Meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

January 16, 1973. DRIVE STIMULATION AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY. Lloyd H. Silverman, Ph.D.

Dr. Silverman said that one of the aims of his paper is to illustrate how data from laboratory experiments can be of value in the development of the clinical theory of psychoanalysis. In his research, he has found data from the psychoanalytic situation and from laboratory experiments to be complementary, each having limitations which can be offset by the other. Thus, the principle limitations of experimental data—its artificality and small magnitude which make the data seem irrelevant to real life—are offset by congruent clinical data. Conversely, the principle limitation of clinical data, coming from a situation that cannot hold constant variables other than the particular one being investigated, can be compensated for by an experimental approach if it is sophisticated and relevant.

To illustrate his thesis, Dr. Silverman considered the question of what conditions must prevail if a drive-related external event is to trigger a psychopathological reaction. It is recognized by psychoanalysts that two of the necessary conditions are: 1, that the drive with which the stimulus makes contact is one that is unacceptable to the person; and 2, that the ego resources available to the person are insufficient to allow for an adaptive reaction—superego and ego conditions. To these he added two other necessary conditions: that the relevant drive is active at the time the stimulus impinges—the 'id condition'; and a fourth, the 'environmental condition', which is fulfilled if the situation in which the drive stimulation occurs discourages drive gratification, most often the case when the drive relevance of the stimulus is hidden.

In everyday life, drive relevance is usually hidden either because the link between the stimulus and the related drive is symbolic, or because the frustration of one drive reactively and silently arouses another. However, sometimes drive relevance is hidden because th