Chapter 7 Potential Space in Psychoanalysis:1The Object in the Setting

On several occasions, Freud was led to assert that psychoanalytic concepts have chiefly an heuristic value and that only secondarily can they be defined more rigorously or replaced by others. No concept since the founding of psychoanalysis has been more broadly utilized than that of the object. According to Littré, the French Academy Dictionary gives the same illustration in defining the word ‘subject’ as it does in defining the word ‘object’: natural bodies are the subject of physics; natural bodies are the object of physics. Rather than deplore the confusion that arises here, or protest against philosophies which would divide subject and object absolutely, I wish instead to emphasize that their relationship is one of symmetry or of complementarity: no object without a subject, no subject without an object. From Freud’s time to ours psychoanalytic theory has not been able to avoid facing up to the truth of this.

Freud completely disrupted the old relation between subject and object. Instead of opposing to the object the subject as it was defined by philosophical tradition, he coupled the object to the drive – the anti-subject. For it is quite clear that the drive cannot assume a subjective function. In his theory, drive – and the agency which connotes it, the id – represents for Freud that which is the most impersonal, the least capable of an individual will: both because it is rooted in the

body and because it is associated with the radical characteristics of the species as such.

Although the drive of Freudian theory is sharply distinguished from the classical notion of instinct, the two remain related by their fundamentally improper ‘nature’ – that is, in their departure from the propriety of self sameness of the subject. However, with the development of object relations theory, Freud’s concept of the ego could no longer provide an adequate theoretical complement to newly emergent formul