Artificial Intelligence on The Couch. Staying Human Post-AI.

This paper examines the human relationship to technology, and AI in particular, including the proposition that algorithms are the new unconscious. Key is the question of how much human ability will be duplicated and transcended by general machine intelligence. More and more people are seeking connection via social media and interaction with artificial beings. The paper examines what it means to be human and which of these traits are already or will be replicated by AI. Therapy bots already exist. It is easier to envision AI therapy guided by CBT manuals than psychoanalytic techniques. Yet, a demonstration of how AI can already perform dream analysis reaching beyond a dream's manifest content is presented. The reader is left to consider whether these findings demand a new role for psychoanalysis in supporting, sustaining, and reframing our humanity as we create technology that transcends our abilities.

Ferenczi's variations on the death drive.

This theoretical paper discusses three variations on the death drive, developed by Sándor Ferenczi. We present a brief history of the use of the term death drive among the first psychoanalysts and argue that, as early as 1913, the notion is used by Ferenczi and serves as a conceptual background for his thinking. During the 1920s, Ferenczi revisits part of this concept, focusing on what he identifies as a primacy of self-destruction. The destructive drive gains an adaptive character responsible for the mortification of parts of the individual, in exchange for the survival of the whole. In this variation, the tendency to regress also arises as the self-destruction drive and the acceptance of unpleasure involves a psychic "reckoning-machine." In the final variation, left unfinished, the death drive at times receives new names, like drive for "conciliation," and at others, the very idea of the death drive is criticized.

The Will to Truth, the Death Drive and the Will to Power.

This paper claims that Freud's idea of the death drive is analogous to the will to truth in traditional philosophy and can be better understood as a truth drive. The argument is based upon Nietzsche's interpretation of the will to truth as a concealed will to death. This interpretation emphasizes the opposition between truth and life; truth is a concept of constancy while life is a concept of change. Freud's recognition of the conservative nature of the drives brings him to the paradoxical conclusion of the existence of a death drive. It is paradoxical, for Freud, since it considers death as a fundamental principle of life and as its aim. The paper suggests that by replacing the concept of death by the concept of truth and using Nietzsche's idea of "the will to power" this paradox can be resolved without losing Freud's insight of the dialectic nature of psychological life.

Working Out Phantoms in Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma.

The concept of Trans-Generational Transmission of Trauma (TTT) is explored through a clinical presentation of a young man in search of a history buried by negation, disavowal, and foreclosure of the ravages of traumatic beginnings of unwelcome children. Transmitted down the generations as phantoms buried in crypts of the psyche, they emerge generations later as holes in the self manifested as a sense of meaninglessness, alienation, and feeling outcast. Historicization of the buried past can bring symbolic representation to phantoms and disperse their influence. Social consequences of unwelcome children are discussed as some may choose violence against others as a solution to their excessive death drive.

Something Was Lost in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle: A Ferenczian Reading.

Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) brought a lot of new possibilities to psychoanalytic theory, but also a series of losses. While I recognize the importance of the death drive as a metapsychological construct, I argue that the first thing that went missing with the arrival of this groundbreaking Freudian text is the theorization of the ego instincts or the self-preservative drives. Freud never articulated some plausible inheritors of the ego instincts. I follow the Budapest School, and especially the voice of Sándor Ferenczi, for addressing this loss. The second thing that went missing after Beyond the Pleasure Principle is our openness in thinking through repetition. With the seductive formulation of the "daemonic" repetition in this 1920 text, our theoretical imagination around repetition seems to have been affected. I draw on the work of Sándor Ferenczi for exploring new forms of repetition. Finally, I offer a Ferenczian re-reading of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, which I see as crucial in the process of pluralizing our thinking on repetition.

Inhibition.

