#libidinal drives

Again, it was Lacan who first clearly rejected the Strachey translation of Trieb as ‘instinct’ (Diatkine, 1997), a term which had been adopted in France, as it had been in England, prior to Lacan’s indignant attack on the misrecognition of Freud’s intention. Lacan proposed to replace it with ‘pulsion’, a less bio- logically based term, more in keeping with Freud’s notion of it being ‘a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reach- ing the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body’ (Freud, 1915c, p. 122). The word pulsion carries in French a greater sense of a movement towards a realisation than does the word instinct. Increasingly, in England too, largely through the influence of French writing, ‘drive’ is replacing ‘instinct’, as indeed will be the case in the updated translation of the Standard Edition. Lacan’s early identification of pulsion, or drive, as one of the four key concepts in psychoanalysis (alongside the unconscious, repetition and transference) placed it high in the theoretical canon, where it has stayed in France.

What the material is with which one starts the treatment is on the whole a matter of indifference—whether it is the patient’s life history or the history of his illness or his recollections of childhood. But in any case, the patient must be left to do the talking and must be free to choose at what point he shall begin….

The only exception to this is in regard to the fundamental rule of psycho- analytic technique which the patient has to observe. This must be imparted to him at the very beginning:…. ‘One more thing before you start, what you tell me must differ in one respect from an ordinary conversation. Ordinarily you rightly try to keep a connecting thread running through your remarks and you exclude any intrusive ideas when they occur to you and any side issues so as not to wander too far from the point. But in this case you must proceed differently. You will notice that as you relate things various thoughts will occur to you which you would like to put aside on the ground of certain criticisms and objections. You will be tempted to say to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here or that it’s quite unimportant or nonsensical so that there’s no need to say it. You must never give in to these criticisms, but must say it in spite of them—indeed, you must say it precisely because you feel an aversion to doing so. Later on you will find out and learn to understand the reason for this injunction, which is really the only one you have to follow. So say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage, the changing view which you see outside. Finally, never forget that you have promised to be absolutely honest and never leave anything out because, for some reason or other, it is unpleasant to tell it.’

The analytic treatment must therefore take its bearings from the subject’s position of jouissance rather than on repressed meaning.

A clinical orientation on jouissance as it is ciphered in the subject’s discourse foregrounds singularity and so dignity. Subjects are not to be cured; they are neither deficient nor helpless victims of their family circumstances. We recall that Freud saw sexuality as the root cause of neurosis; but for Lacan it is the absence of sexual relation that differentiates the human subject from animals. Humans cannot behave instinctively; they need a symptom, or a construct, an invention of their own, to be inscribed in the social bond. Unlike cognitive-behavioral therapies, for the later Lacan the symptom is thus neither to be removed nor to be cured, for the symptom is a real invention of the subject that anchors him or her in language.

For Lacan, human culture (the symbolic order) creates a break from the biological real, capturing and restructuring the experience of life through mediating symbols. The body, for example, is conceptualized and organized by labels and categories that under ordinary circumstances stand in the way of any direct experience of its existence. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam has stated, we have no access to such a thing as a language independent-reality. In Lacan’s idiom, we would say there is “no pre-discursive reality”.  But the symbolic order always falls short of totally capturing lived experience, inevitably excluding a part of the real in which we are rooted. This insufficiency is attributable to the very nature of symbols, which represent missing or absent objects. A symbol, after all, refers to an abstract concept, so that language can only allude to a concrete external referent without totally capturing it. For Lacan, the inability of the symbolic to totally encompass its referents and to represent fully what has been lost creates a constant gradient of desire, a perpetual reaching out for the pure reality behind representation. In the Lacanian formula, desire “insists” in the signifying chain of human speech, straining toward dimly perceived goals and the deferred promise of complete satisfaction. Because achievement of this aim is impossible, we substitute fantasies of sexual, romantic, narcissistic, or material accomplishment that stitch desire to the fabric of social reality, and we convince ourselves that we will be satisfied by realizing them. Desire thus becomes “libidinized” and diverted to existing symbolic objects.

Where is the subject […]? In radical, real individuality? […]. In the organism […] drawn in by the effects of the ça parle, by the fact that one living being among others has been called upon to become what Mr. Heidegger calls the “shepherd of being,” having been taken up into the mechanisms of the signifier? Is it, at the other extreme, identifiable with the very play of the signifier? Is the subject only the subject of discourse, in some way torn out of its vital immanence, con- demned to soar over it, to live in this sort of mirage […] making it the case that everything s/he lives is not only spoken, but, in living it, s/he lives it by speaking it, and that already what s/he lives is inscribed in an epos, a saga woven throughout the length of his or her very act? Our effort this year, if it has a meaning, is to show, precisely, how the function of the subject, playing between the two, is articulated elsewhere than in one or the other of these poles. […]. Does it suffice to know that the function of the subject is in the between-the-two, between the idealizing effects of the signifying function and this vital immanence which you will readily confuse again, I think, despite my warnings, with the function of the drive? What we are engaged in, precisely, and what we are trying to push further, is precisely this.