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3. The Drive – A central point in his theoretical developments. Starting from Freud, Green maintains that the drive is neither conscious nor unconscious, and it can only be known through its representatives. At the limit of the unknowable, it is the psychic representative of excitations originating from within the body and reaching the psyche. The endosomatic excitation becomes a psychic representative once it reaches the psyche, as if, from its point of origin to its point of arrival, it changes in nature by having crossed a threshold. He emphasizes the importance of preserving the distinction between the terms psychic representative and thing representation . Green revalorizes Freud’s Second topography/Structural theory and points out that, from 1923 onward, in Freud’s work, the drive ( Triebregung ) takes the place formerly occupied by the thing or object representation in the first topography. The Id becomes a part of the psychic apparatus and, therefore, the drive is included in the psyche, representing the endosomatic excitation in a very different way. In sum, the thing representation occupies a crucial position within the psyche: at the conscious level, it links the thing and the word through language, while at the unconscious level, it connects the thing and the drive . Regarding the object , Green proposes that it functions as a revealer of the drives. In order to awaken the child to life, the object must carry out the contradictory task of both stimulating drive activity and containing it, offering itself and simultaneously withdrawing as an object of pleasure. The object reveals the drives and in doing so reveals the first forms of subjectivity. The drive is not only a boundary concept between the psychic and the somatic, but also a limit concept between subject and object, since its activation compels the creation of the external object according to Winnicott’s dialectic of found-created . At the same time, the drive constructs its own objects—duplications of earlier ones—which will become internal objects . The object is the agent that activates in the subject the objectifying function , an expression of the sexual drive which, according to Freud, allows the life drive ( Eros , or drive of love ) to be recognized by its index: libido . The objectifying function is characterized by its displacement and its unlimited metaphorization, being able to sacrifice all the characteristics that link it to primitive objects, including pleasure, as long as only one is preserved beyond the difference between pleasure and reality: the significant investiture. In his book “The Work of the Negative” (1993), Green addresses the distinction between the functions of the object and the parts of the object , which entails “...the analysis of the intrapsychic destinies of the invested object” (in: Rosas Salas 2005, p. 62), noting that there is always an irreducible remainder. This remainder serves as the foundation for what is referred to as the trauma of alterity . To consider the object as a “construct” implies that while representation matters, it is only one of its possible destinies—alongside two others in particular: identification and disavowal .
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