We are driven

Is metapsychology out-or in again? Is it a millstone tied around our necks-or is it an intriguing Freudian witch whom we can even dance with? Is the concept of drives an outmoded oddity-or an indispensable companion, inspiring our understanding of the patient's material and even opening new windows for further development? Can we proceed with the concept of structures and object relationships alone -or do we need the concept of drives in order to understand what these object relationships are all about? The author clearly opts for the second option in each of these pairs of alternatives. Musing on the sophisticated metapsychology debate that unsettled psychoanalysis in the United States for many years, she reviews some of the most frequently quoted objections to the concept of drives. Further, she offers an introduction to modern drive theory with the new duality of sexual and preservative drives, as well as a different concept of aggression, and explains how drives relate to structures-specifically, to the representations of self and object.     

The limitations of the object relations model

The position expressed in this paper is that there is no drive without object, and no object relationship except in the context of the drives. If primacy is to be attributed to any of the factors involved in mental functioning, it should be to the workings of the pleasure-unpleasure principle; the latter cannot be conceived as independent of the realm of the drives. A clinical case is presented in order to demonstrate why and to what extent it can be severely restrictive to attribute ultimate motivating primacy to a hypothetical object-seeking tendency conceived of as operating outside the sphere of the drives.     

Driving and gaze behavior while texting when the smartphone is placed in a mount: A simulator study

The aim of this study was to investigate how texting when the smartphone in a mount next to the wheel, negatively affects safe driving behavior and gaze behavior. In most countries hand-held phone use while driving is prohibited. However, when texting is not explicitly forbidden and only hand-held use is not allowed, drivers can still legally operate their smartphone with their fingers when it is placed in a mount which is attached to the dashboard or the windscreen. The effects on driving and gaze behavior of ‘dashboard-mount’ texting have hardly been investigated. Twenty-seven participants drove three short identical drives in a simulator while their driving behavior and gaze behavior was measured. This was a drive in which participants did not text (baseline drive), a drive while they texted with a smartphone in one hand (hand-held drive), and a drive in which they texted while the phone was placed in a dashboard-mount (dashboard-mount drive). Participants looked significantly more often at the smartphone during the dashboard-mount than during the hand-held drive. Total dwell time at the smartphone was significantly longer during the dashboard-mount than during the hand-held drive. There were no significant differences between the two texting drives in the number of glances longer than 2 s, the longest glance of each participant, and mean fixation duration at the smartphone. Total dwell time in the mirrors was significantly shorter during the two texting drives than in the baseline drive but did not differ between the two texting drives. The drivers showed poorer lateral control and varied their speed more in the two texting drives than in the baseline drive. They also drove significantly slower in the two texting drives than in the baseline drive. Finally, subjective workload was much higher in the two texting drives than in the baseline drive. The results indicate that dashboard-mount texting deteriorates the safe execution of the driving task to at least the same extend as hand-held texting does.     

The role of removal and elimination in Nietzsche’s model of self-cultivation

ABSTRACT

In this paper I call into question the commonplace assumption in Anglophone Nietzsche scholarship that ideal psychological self-cultivation comes about solely by means of the sublimation of all of one's drives. While the psychological incorporation of one’s drives and instincts plays a crucial role in promoting what Nietzsche considers a higher self, I argue that some degree of removal and elimination of particular drives and instincts could be, perhaps necessarily is, involved in ideal cases. Yet I will suggest that we should not think of these cases as constituting ‘repressions’. I will seek to offer a better characterization of the discussions of productive removal and elimination in Nietzsche’s texts, and consider how they fit in his model of self-cultivation. Nietzsche’s texts demonstrate a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which certain kinds of removal and elimination can lead to greater integration for the would-be exemplary individual. My reading, I argue, helps to better understand the instances in the texts where Nietzsche valorizes the removal of particular drives and instincts.     

