You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Mackay: One thing that impresses me about Dr. Meadow is the way she understands what I talk about at a very abstract level and in a few quick sentences turns it into something direct and practical. She has done that with ideas I wrote about a few years ago, too. She has taken concepts which were part of a philosophical analysis of psychoanalysis and translated them into very practical ways of conducting research and examining issues. That is something very commendable. It's a very special skill.
Audience member: I have a question about yesterday's conference. I was wondering what you thought about the cases, and if you could discuss them in terms of motivation theory and help us understand how you see the quest for pleasure in those cases.
Meadow: Dr. Mackay, you mentioned something in your paper which fits in here: wishes and pleasure as outcomes and affects rather than drive.
Mackay: Yes, during a psychoanalysis the analyst deals with wishes, first superficial ones then increasingly deeper wishes; however these wihses are derivatives. There is no way the analyst plumbs primary motives. The primary motives are there, but we can only infer them. Freud said as much, that primary motives are so far from the surface that they are known only by inference; they are not known directly. That is not to say that primary motives are not there and not operative. Presumably they are born of a biological source and have some evolutionary function. I am not sure that it is the analyst's
word to get to the rock bottom of those sorts of motives in the sessions. It does not seem possible.
Audience member: As you were speaking, I was thinking that to keep that thought in perspective is helpful because there is something ever unobtainable about totally understanding oneself, and I wanted to share with you something that I heard at lunch. Dr. Mackay felt a resonance with the way Dr. Meadow and modern analysts work. There is present a commitment to investigation and exploration, which I th