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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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This paper investigates the way poetry considers the « imaginary halo » (Bachelard) emanating from works of art, that is to say, not forms in themselves, but the suggestions, affects and experiences that those forms elicit for their beholders. According to Brancusi, the vocation of his sculpture is to arouse joy. We try to examine this emotion of joy by connecting two poems with remarks and aphorisms by Brancusi: a poem by the American modernist Mina Loy, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” (1921,) that was published with a photograph taken by the sculptor, and lines written in French by Rilke (1920,) that have been read as an evocation of Brancusi’s sculpture and thus have become a poem about Brancusi. In Loy’s poem, the experience of joy takes the guise of “rapture”, as it is defined by the philosopher Marianne Massin: a feeling of intense pleasure, intermixed with a violent abduction to the sacred, notably triggered by Grecian “agalmata” which might survive in Brancusi’s sculpture. Rapture means movement, constantly evolving. The experience of joy, if we believe the philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien, springs from a movement of amplification and projection in the future. It is this very movement that animates Brancusi’s sculpture. Poems invent figures for this imperfect movement of enlargement, and they contribute to its momentum, effecting a constant evolution of the work, making it inexhaustible, and refusing to let it come to a completion that would be its end.