The current status of the psychoanalytic theory of instinctual drives. I: Drive concept, classification, and development

The evolution of Freud's theory of instinctual drives, with the accompanying models of a mental apparatus, is remarkable for its tenacious adherence to addressing the fundamental problems of human psychology, here phrased as the problems of body-mind-environment relationships. The concept of instinctual drives continues to be one of the most pervasive concepts of psychoanalysis, weathering considerable attack over the last several decades, although losing some clarity in the process. I have cited and discussed as basic issues of the concept of instinctual drives: the relationship of observational data and theoretical constructs in psychology; whether our construct of drives is or should be or can be purely psychological; the problem of conceptualizing the ontogenetic origin of mind; the issues of the "force-meaning conjunction" and the problem of psychic energy in psychoanalytic constructs; and the relation of our concept of instinctual drives to the concept of instincts in general. It seems that progress with these fundamental issues might be made by utilizing models that are more homologous with present knowledge in related fields than is Freud's reflex arc model of the nervous system, in order to build a better drive construct within the framework of psychoanalysis. The classification of instinctual drives remains a problem. Clinically, aggression seems to be a factor in conflict, very much like sexuality. Despite widespread acceptance of the idea of aggression as simply parallel to sexuality in all respects, there are major discrepancies. Perhaps aggression cannot be viewed as a drive after all; perhaps our drive construct needs to be modified to accommodate aggression. Certainly, controversy in this area has interfered with the production of good clinical studies which could begin to increase our understanding of aggression and its place in the human personality. The psychoanalytic theory of drive development has probably undergone less change in the last forty years than other aspects of drive theory, although careful observational work has led to alterations of our views of the age of onset of genital awareness, of female sexual development and function, and of the latency period. This is the conclusion of the first of two papers examining the post-Freud development of the theory of instinctual drives in psychoanalysis. The companion paper follows on p. 402 of this issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.     

Infantile sexuality: Its place in the conceptual developments of Anna Freud and Donald W. Winnicott

This essay explores the place of infantile sexuality in the theories of Anna Freud and Donald W Winnicott. Both Anna Freud and D.W. Winnicott incorporated and at the same time changed the classical psychoanalytic account of infantile sexuality and the instinctual drives. Whilst Anna Freud remained closer to her father's original conceptualization, she developed a multidimensional model of development which gave the drives a foundational status whist also maintaining their significance in giving meaning and texture to children's subjective experience. Winnicott also retained much of S. Freud's original theorizing except that in a fundamental way he turned it on its head when considering earliest development. For him the establishment of the self was paramount, and the drives and infantile sexuality merely served to give substance to that self.     

Understanding Dali's Slave market with the disappearing bust of Voltaire: a case study in the scale information driving perception

A generic problem in vision is to know which information drives the perception of a stimulus. We address this problem in a case study that involves the perceptual reversal of an ambiguous image (here, Dali's painting the Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire 1940). In experiment 1, we use 'bubbles' (Gosselin and Schyns, 2001 Vision Research 41 2261-2271) to disambiguate the image and to determine the specific visual information that drives each possible perception (here, the nuns versus the bust of Voltaire). Experiment 2 validates that this information does determine the selective perception of the ambiguous image. We adapted the spatial-frequency channels of observers selectively to the information that mediates one of the two perceptions, to induce the opposite perception of the ambiguous image in a transfer phase. Together, the results suggest a method of revealing the visual information that drives perception.     

Celtic Saints and the Ecology of Death

Romantics mislead us when they depict nature as a garden where we feel at home. What drives nature is death, death with all its blood shedding pain. Death drives natural selection in evolutionary biology. The Celtic Saints in Ireland developed a rich spirituality that acknowledged the dominant role of death while trusting profoundly in divine providence.     

What attracts attention during police pursuit driving?

