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Do not think a life’s destiny is anything other
than the felt pressure of sense you knew as a child.
…
Glaubt nicht, Schicksal sei mehr, als das Dichte der Kindheit.
(Rilke: The seventh elegy, Martyn Crucefix, Duino Elegies, Enitharmon Press, 2006)1
Not long after a French journal with the title, La pulsion pour quoi faire?, 1984 came out, a distinguished American psychoanalyst held a conference in Paris. At the end of the meeting, he could not help propound a response to the question which the journal had launched: Are the drives of any use? “The theory of instincts is embarrassing both to the credibility and the research of psychoanalysis. Why do you French psychoanalysts still stick to this notion? Devoting yourselves to such an abstraction…” (see Baldacci, 2007).
Some decades afterwards, these questions probably weigh no less on the psychoanalytic community. The emphasis on science, method and evidence, the whole Zeitgeist, has taken a firm hold not only on culture but also, it seems, on psychoanalysis itself. The even stronger pertinence of these questions today also comes through in the alternative that the American psychoanalyst subsequently launched: attend rather to the notion of affects. It is closer to the clinical and lends itself more easily to research. This suggestion has no doubt much appeal among clinicians as well as more scientifically oriented psychoanalysts.
The idea of psychoanalysis as a modern science does obviously not go so well with the notion of instinct or drive. Even after Freud’s Trieb was re-translated to drive, largely instigated by the French and Jacques Lacan to be more precise, this understanding keeps a stamp of yesterday. Indeed, many of the directions of modern psychoanalysis grew out of attempts at departing from this part of Freud’s theories. Various directions of object relation theories are one example; Freud’s instinct theory did not harmonize with more modern views on the development of man. Self-psychology has even more explici