Hans Loewald, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis” (1960) (V)

In the last entry, we considered Loewald’s analysis of Freud’s original drive concept, one associated with the 1915 essay, “Drives and Their Fates.” Loewald now argues that “Freud gradually moves away from this position” (22), and quotes materials from Beyond the Pleasure Principle and An Outline of Psychoanalysis which reflect this changing conception.

What sort of changes do we observe? Loewald is less concerned with obvious change in classification. From the division of drives into the “self-preserving” and “sexual,” Freud arrives at the mythical pair, Eros and Thanatos, allegedly discernible at all levels of (biological) reality. But what is significant, it seems, is not merely that Freud parses drives according to different features and applies new names — as though he were now classifying animals, say, by their number of legs, rather than the color of their fur. What a drive essentially is — its nature, function, and its relation to the rest of the organism — is re-conceptualized.

We saw that, in "Drives and Their Fates,” a drive was considered an "inner stimulus” that the “nervous apparatus” must somehow discharge. With the aid of some suitable object, the “tension” represented by the drive is reduced, one’s discomfort resolved. As early as Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, Freud ascribes another suite of characteristics to drives:

1. Whereas earlier, “function” or “purpose” applied to the apparatus — which worked to address and discharge the inner “stimulus” — these now apply to drives themselves. That is to say, drives are now invested with particular and variable functions. (These functions, we will find, go well beyond the — somewhat vacuous — “aim” of discharge or satisfaction.) And this means: “Instinct is no longer an intrapsychic stimulus, but an expression of the function, the ‘urge’ of the nervous apparatus to deal with environment” (22).

2. These functions — whose seat is now the drives, not the “apparatus” as distinct from the drives — are themselves of a different sort. The apparatus, in the earlier model, had the task of addressing, taking up, and discharging a stimulus arising from an inner source — a process that Loewald calls the “reflex arc.” Now, however, the drives — Eros an Thanatos — are viewed as per se “urges” to unify and dissolve: “[T]he aim of the instinct Eros is no longer formulated in terms of a contentless ‘satisfaction,’ or satisfaction in the sense of abolishing stimuli, but the aim is clearly seen in terms of integration” (22). This evidently means that a drive need not await the emergence of a fully-developed apparatus to acquire a “functional” character. On the contrary, from its earliest origins, a drive, and so the id, is defined by these irreducible functions of unification and dissolution. A drive, finally, is not something in connection with which the apparatus “functions”; it is the function itself.

3. One significant implication of these revisions is a much tighter link between “drive” and “object.” A drive, again, is no longer simply an inner, self-contained, and antecedent “stimulus,” which a separate apparatus may arrange to expend upon an appropriate object as a “vehicle” for it. A drive is rather a “function" that cannot be separated even in thought from its object. “Unification” and “dissolution” presuppose “that which is unified" and “that which is dissolved.” A drive “exists” at all only inasmuch as it is unifying and dissolving its object. It is no longer solely the ego — classically the agency of “integration” par excellence — which relates to objects in this way. Hence while there is still some basis for distinguishing between the levels of id and ego, they can no longer be distinguished according to the former criteria: “In such a perspective, instinctual drives are as primarily related to ‘objects,’ to the ‘external world’ as the ego is” (23).

4. Finally, I have just been hinting at another, related implication of Freud’s mature revisions: not only is a drive now inseparable from the object upon which it acts; it is at the same time inseparable from the mental apparatus as a whole — above all from the ego. Here is Loewald’s evocative description of the mind’s differentiated “unity,” according to the picture now emerging:

“In his conception of Eros, Freud moves away from an opposition between instinctual drives and ego, and toward a view according to which instinctual drives become moulded, channelled, focused, tamed, transformed, and sublimated in and by the ego organization, an organization which is more complex and at the same time more sharply elaborated and articulated than the drive-organization which we call the id. But the ego is an organization which continues, much more than it is in opposition to, the inherent tendencies of the drive-organization.” (23, my italics)

We may also look at things in the following way: Freud’s late modifications to the concept of “drive” entail corresponding modifications (likewise unappreciated) to the concepts of (1) “aim,” (2) “object,” and (3) “apparatus” — each of which, of course, pertains to drive. These revisions carry us

1. from the “aims” of discharge or satisfaction to those of unification and dissolution

2. from the “object” as vehicle for discharge to the object-for-appropriation or object-as-appropriated, and

3. from the “apparatus” as an autonomous, superordinate system — one that absorbs and “works off” inner stimuli pressing for discharge — to a more-or-less sophisticated, internally-differentiated expression of the drives themselves, the irreducible urges to unify and dissolve manifested at all levels of (biological) reality

Thus Loewald associates Freud’s early definition of drive with “the reflex-arc scheme of a self-contained, closed system” (22) — essentially “intrapsychic,” it seems, because the drives have as yet no necessary relation to the “object” of experience. (Except, again, as a vehicle “fitted” to satisfaction.) By contrast, Freud’s subsequent descriptions of drives imply some kind of “metabolism" or “interchange” between mind and world at the first, most primitive levels of development. And if mind, even at the level of the drives — so-called id energies — is bound up inseparably with its object, then the very notion of a purely-intrapsychic mind becomes questionable. In fact, the form the “drives” assume in any particular person will depend on the earliest “objects” it has “integrated.” These drives, after all, are simply this unifying and dissolving activity itself, and thus have no antecedent independence, no self-definition, apart from those particular “objects” he or she has engaged from the first.

Now, this detour through Freud’s evolving treatment of drives has enabled Loewald to accomplish several objectives:

1. He has revisited and appropriated a drive concept whose definition is consistent with the innovations of ego psychology, and thus permits a reconciliation between this psychology and a “drive theory” previously regarded as incompatible with it, or at least awkward to assimilate.

2. He has rectified a stubborn misconception within psychoanalysis, premised upon an outmoded understanding of drives — namely, the view that only the ego, and emphatically not the id, is a creature of integrative adaptation, structured with and by its world and, in particular, early object-relations.

3. He has established an intellectual foundation for an understanding, not only of early development, but of —as the essay’s title has it — the “therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.” For only an understanding of drives along these lines supports a picture of analyst-patient interaction which involves the “mediations” of both (1) self-environment and (2) ego-id. Indeed, as Loewald argues, we now perceive the inseparability of these two “relations” — 1 and 2 — with one another. As I anticipated in a previous entry, the integration of ego and id is now regarded as co-dependent with the integration of self and other.