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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 studies the interaction of the clinical theories of two major British theorists, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Through three clinical examples, we see how the “Klein-Winnicott dialectic” operates in a significantly developmental fashion to advance and fulfill clinical work. Winnicott’s “object survival” is looked at in developmental conjunction with Klein’s “mourning” as a primary clinical and developmental process. This interaction also captures the essence of working with the aggression of a self that has been traumatically disrupted within its early development. This paper demonstrates how such work leads to the assimilation and grieving of primal object loss, evolving into a “developmental mourning process.” This developmental mourning includes the working-through of an “abandonment depression” in the character-disordered patient. A clinical example in a 1989 essay on “psychic pain” by Betty Joseph is used to set up the clinical challenge of going beyond the symptomatic clinging behavior of developmental arrest, into full psychic birth as a separate other, an Other who can relate to an Other. Conclusively, the subjective visceral affect noted and monitored in its clinical dimensions here is that of human “heartache,” which can also include regret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, there are two ways of conceiving psychoanalysis, a classical one focused on the search for truth within the internal world of the patient, and a contemporary one perceiving the patient–therapist relationship as the axis of exploration. Rorty's criterion, which divides disciplines into either truth-based or solidarity-based, may be applied to this dichotomy. These conflicting positions come from two different historical periods: the Enlightenment and the contemporary world. They inhabit a sterile environment without theoretical discussion or comparison. The Renaissance relocated man at the centre of creation and urged him to seek encounters with others as well as with the truth concealed in nature. Possibly, these elements of truth and solidarity, initially designed as complementary, integrative, and nonconflicting, can be found in the work of some psychoanalysts, specifically in Otto Kernberg's proposals. Kernberg makes a creative integration of object relations theory, especially in its Kleinian approach, and ego psychology. In addition, Kernberg's consideration of affects as key elements of the human's internal world reflects a third psychoanalytical “way,” exposing the centrality of relational experiences from the earliest stages of life, alongside constitutional drive forces that link us to our biological make-up and determine much of our inner world and behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]