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Freudian drive theory has found an important voice in the work of Joseph Fernando on what he calls the “zero process drive” and the “zero process defenses”. This book offers a detailed clinical and metapsychological description of how the mind responds to trauma, integrating Freudian and ego psychological drive and defence theory with some current thought about how the brain processes memory. In bridging neuroscience, contemporary trauma treatments such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and sensorimotor processing, and classical drive theory, Fernando offers an exciting new psychoanalytic way of thinking about and treating trauma that serves as an important adjunct to other approaches. Fernando coins a new term, “the zero process drive”, to argue that traumatic functioning constitutes a mental process equivalent to Freud’s primary and secondary processes. This is an important contribution to psychoanalytic thinking, one that shifts our attention away from developmental or relational processes, and redirects us to the more contingent, particular, and event-focused dynamics of trauma. Although Fernando’s relentless focus on drive elements unnecessarily minimizes the role of the other in both the trauma and its recovery, his emphasis on the functioning of the zero process drive opens important avenues for the psychoanalytic treatment of traumatic experiences.
Fernando begins his analysis with a careful description of what trauma is and, more important, what it is not, in order to clear the field for a more precise description of how trauma operates in the mind. He differentiates his approach to trauma from Bion’s theory of beta elements and alpha function, arguing that Bion and those who draw on his work conflate the normal developmental process of the creation of what Bion calls “an apparatus for thinking thoughts” with the uniquely pathological process the mind undergoes in trauma. Fernando begins his theoretical description of “The Traumatic Pro