This article explores the notion of inhibition at a theoretical and clinical level in psychoanalysis. The first part follows the development of the notion in Freud's work, from the "Project" (1950a [1895]) to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d). It identifies the two approaches to inhibition, the first from an energetic point of view, the second from the angle of its relations to anxiety. The second part of the article is devoted to the links between inhibition and Freud's thoughts about death, in particular in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and the links to the death drive. It draws on some of Jones' notes and presents a brief clinical illustration. The third part focuses more particularly on general inhibition, especially in depression and melancholia. Based on the treatment of one patient, the author shows how the slow process of overcoming general inhibition is achieved through the gradual use of negation. From an economic point of view, it is suggested that psychoanalytic treatment, through the transference and associative speech, has an effect on the depletion of energy by diverting the "suction" of stimuli, paving the way for the formation of drive representatives, or inhibitions as symptoms, which will need to be dissected.

Was It Just a Dream? Aging and Dreaming the Psychoanalytic Process.

By revisiting the last years of a long psychoanalytic treatment of a female patient, a psychoanalyst reflects on her own development as a clinician and on the changes in her experience of psychoanalytic generativity. An increasing ability to understand patient's shifts between creativity and destructiveness brings about a different understanding of the process of mourning, while the shared aging of the analytic dyad highlights the difficulty of ending an analysis that has become a way of life.

Desexualization: An interesting problem in The Ego and the Id.

The sudden appearance of the term "desexualization" in The Ego and the Id is considered as a marker of the subtle, almost unnoticeable changes that occurred in Freud's thinking after 1920. The strict dichotomy between life and death drives posed a series of new problems that force Freud to invoke a "desexualized libido" in order to restore some fluidity in the psychic apparatus. But the mechanism of desexualization was difficult to describe and Freud seems to resort to a circular explanation. In the end, the restored dialectics between Eros and the death drive, thanks to desexualization, force Freud to invoke a split in the ego itself.

The Ego and the Id: Concepts and developments.

In this note I have limited myself to describing some convergent and divergent developments arising from the innovative concepts present in The Ego and the Id. It could be argued that a part of the psychoanalytic movement wished to emphasize the function of the Ego (Anna Freud, Hartmann, Rapaport), while another part (Melanie Klein and her followers) delved into the dynamics of the Superego and the Id in primitive and pathological states of mind. I will examine three themes presents in The Ego and the Id: the assertion that a part of the Ego is unconscious; the idea that the death drive becomes part of the dynamics of melancholia and its Superego; the concept of fusion and defusion of the life and death instinct. Freud's writing represents a forge of new ideas that have made psychoanalysis ever more creative and capable of understanding the complexity and mysteriousness of the human mind.

An Accident With the Death Drive and Its Working Through in the Analyst's Countertransference.

Working through the different faces and vicissitudes of the death drive in the countertransference, and especially through projective identification, is a very challenging process. A thorough and versatile process of containment and working through of the manifold threatening expressions and influences of the death drive is required, experienced most specifically and deeply in the arena of projective identification. This paper demonstrates how each aspect that unfolds in the analyst's countertransference sheds light on a particular layer of anxiety and internal object relations related to it. The creation of a new meaning to the differing expressions of the death drive gradually lessens the compulsion to repeat and enables a better integration between the life and death drives. This process will be illustrated by a prolonged clinical case that involved intense internal working through of the death drive in the analyst's countertransference.

To and Fro Between Eros and Thanatos: What Where and the Death Drive.

This paper tries to read What Where as Beckett's realistic and pessimistic presentation of the ontological conditions of the human history, which the play defines as investigation, exploitation and quest for the ultimate truth. Its analysis finds that this presentation has important threads in common with the criticism of civilization in the later Freud's metapsychology, which formulated "an all-embracing, grand theory of the psyche" in terms of the development of the individual as well as the evolution of the entire species on the basis of the maxim that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" What Where enacts this Freudian vision in theatrical terms as its theater version foregrounds the phylogenetic scale with the physical subjections happening among the characters and its television version the interior depth of the mind with the maneuvering of the television images. Another important commonality is that the character Bam is presented as a figure pertaining to Freud's concept of the death drive. The resulting theatrical picture is a sobering and realistic testimony to the individual and collective human existence that has always survived on questionings about, exploitation of and quest for a different object. This strikes a chord with how Beckett's characters embody his poetics of 'senility,' and leads to the political implications of freedom without hope or meaning, which is the infinite task of Beckett's senile characters.

