proponents of the addition of a “third” metapsychological model to our theoretical armamentarium, in pointing out how deeply interrelated drive and object relations are, might be seen as in agreement with the relationists who, as noted above, advocate a “dialectic” between drive and relational models. It might be more accurate to refer to the third model in the plural since different authors have approached the role of the object in such fundamentally disparate ways that a “unified” theory does not yet, nor may never, exist. As awareness of the convergence across theoretical orientations and continents of intense study of the role of the object in the development of the psychic apparatus becomes more widespread, there will be precious opportunities for cross-fertilization and debate. To illustrate the diversity of point of view, six authors whose contributions to this area of reflection have been particularly influential in North America will be briefly mentioned here: Lacan, Winnicott, Green, Laplanche, Reid, and Loewald. Independently and virtually simultaneously, Lacan and Winnicott both formulated the primary human dilemma: in order to become someone, each subject must pass through another, a real, conflicted, individual, other. Both authors wrote of the mirroring function of the object, in Winnicott’s (1967) case as an opportunity to find reflected back one’s “true” self whereas for Lacan (1977 [1949]) this mirroring was the beginning of a lifelong alienation. in which the ego, craving to be the object of the other’s desire, takes other forms to be itself. The “reality” of the other’s intrusion preoccupying Lacan, however, concerned not concrete details about personality or aspects of the other’s behaviour but “the signifiers” as it were swallowed with breast milk. It was identificatory skewering or “pinning” of the unconscious subject by the combined discourses of the ‘near’ other of the early caretaker and the ‘far’ other of community and culture which led to the emphasis on detecting key “signifiers” in treatment. A former disciple of Lacan, Aulagnier (2001[1975]) deepened understanding of the intimate role of the early caretaker in the infant’s “activity of representation”. She pointed out that for the infans there is an inevitable “violence of anticipation” in the “spoken shadow” of maternal discourse. Moreover, she emphasized the central role of the “deferred action” of the naming of affect (deferred because occuring after the mother has observed the child’s response and before the child knows how to speak of it himself) which by designating the child’s relation to others cathected by him “identifies and constitutes the I” (p 97).
595
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online