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The responses by Phyllis Meadow and Siamak Movahedi to my paper “The place of motivation in psychoanalysis” are of quite different kinds. Meadow is broadly sympathetic to the line that I take; Movahedi is strongly critical. As it is the nature of these replies to focus larely on rebutting criticisms, my reply to Meadow will be shorter than that to Movahedi.
However, there are two or three points in Meadow's response that I want discuss. In my paper my interest was on the form of motivation and securing its central place in psychoanalytic theory, not with actual drive manifestation in clinical settings. Her response is to take the abstract themes that I discussed and to tease out their practical implications, linking them to clinical experience. Part of my argument was that the more obvious forms of motivation, wishes, desires and so on, many of which are consciously experienced and manifest, are the derivatives of more baisc drives. There is nothing new about this. It is the classical metapsychological position.
Now, Meadow illustrates a clinical corollary of this position that the wishes encountered in the analytic session are ephemeral and their objects shift: “My experience in the long-term treatment of patients has demonstrated that wishes come and go during the course of resistance analysis” (p. 32). However, it is the deeper and more enduring motive from which the superficial, perhaps conscious, wishes derive that is the key to understanding. Neadow continues: “… the cause or causes behind the wishes can be uncovered and it is these