On brutal gestures: trauma, destruction, and forms of mental illness.

The Bohemian writer Milan Kundera narrates, more than once, an experience from his years of life under an authoritarian regime. It is the memory of a violent fantasy of rape, one in which libido and destruction are mingled. Based on this memory and how he wrote about it, we present two forms of mental illnesses (by activation and by passivation) and relate them to the model proposed by Green to think about depressive states through passivation. The first form of mental illness, by activation, is the result of an overly successful active defense against anxiety. The second form, by passivation, is a paradoxical reaction to agony in the face of deadly psychic states. Arguing that this second form of mental illness is frequently identified in individuals during periods of political change, we consider that the intricacy between the drives of destruction and the libido, even when it generates fantasies or brutal gestures, can reveal itself as an episodic attempt of an active defense amid the predominance of passivation generated by post-traumatic helplessness.

The work of Benno Rosenberg.

Benno Rosenberg's work has been little translated into English. Yet, his work on masochism is a landmark in France. He set himself the goal of deploying all the richness and implications of the second Freudian drive theory and the introduction of the death drive. He therefore returns to "the Economic Problem of Masochism" to give all its value to the drive fusion that it achieves internally and which is therefore for it "guardian of life", even if it is can also be fatal. He draws consequences on the psychic construction of the ego, the superego and on that of temporality. He also describes a "work of melancholy" which is different from mourning. Thinking it necessary to push the consequences of the new theorizing further than Freud was able to do, he revisits "Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety" to articulate the triggering of anxiety by a libidinal demand and the threat to the unity of the ego who comes from the death drive due to conflict. Starting from the psychosomatic descriptions of Pierre Marty, whose options are specified, he also proposed a metapsychology of somatization during the overflow of the psyche by the destructiveness which will then threaten the body.

The correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud in "Why War" and the socio-political perspective of Alfred Adler.

This paper discusses the correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, published in the Standard Edition of Freud's writings under the title of "Why War". Freud's answers to some of Einstein's questions are compared to Alfred Adler's ideas on the role of "striving for power" versus "community feeling" and the role of these two forces in the development of war. Adler had begun to develop an object relations line of thinking in his early papers on the aggressive drive and the need for affection (Adler 1908a and 1908b). It is suggested that if Freud and Adler had been able to continue working together, they might have been able to bring their differing perspectives on the issue of war together to address both the role of power and loss of power, as well as the role of narcissistic defences in the development of war. As it is, this was left to later psychoanalytic thinkers, in particular the Kleinian analysts, who underlined the role of reverting to paranoid-schizoid thinking in the face of humiliation, rather than facing depression and the work of mourning. The work of mourning is illustrated using excerpts from Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem".

"Death drive" scientifically reconsidered: Not a drive but a collection of trauma-induced auto-addictive diseases.

Over the last 102 years, a lot of discussion was being held about the psychoanalytic conception of the "death drive," but still with inconclusive results. In this paper, we start with a brief review of Freud's conception, followed by a comprised overview of its subsequent support or criticisms. The core of our argument is a systematic review of current biochemical research about two proposed manifestations of the "death drive," which could hopefully move the discussion to the realm of science. It was already established that drive satisfaction leads to the secretion of beta-endorphins, and research evidence also shows that the same biochemical mechanisms get activated in the case of masochism and the gambling disorder but only if they are preceded by chronic frustration of the essential drives. We conclude that the actual situation is more complex than Freud hypothesized, and that a fundamental revision of the psychoanalytic drive theory is necessary.

Beyond the death drive: Entropy and free energy.

In this paper I offer an overview of the possible links between psychoanalytical metapsychology and contemporary work in neuroscience concerning entropy and the free energy principle. After briefly describing the theory of living systems put forward by the neuroscientist Karl Friston based on the notion of entropy, we sum up the use of the notion of free energy by Friston and Freud. I then analyze how these notions improve the intelligibility of psychic functioning and can be associated with several psychoanalytical concepts, in particular the death drive. I approach from the same perspective the regulation of free energy associated with psychic envelopes and early intersubjectivity. It thus appears that the psychic apparatus can be considered at its different levels, from the most primary to the most secondary, as having the essential function of reducing entropy and free energy. Various forms of "failure" of this process of linking, regulation and transformation of energy within the psychic apparatus could be considered as the origin of different psychopathological manifestations as suggested in the last part of this paper.

