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Mark Solms' revision of the concept of drive represents the latest in a series of his indepth reviews of the most fundamental Freudian concepts. The movement of neuropsychoanalysis begun in 2000 with the first Congress focused precisely on a neuroscientific definition of affects and emotions. In 2013, Solms proposed a substantial and profound modification of Freud's structural model, motivating his theses which argue that the instinctual id can only be conscious. In the current paper, Solms (2021a) reaffirms and re-evaluates the centrality of drive theory in psychoanalysis and neuroscience as a starting point for understanding conscious and unconscious phenomena, in normality as well in pathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper "Revision of drive theory" (Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane, 2022, 56, 3: 363-422) Mark Solms (2021a) correctly argues that the basic motivational forces are affect systems, activated following the general homeostatic principles that govern biological processes that assure survival and reproduction. However, psychoanalytic object relation theory points to a specifically human, supraordinate integrative motivational system that condenses component affect systems into the affiliative and counteraffiliative motivations described by Freud with the concepts of libido and aggression. They are not "drives" in the psychobiological sense, but profoundly define unconscious intrapsychic conflict and are relevant in clinical psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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