Introduction
What I’m going to say today has its clinical basis in the cases of babies who are at risk of autism. This allows us to introduce the way Lacan criticizes the second theory of drives in Freud, in which he opposed life drive to death drive. Lacan regards it as nothing other than the biface of any drive, necessarily sexual and partial; in dialectical opposition, he introduces narcissism.
The theory of drives in Lacan and the Research Preaut to spot signs of risk in babies
Our research, begun more than 20 years ago, has been published in an international journal (PLOS ONE) in December 2017. It concerns a grid enabling us to assess at 4 and 9 months the risk of autism spectrum disorders in the baby. Statistical results show that it estimates this risk at 4 months as well as the two-year CHAT.
Then again, my theoretical reflection on the drive, which was to lead to hypotheses to distinguish babies at risk from others, began in 1992. Throughout that summer, I had been working on the text of Freud: Drive and their Vicissitudes in French, in English, and German, in the light of what Lacan proposed in a very sparse way in several lessons from Seminary 11, The Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Even if Lacan immediately announced that the drive was one of these four concepts, it was a real puzzle to rebuild, the pieces being in several different lessons, without the slightest pedagogical concern. He was making up as he went, with genius. Throughout this painstaking work, I was very surprised to find concepts capable of accounting for the enigmas with which my practice of the autism clinic confronted me. I wondered if I wasn't dreaming. At that time, we had at the Freudian International Association a space of theoretical reflection on psychoanalytic concepts: the Dictionary. I provided them with the text; none of the colleagues found anything to complain about. So it was published as it was written.
This text by Lacan, for I had added nothing, only shaped it, presents two revolutionary points concerning the usual analytical thinking.
The first, which is the basis of the signs of autism risk in babies of the PREAUT grid, was to propose to think of the 3rd time of the drive, where the “Ich” becomes the object of the drive of another subject “eine Anderes Subject” not in a passive way as Freud writes, but as an active form of passivity. For Lacan, it is the time when the Ich "is" the object of this drive for another subject. This middle way, this active form of passivity: making itself, was truly revolutionary. This discovery of Lacan we can see in the daily clinic with a typical, banal baby. It gets his foot bit by his mom, gets looked at by her, gets heard by her. What about the other babies? What do we see in the family films of those who have become autistic? [1]These babies let themselves be kissed, watched, called, but they do not reverse the situation by doing anything for the other. They remain Freudian. In this third time, they let themselves be passively kissed on the foot for example. They let themselves be watched and sometimes respond to the look. While typical babies, those who are well, present this particularly active form of passivity, they get their feet eaten, they actively make themselves being watched by the others. PREAUT research has shown that this could be a way to spot babies at risk.
But there was another revolutionary element in this text that I may not have highlighted so well because I did not see to what use it could be put in the clinical field. Later, it showed me its central importance, and that is the subject of this work.
How to care for babies at risk
In the first months of life, the cerebral and epigenetic plasticity is immense. We are not the only ones betting on the possibility of major changes at this time of life or even a reversal of the autism picture that is still in its infancy. In recent years, research on autism in genetics has shown the predominant aspect of its epigenetic dimension. And it can be modified by the environment. What can treat the baby? Our clinical experience shows us that intense pleasure, which breaks down the principle of pleasure as homeostasis is possible with the drive-game. If the baby starts loving to go to catch enjoyment in the field of the Other, as Lacan puts it when he talks about this time when the Ich make itself object of another subject (generally the mother), and if this is repeated many times, its destiny may change.
For this, it is necessary to distinguish well the field of sexual drives specific to the baby in his experience with his mother and the narcissistic field where some respond while remaining in danger of slipping towards autism. But these concepts are tricky to handle and to oppose at this stage. I don't know if there is another clinical experience where the distinction between these two fields might matter.
In general, we identify them as composing an ensemble. This is the common clinical experience we face. Both are vital for the constitution of the subject.
In the home movies of babies who later became autistic, many show no interest neither for the narcissistic appeal of their parents nor for any drive-game in which they would offer themselves as an object for another subject. These two registers, therefore, seem to go well together.
But in some babies, the home movies show us that they may have been sensitive to the narcissistic discourse of their “next helper” (Nebenmensch), who erected them phallically without thereby becoming the object of anyone's drive. How can such a clinical phenomenon be theoretically understood? If the two go together, how can we explain why a baby who responds so well to the parent's narcissistic call can still become autistic?
Our scientific research friends from Pisa[2], who had received these home movies from the parents of these babies, were stunned. They ended up creating a special category of entry into autism for these babies[3]
Mauricio is the first of these babies. The evolution towards autism of this child was for them an enigma. He had arrived at the age of three at the Stella Maris Foundation for a diagnosis. His autism was obvious. But the baby they saw in the home movies the parents gave to them, did not correspond with what they were used to see. Indeed, in several scenes of these films, the baby responded to his parents who spoke to him, and he preferred the voice of his mother to his mobile. It must be said that they had an excellent prosody in their motherese.[4]
And it is a scene from when he was ten months old, which after baffling me, allowed me to understand the clinical and theoretical richness of this distinction of narcissistic and drive fields proposed by Lacan.
Here it is: He is in his bar crib when his father enters and addresses him warmly, as these parents usually did. Father: "So? Are you going to show me?” The baby starts to stand up by supporting himself on the bars of the bed. The father encourages him: "How strong you are! Go on, go!” The father's prosody is warm and indicates his admiration for the son. As the baby stands up, the father's voice comments on the event in the enthusiastic mode of a football reporter: "Go! You're going to make it. Go, Mauricio! Well done! You're great Mauricio!” The baby listens to the father and his face and his voice make clear that he likes all these compliments.
