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Dear Editors,
I read with great interest the sophisticated essay by Gadi Taub (2009), whose clarity of exposition did, indeed, illuminate some of the key confusions in the debate between the so-called Drive Theories and the Relational ones. I was, however, left with two lingering, troubling impressions that spring from Taub's ‘Afterthought: Psychoanalysis and its Social Context,’ the last section of the paper. It is here in my reading that Taub's own personal, moral commitment in the theoretical debate breaks through in the reference to “Freud's Hobbesian conception of human beings as egotistic, pleasure-seeking monads” and, then, shortly after, “the portrait [Freud's] of humans as isolated self-interested units.” Certainly, the justification sought by some philosophically, as Taub so eloquently clarifies, of a radical autonomy of the individual might result in this kind of extremist, narcissistic pursuit.
But, to my understanding, that description suggests a misconception, and one that is widespread in our field and beyond, of the Freudian conceptualization of the Instinctual Drive, as delineated in Instincts and their vicissitudes. The definition of the Instinctual Drive includes four components: source, pressure, aim and object. The object is intrinsic to the ‘drive’; there is no objectless drive (whether the object be another person, one's self, one's own body part, a non-human part of the environment, etc.). Freud's drive theory is a relational theory, albeit that the ultimate source is postulated as the organism's need for biological homeostasis, which from the beginning requires attachment and leads in the mature organism hopefully to meaningful and intimate attachments. Seen in this light, the Freudian position does reflect a complex network of basic motivational forces in the adult, as Taub so clearly indicates earlier in the essay in the discussion of ‘mixed models.’
As for ‘monads’ and ‘isolated self-interested units’ — the discourse at that instant seems mo