Efficient deployment of attention is important to the safe execution of tasks with a high content of visual information, such as driving. Chasing a lead vehicle is an extremely demanding and dangerous task, though little is known of the visual skills required. A study is reported that recorded the eye movements of police drivers and two control groups (novices and age‐ and experienced‐ matched controls) while watching a series of video clips of driving. The clips included pursuits, emergency response drives, and control drives (at normal speeds) around Nottinghamshire, UK. Analysis of gaze durations within certain categories of stimuli revealed that daytime pursuit drives correspond with an increase in gaze durations on a lead car (controlled for exposure), though police drivers direct their attention to other sources of potential hazards, such as pedestrians, more so than other drivers. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Object Relations,Affects, and Drives: Toward a New Synthesis

This paper summarizes my efforts to develop a contemporary psychoanalytic theory of drives, integrating this theory with contemporary affect theory and with psychoanalytic object relations theory. It proposes, in essence, that affects are the primary motivations of behavior, that they include a fundamental communicative function in the infant/caregiver relationship, and that it is the integration of, respectively, positive and negative affects that will crystallize libido and aggression as supraordinate motivational systems or drives. At the same time, insofar as peak affect states organize the internalization of the relationship between self and objects in the form of affect-invested self and object representations, affects are also contributing fundamentally to the organization of an internalized world of object relations, eventually consolidated in the tripartite structure of the mind.

This proposed interrelationship of affects, self- and object representations, and drives rejects the assumption of incompatibility of drive theory and object relations theory and provides potential bridging functions with the neurobiology of affects.     

Self, ego, affects, and drives

I have explored the concepts of self, ego, affects, and drives, with special emphasis on terminological confusions and Freud's use of Selbst and Ich. I have also proposed a modification of the dual instinct theory in the light of the relation between affect and drives. Finally, I have proposed a developmental model on the basis of all the above considerations, and stressed its relevance for the classification of nonorganic psychopathology.     

At the core: how we steer our course

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age..."--Dylan Thomas (1952). The beautiful evocative words of Dylan Thomas speak to the driving life force that pulses through all creation. So what, then, drives our organization, the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA)? What underlying stream can we tap into to provide the energy, power, and vitality we need to go on being in a meaningful and productive fashion? And, what internal compass can we rely on to steer us in the right direction, to guide us in how we function as an organization? My purpose here is to consider how we formulate our objectives, determine our priorities, make decisions, and insure, as best we can, that we are pursuing that which is meaningful and essential, not veering drastically off course. To do this, I would like to focus briefly on the current organizational structure of AGPA, then examine the use of a strategic planning process, review our accomplishments, and lastly explore hopes and dreams for our future as the premier group psychotherapy organization in the United States.     

Some new perspectives on conditioned hunger.

One theory holds that appetitive drives such as hunger and thirst are not conditionable because of their slow onset. However, recent evidence has shown only transitory conditioning of appetitive drives even with rapid onset. Such experiments may have failed because: (a) Exteroceptive conditioned stimuli (CSs) used in past experiments may be less easily accociated with the internal hunger drive than are interoceptive taste cues. Experiments 1-3 provided some support for this hypothesis. (b) The dependent measures used in past experiments may not be valid. Experiments 4 and 5 suggested that changes in the rate of bar pressing on an operant extinction curve following probe CSs for hunger may be a more sensitive and valid index of conditioned appetitive drive. However, the elusive and transitory nature of these results demands a reexamination of the basic difference between appetitive and aversive drives, which lies in the mode of their onset and control and which, given adaptive considerations, can account for their widely different conditionability.     

Body and mind: two sides of one coin

ABSTRACT

Psychosomatics is concerned with mentalization and the mind’s impact on the body’s functions. Choosing the reverse approach, how the body steers the mind, the author elaborates on a monistic mind-body-theory, suggesting that all physiological processes down to the cellular level have a psychological concomitant. Body and mind are the two sides of one coin, distinguished though by different representational organizations. This perspective is pertinent to Freud’s 1915 definition of the drive as the body’s demand on the mind. It also opens interesting perspectives for the elaboration of a preservative drive and its specific ideation in mental life. Comparing the dynamics between the sexual and the preservative drives with the workings of the autonomous nervous system reveals some specific traits of the preservative drives, as they are considered characteristic for psychosomatic patients. As a case in point, the author looks into the French conception of the drives and the theoretical framework of the Paris School of Psychosomatics, to which her conception would add an important dimension, theoretically, clinically, and technically.     

