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Almost all psychoanalytic theorizing posits some basic and presumably built-in motivational thrusts. The goal of this paper is to present an alternative way of thinking about the beginnings of motivation. I go into some detail about recent contributions from two areas of research: dynamic systems theory as applied by Esther Thelen to infantile motor development and Gerald Edelman's (1992) theory of “Neural Darwinism.” What emerges are two interlocking hypotheses: The first is that what we infer as drives or other versions of “basic” motivations are already a late development of motivational organizations that started out from a collection of rather primitive biases. The second hypothesis, based on dynamic systems thinking or complexity theory, is that a great many developmental features that appear to be driven by a built-in genetic program or design, are, in fact, the spontaneously emergent, and therefore the never completely predictable, resultant of the interplay of embedded, embodied, and environmental elements. It is also hypothesized that, just as motivational systems lead to the emergence of new capacities and functions, so too do new capacities beget new motivational derivatives in an ever-more complex developmental spiral. Early experience plays an enormously important and highly individual role in the creation of conative patterns that eventually crystalize into what we, as observers and theoreticians, begin to categorize into systems
Emmanuel Ghent, M.D. is Clinical Professor, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York University, where he was founding chairman of the Relational Track. He is a Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute.
This paper is a version of a paper written originally in 1998 for a book that never materialized. It was presented at the Washington (DC) School of Psychiatry, November 6, 1999 and, in abbreviated form, at the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, New York, January 8, 2000; the New York University Postdoctoral Program Colloquium, January 27, 2001; and the Institute for Specialization in the Psychoanalytic Psychology of the Self and Relational Psychoanalysis, Rome, October 6, 2001.
of motivation. Depending on the observer and his or her frame of reference, certain motivational systems are held to be superordinate to others; these then are held up as basic motives. As psychoanalysts we currently find ourselves in a situation of competing organizational systems vying for prominence. The multiplicity of such systems speaks to our uncertainty and the need for further study to clarify the many questions that this line of thinking evokes. The second section of this paper explores the relations among need, wish, impulse, and defense as varieties of motivational systems that have already crystalized out of the early beginnings of motivation.