The drive, without any doubt, is Freudâs most remarkable invention after that of the unconscious.1 It is a creation which enables us to account for the conditions linked to the emergence of psychical life. It is, therefore, âinfantile in originâ and, as we shall see, âsexual in natureâ.2 It is precisely the dimension of sexuality that differentiates the sphere of the drive from that of the instincts.
Characteristics of the drive and the montage of the drive
We may say that the drive as Freud described it in his early works comes into being with the babyâs first cry. For the newborn subject, it comes from within the organism, and there is no escaping from it. Freud refers to the pressure of hunger and thirst which demand to be suppressed by satisfaction, even if the latter comes by way of an external action.6 From this point of view, he did not yet make a distinction between the drive and need. But what was both absolutely revolutionary and modern was that he said that this would allow the baby to have an initial pivot on which to separate âan outside and an insideâ.7 It is unusual to find such assertions in Freud,8 but there, on this occasion, he points to the babyâs capacity to differentiate a minima between self and other and to initiate a movement towards the other; and this is confirmed by baby observation as well as other theories concerning babies.
Freud equivocates: he hesitates to consider the self-preservative drives as giving the most comprehensive model of the drive. What it is that he wishes to capture is not the organism, but the body of the living being.
One page further on, when he tackles the characteristics of the drive, we read that the pressure of the drive ânever operates as a force giving a momentary impact but always as a constant one.â9 This creates tension with, and sits uncomfortably alongside, the notion of needs such as hunger and thirst, which themselves are rhythmic in nature. But that is not all; as early as the Project, Freud distinguished between âan urgency which is released along the motor pathwayâ10 and an urgency that finds satisfaction only through âa specific actionâ coming from outside.11
At first the human baby is unable to initiate this action; it can only happen, he says, thanks to help from someone else: âIt takes place by extraneous help, when the attention of an experienced person is drawn to the childâs state by discharge along the path of internal change.â12 The âNebenmenschâ13 of the Project, by responding to the babyâs cries of distress, through actions and words âcodes or supercodesâ the unnameable thing which is at the heart of the babyâs primordial dependence.14 Fundamentally, as J. Champeau put it, âthe subject is not self-sufficient, which is why he makes demandsâ.15 In this way, Freud turned his back on an organicist view based on the model of need and its satisfaction via the reflex arc.
On the contrary, everything happens as if in the intricate connection with the other, one might see the setting in motion of a displacement in which the psychical system would no longer be merely internal to the individual but would be situated between the baby and his or her other. Here we see a prefiguring of the circuit of the drives as described twenty years later in âDrives and their Vicissitudesâ.
If satisfaction can come only from the outside, then it is surely an invitation to theorise the primordial place of the person who takes care of the baby. And Freud is very precise about this: what constitutes caring for a baby is the âsupply of nourishment, proximity of the sexual objectâ16; in other words, an intervention coming from the external world which is of a sexual nature. The drive then undergoes a complete change of direction, it is no longer simply linked to the instincts, but is derived from the sexual, that is to say, the eroticisation of a relationship, as we can find already described a year prior to the article on the drives in âOn Narcissismâ17 and later in An Outline of Psychoanalysis.18
Freud oscillated between need and drive, and later between the self-preservative drives and the partial sexual drives, and this oscillation constituted the first tension observed by Lacan, and was to provide the basis for his re-working of the theory of drives.
On reading these texts carefully, one discovers that Freud was caught up in contradictions over and over again, and we may assume that the concept of the drive gave him considerable trouble. It is as if he invites us to accompany him in his tribulations and in the twists and turns of his thinking, which themselves are marked by the very same rigour that we find in his work whenever there was a key concept that needed to be elaborated.
Freud continued his analysis of the characteristics of the drive, and then proceeded to tighten up the concept ontologically, moving from the self-preservative drives to the partial sexual drives. As we know, the characteristics of the drive which he retained were four in number: pressure, which we have already mentioned, aim, object and source.
As we shall see, the analysis of these characteristics enabled Freud to set up the partial sexual drives as the paradigm of the drives.
Regarding the aim of the drive, Freud writes that it always aims at satisfaction, but he then goes on to assert that âthere may yet be different paths leading to the same ultimate aimâ including âdrives which are inhibited in their aimâ while still involving a satisfaction.19 This is a more or less explicit way of saying that a drive can be satisfied by not being satisfied, or at least that it can be satisfied in ways other than achieving its aim. If we take the further step of translating this operation into clinical terms, and more specifically of basing it on clinical work with babies, we can recognise that a hungry baby may be just as satisfied by the motherâs words as by her milk, at least for a while. This operation, which has been confirmed experimentally,20 means that the human infant is a being with a hunger for the symbolic and already has the capacity to sublimate. This is why Freud made sublimation one of the vicissitudes of the drive. But that is not all; through this second characteristic, Freud emphasised the importance of differentiating the drive from need, which always has immediate satisfaction as its aim.
As for the object, he tells us that it is âwhat is most variable about a driveâ.21 Obviously one might think once again of the breast, which touches on the register of orality, but Freud is quite explicit that it is not necessarily an external object. âIt may equally well be a part of the subjectâs own body.â22 Indeed any number of babies demonstrate that they are capable of finding satisfaction by sucking their thumb or their hand, which can cause a certain bitterness in the mother who finds she is no longer the exclusive object of satisfaction.
This explanation is quite apt, and opens up the possibility of an interpretation other than that of anaclitic object choice, which psychoanalysis repeats over and over again, and which makes the baby seem so lifeless. In fact, the object obtains its status uniquely âin consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possibleâ,23 and it is through this satisfaction that it achieves its aim. Here we have a radically different perspective as to the place of the object from that which we find so often in psychoanalysis, and which has so little to do with clinical reality. The edifice of Post-Freudian analysis is indeed founded on the idea of the lost object. From this point of view, it is the loss of the object and the efforts made to find it again which constitute access to psychical life and the opening up to the field of the symbolic. But this only creates an impasse, in shifting the emphasis away from the absolute precedence of the presence of the object over the absence of the object. Yet the entirety of our clinical work with babies is there to open our eyes to the disasters caused when the object is missing or inadequate.
Access to psychical life depends on the emergence of the drive, intrinsically bound up with the Other24 in its presence as object. In other words, the re-finding of the object, while it has a logical temporal relation to its loss, is always initially linked back to its presence in the time of the real. This is why Marie-Christine Laznik had to say, âThere can be no absence unless there is already a presence.â25
And if babies, in the oral register, can experience a form of satisfaction by sucking their fingers or hands, this is clearly because it is possible to feel replete other than by feeding on milk, other than in an organic sense, but it is also because it constitutes a renewal of the presence of the experience of satisfaction. So then what would be the function of the object of the drive? In fact, âas far as this object of the drive is concerned, we have to understand it as the object of a functionâ. And âthe object of the function is . . . to functionâ,26 as Bergès tells us.
When this is applied to the oral register, the function of the breast would then be: to make oneself sucked, gobbled, vampirised . . . So what establishes the functioning of orality is on the side of âsurplus pleasureâ. Not in terms of having the object, in this case the breast, but of âcircumventing the eternally lacking objectâ.27 The circle is thus completed, and at the same time, we can see the emergence of the movement of tension of this âcircuit-like returnâ,28 so well observed by Lacan.
Where the source is concerned, Freud tells us that it is initially and always bodily, and this provenance on the basis of the real of the body will ...