The lethic phallus: rethinking the misery of Oedipus

The author rethinks Sophocles' dramas Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus with a special focus on how self- and object-preservative drives are expressed in the protagonist's thoughts, feelings, and actions. What endangered Oedipus' survival at the beginning of his life-the planned infanticide-becomes the disease that later befalls his kingdom and finally culminates in his self-mutilation, which entitles the blinded Oedipus to be cared for by Antigone until he dies. The concept of the lethic phallus demonstrates how trauma and the resultant failure in structuring the lethic energies of the preservative and death drives can result in a specific pathology in which disease is used as a trophy and a means to bind the object in an ongoing caretaker relationship.     

After pluralism: Towards a new,integrated psychoanalytic paradigm1

After a restatement of the isolationism of psychoanalysis from allied disciplines, and an examination of some of the reasons for the diversity of schools of thought and the fragmentation of psychoanalytic knowledge, the author suggests the need to adopt principles of correspondence or external coherence along with those of hermeneutic coherence to validate psychoanalytic hypotheses. Recent developments in neurocognitive science have come to the aid of psychoanalysis in this period of crisis, resulting in the proposition of integrating both areas to form a new paradigm for the construction of the theory of the mind. This emerging paradigm tries to integrate clinical knowledge with neurocognitive science, fi ndings from studies on the process and outcome of psychotherapy, research into the early mother‐infant relationship, and developmental psychopathology. The author examines theoretical‐ technical models based on the concept of drives and of relationships in the light of interdisciplinary fi ndings. He concludes that the relational model has a broad empirical base, except when the concept of drives is discredited. Interdisciplinary fi ndings have led to the positing of the replacement of the Freudian model of drives with a model of motivational systems centred on affective processes. He draws certain conclusions which have a bearing on the technique of psychoanalytic treatment. These arise from the adoption of the new integrated paradigm.     

Chimpanzee (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pan troglodytes</Emphasis>) and orangutan (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pongo abelii</Emphasis>) forethought: self-control and pre-experience in the face of future tool use

Planning for future needs has traditionally been considered to be restricted to human cognition. Although recent studies on great ape and corvid cognition challenge this belief, the phylogenesis of human planning remains largely unknown. The complex skill for future planning has not yet been satisfactorily established in any other extant primate species than our own. In humans, planning for future needs rely heavily on two overarching capacities, both of which lie at the heart of our cognition: self-control, often defined as the suppression of immediate drives in favor of delayed rewards, and mental time travel, which could be described as a detached mental experience of a past or future event. Future planning is linked to additional high complexity cognition such as metacognition and a consciousness usually not attributed to animals. In a series of four experiments based on tool use, we demonstrate that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and orangutans (Pongo abelii) override immediate drives in favor of future needs, and they do not merely rely on associative learning or semantic prospection when confronted with a planning task. These results suggest that great apes engage in planning for the future by out competing current drives and mentally pre-experiencing an upcoming event. This suggests that the advanced mental capacities utilized in human future planning are shared by phylogenetically more ancient species than previously believed.     

The current status of the psychoanalytic theory of instinctual drives. II: The relation of the drive concept to structures, regulatory principles, and objects

There has been and continues to be some degree of failure to recognize the effects of the introduction of the ego-id-superego model on the drive construct. In particular, some of the criticisms of drive theory fail to take cognizance of the structural position of drives. Drives, as an aspect of id, are more clearly separated from behavior conceptually than many discussions imply. Drive energy is a different concept from drive. Especially in the area of the governance of drives by the regulatory principles of mental functioning some improvement in clarity and utility seems possible through the use of different, more sophisticated models. Difficulties in the concept of objects appear to underlie considerable controversy in psychoanalysis today. I have here attempted to clarify the concept of drive objects, as a step in resolving the broader issues.     

Compassionate Love among Catholic Priests: its Antecedents and its Influence on Affect toward Pastoral Ministry in Indonesia

Pastoral Psychology - What drives Catholic priests to continue to serve people? That is the main question behind this psychological study. Based on a working model of compassionate love (Underwood...