The traumatic and the work of the après-coup in Freud's opus.

This text explores the evolution of the notion of trauma in Freud's work and of its decisive import for the organization of psychic functioning through a two-stage process called the après-coup. By following the three steps of Freud's theory of the drives, the author shows that the conception of the traumatic is gradually internalized to become a basic quality of all drives as a tendency to return to an earlier state, and ultimately an organic, inanimate state. An open question remains in Freud about this tendency's relation to Eros, and therefore to the links between Eros and the traumatic state. This question has remained latent within the psychoanalytic community. The author proposes to conceive of Eros as an infinitely extensible tendency that needs containing in order for it to contribute to evolving inscriptions. Thus is outlined one traumatic state as a return to the inorganic and another traumatic state as an infinite extensibility, both being transformed by the superego and its imperatives in order to generate all life forms.

From the Principle of Inertia to the Death Drive: The Influence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics on the Freudian Theory of the Psychical Apparatus.

In the Freudian theory of the psychical apparatus, the introduction from the 1920s onward of the second drive dualism appears as a major turning point. The idea of a "death drive," first expressed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920), is generally considered to be a new concept, one that represents a break with Freud's previous thinking. It has often surprised the scholars because it seemed, at first sight, difficult to reconcile with the idea of the singularity of living organisms within which the psychical functions form an integral part. Our research aims to demonstrate that the theory of the death drive does not represent a complete change in direction for Freud. It is present, in essence, in his earliest work, to the extent that the "principle of inertia" described in 1895 in A Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1895) can be seen as a precursor to the death drive. Based on a reading of Freud's early formulations of his ideas, we aim to bring to light how certain aporias that seem inherent to the concept of the death drive can be overcome if we consider them in the context of an epistemological model that draws on the paradigms of physics which were conveyed by the Helmholtz School. Namely, we can consider the idea of death drive in reference to the principle of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics.

Repetition and the compulsion to repeat, a French perspective.

The discovery of a compulsion to repeat and its involvement in the elaboration of the second drive theory of the libido and the death drive was fundamental in the evolution of Freud's thought: psychic functioning was no longer governed by the pleasure principle alone, and this changed analytic technique. This led in 1923 to a change of topography in order to take into consideration the existence of destructiveness within the mind that Freud had hitherto underestimated.

Neiko-erotic: contemporary erotic literature in the light of Freudian psychoanalysis / Neiko-erótica: a literatura erótica contemporânea à luz da psicanálise freudiana

RESUMO: Este texto objetiva apresentar uma leitura da literatura erótica contemporânea a partir da teoria psicanalítica de Sigmund Freud. Percorrendo a história da escrita feminina e da literatura erótica, verifica-se o surgimento da chamada literatura erótica contemporânea. Entre as características desse gênero, destaca-se o cenário das tramas eróticas que torna central um eixo sombrio no qual gravita a sexualidade das personagens que, à luz da teoria freudiana, pode ser lida como um caráter disruptivo, característica fundamental das relações amorosas. Nesse viés, para que a erótica se valha como tal, torna-se necessária a presença de um traço discordante que nomeamos de neiko-erótico.

ABSTRACT: This text aims to present a reading of contemporary erotic literature based on Freud's psychoanalytic theory. Going through the history of women's writing and erotic literature, we can see the emergence of the so-called contemporary erotic literature. Among the characteristics of this genre, the setting of erotic plots stands out, which makes central a dark axis in which the sexuality of the characters gravitates which, in the light of Freudian theory, can be read as the disruptive character, a fundamental characteristic of love relationships. In this bias, for eroticism to be valid as such, the presence of a discordant trait that we call neiko-erotic is necessary.