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Dear Sir,
We must thank Christopher Bollas for having focused on the topic of sexuality in the session and for his excellent exposition in which he reflects on it from the economic point of view and that of meaning (IJPA, 78: 363-7).
As I see it, he shows how the ‘pleasure of transforming sexual energy into acts of meaning’ can be made possible by regulating an optimal level of drive activity.
He locates the way to achieve this on two levels, one through wording, the choice of words and sentences, and the other through telling, which as a second signifier brings new meanings that contextualize and alter the strict meaning of the signifier.
I shall now discuss several reflections arising out of such a stimulating idea.
Drive activation through the choice of words is clearly obvious, as Ferenczi demonstrated in 1910, in the use of coarse language to provoke a regression in the analysand to the hallucinatory-motor level of representation, which is perceived by the analysand as a sexual assault.
The same effect can be noted in word order. David Liberman, in speaking about the syntactic arrangement of words, describes different ‘styles’ and how by adopting a ‘counterstyle’ we may overcome the drive blockage that the style supports.
An example of this is use of the dramatic ‘counterstyle’ of the hysterical to reinvest the narrative style of the obsessive personality.
In both these cases we are working within the realm of meaning. Even if we deliberately stress our tone of voice, we only manage to reinforce it.
In contrast, from the standpoint that I am proposing, the voice viewed as a modulator of the level of drive activity is located, to my mind, at a pre-verbal and pre-linguistic level in which meaning has not yet been established.