You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
For those interested in French psychoanalysis, Michel de M'Uzan is a singular figure whose work has extended over five decades. Starting in the 1960s, he, along with Pierre Marty, Christian David, and Michel Fain, pioneered a new form of psychoanalytic psychosomatic medicine and founded the Paris School of Psychosomatic Medicine. Also the author of three literary works, de M'Uzan writes in an elegant French for which he is renowned. Moreover, as Dominique Scarfone has noted, his writing bespeaks an elegance not only of style but also of psychoanalytic thinking.
As he explains in the foreword to Aux confins de l'identité, de M'Uzan continues to rethink and extend his formulations, constantly pursuing further possibilities of elaboration or revision. Throughout his career he has stressed the importance of retaining the economic point of view, that is to say, thinking in terms of energy and the vicissitudes of the investment of energy in the formation of the mental apparatus. His concern for the energies at stake in forming the psychic apparatus leads directly to his way of theorizing about identity. As for the sources of energy, a cornerstone of de M'Uzan's thinking regarding the earliest levels of psychic life is his work on Freud's concept of Selbsterhaltungs-triebe, which Strachey translated as “instincts of self-preservation” and Laplanche and Pontalis as “pulsions d'auto-conservation.” We can notice here differences in the translation of both parts of the German word. Triebe is translated by Strachey as “instincts” and by Laplanche and Pontalis as “pulsions”—in English, drives. For our purposes, in French psychoanalysis “drive” has come to mean more specifically the psychic representative of somatic energy, whereas “instinct” tends to overlap the idea of energy itself and its psychic representative. Selbsterhaltungs-triebe is a conceptual “term by which Freud designates all needs associated with bodily functions necessary for the preservation of the individual: