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I am grateful to John Dall'Aglio for this enlightening set of papers and to the editors of JAPA for affording me the opportunity to respond to them. I very much agree with Dall'Aglio's view that “the brain is a potential common ground for different psychoanalytic schools” (p. 694)—indeed, that was one of the raisons d'être of Neuropsychoanalysis. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that his translation of Lacan's concept of jouissance into the language of neuroscience enables me to understand it in a way I never did before. That can only be a good thing; I would not otherwise have appreciated how deeply Lacan understood a driving force in mental life that has only recently come to occupy center stage in affective and computational neuroscience.
I particularly want to commend Dall'Aglio's courage in undertaking this translation, because proponents of our different psychoanalytic schools do not always welcome such exercises; generally, they prefer to foster the splits that flow from the “narcissism of minor differences.” I hope his good deed is not punished too harshly.
The argument presented in these papers pivots on a puzzle that greatly exercised Freud (1905), from the moment he equated pleasure with decreasing drive tension: namely, the fact that sexual excitement (i.e., increasing drive tension) is experienced as pleasurable:
Infantile sexuality does not aim at the reduction of [drive] tension to derive pleasure. Rather, it seeks a strange enjoyment in the increase of tension, in its excess. The quintessential example is the stimulation of the erotogenic zones, such as the oral and anal orifices. Freud [1905] discerns an enjoyment in the increased stimulation of these zones, without seeking discharge of the tension [Dall'Aglio, p. 696].