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.
Ahumada refers to two currents in contemporary psychoanalysis, one empirical, anchored in Freud, the other linguistic-narrative, hermeneutical. Blackburn said that any investigation should study the relationship of its subject to language. Feyerabend, however, warned against the excesses of the liguistic current. Ahumada asks: Which approach leads to increased knowledge of contents? Referring to Freud's famous metaphor, he observes that there has been a gradual abandonment of the “via di levare” (or Charcot's “let the facts speak”).
Basing his views on Freud's statement that the ego is fundamentally a body ego, and on the idea of drives, Ahumada affirms that object ties are expressed through the body in a primary emotionality. Melanie Klein related symbolization to weaning. Representation passes from primary identification of the object to visual representation and then to representation by words.
For Freud, there were two interpenetrating levels: one, the motivational—a process which corresponds to drives and the object representation, a level which underlies the basic signification of the subject; the other, a layering of meaning in conscious memory and in language. In contrast, in the narrative hermeneutic currents, signification resides in language; therefore, speech itself is viewed as susceptible to motion, an act, something we do, and do to someone. Ahumada cites the surprise we experience when we have access to the peculiar world of primary links and their particular signification: two children are talking, a fiveyear -old and a two-year-old. The older child asks, “Where is that plane going?” And the younger one answers, “To look for its mommy.” This illustrates the different logic of Freudian references at the level of impulses, of object representation, and of emotions, in contrast to the representational level of the linguistic current.
For philosophers of language, meaning has to be created: they sever the connection of the links body-sex-object tie, and me