The father continues with an enthusiastic voice: "Mauricio! Mauricio!” He is the bearer of his son in every sense of the word. And he thus sustains not only his still failing motor skills but above all the attention of his son. Enthusiastic himself, Mauricio even lets one hand go and reaches out to the one who is filming. The next moment, the baby looks down, but already the father's voice envelops him: "Go, Mauricio! Great Mauricio! magnificent!” At this exclamation, the baby looks again towards the father, blinking, as if to show his satisfaction at being admired in this way. "You're splendid!" says the father. The baby wobbles a little on his legs, the father makes him stand again: "Ti, Ti, Ti, Ti, Ti! Big Mauricio! ». As soon as Mauricio looks elsewhere, his father calls him back with the same enthusiastic admiration: "So Mauricio? You're very strong, you know?” The baby looks at him immediately and repeats his father's ti, ti, ti.
The father has a great answer: "What do you want to say to me, darling?" This indicates that the father makes the hypothesis that his son is a subject. Psychoanalyst colleagues, who have not had the opportunity to watch home movies of babies who later became autistic, sometimes assume that these parents did not make the hypothesis that their baby is a subject. I imagine that such a hypothesis comes to them depending on the state of amazement in which they met these parents two years later. Indeed, even Mauricio's parents, so warm with their baby, also ended up petrifying themselves in front of their boy who, having become able to walk, was only going incessantly from one side of the room to the other as if they were not there. We must be careful not to take the effects for causes.
But back to the theoretical stupor in which Mauricio had put us all. How could a little baby who seemed to respond so well become autistic?
It is still in the theoretical opposition that Lacan makes between drive-field and narcissistic field that I found the theoretical elements that make us capable of understanding such a situation. Clearly, this pleasant experience had not inscribed in him the permanence of a path to the great pleasure of the Other, towards what Lacan calls the catching of the enjoyment of the Other, which is realized by the drive closure when the baby becomes the object of this other subject that becomes his Other in this experience. Indeed, the full viewing of the movies does not at any time show Mauricio seeking to become the drive-object of his parents. However, it is only the frequent repetition of this particular experience, that of finding a way to trigger in the other his drive pleasure, for example by extending little feet and small hands so that he enjoys it orally, that the baby at risk protects himself from an autistic evolution. The clinical experience shows us that the fact that being the object of the parent's admiration does not have the same effect. This empirical observation needs to be understood from a metapsychological point of view.
Recently, I wanted to review these concepts because, having to receive several of these at-risk babies with their parents, I was faced with similar situations, with the fact that these babies can respond on the narcissistic level without entering the drive closure. And that can mislead the therapist who cares for it as well as the parents.
I know that the way Lacan exposes his theory of drives in the Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis Seminar is not well known and recognized. He dealt with other concepts later on. But I will use what Freud says in his paper: To Introduce Narcissism. He opposes a speculative theory with science built on the interpretation of what he calls the empirie.[5] "The one that relies on clinical data. Of course, it must be able to change as research progresses. Its foundation is only observation."[6] We know that the following year he will present his first theory of drives, where he opposes sexual drives and self-conservation drives. Then, he will reject it by proposing a second, the one opposing life's drive and death’s drive. In 1964, when Lacan took up the question of drive, he knew both.
Lacan criticises the second and the first theories of drive
Lacan said on May 29th, 1964: "…the relation between the living subject and that which he loses by having to pass, for his reproduction, through the sexual cycle. In this way, I explain the essential affinity of every drive with the zone of death and reconcile the two sides of the drive —which, at the same time, makes present sexuality in the unconscious and represents, in its essence, death.” (p. 199). So, life and death drive become the two sides of sexual drive.17th June 1964, p. 257
He repeats this question 4 lessons later: "The distinction between the life drive and the death drive is true in as much as it manifests two aspects of the drive. But this is so only on condition that one sees all the sexual drives as articulated at the level of significations in the unconscious, in as much as what they bring out is death" Lesson 19, June 17th, 1964, p.257.
For Lacan, the real drives are the sexual ones, always partial by the way. The drives of self-conservation of the first theory of drives are not true drives. He does not deny the existence of what he calls the instinct of life. There is self conservation, but for him, it is not a drive. He then rereads the first theory of drives by opposing the drive field with another field that he will call the narcissistic field of love in which the old Ego drives will be situated. This echoes what Freud has thoroughly opposed in his text To Introduce Narcissism (1914). He wants to study the narcissism he calls primary, that is, common to all human beings, as opposed to narcissistic perversions that are pathological forms.
Freud starts from the investment of psychic energies:
First, in the narcissistic state they are reunited and impossible to differentiate.
Then, with object investment, one can differentiate the sexual energy, the libido, and an energy of the drives of the Ego (O.C., vol. XII, p. 220). But then Freud revolves around the opposition between the Ego libido and object libido. By attributing the term libido to both, this text can be confusing. This has been the case and continues to be so among us. Here is the situation that will allow Lacan, later, to keep in the field of drives only the partial sexual drives and to throw in another field the Ego drives, specific to narcissism and from which the drive character will be removed. This last field takes for Lacan the name of the narcissistic field of love.
For sure, such an organization of Lacan's thinking in Seminar 11 is useful for the clinical cases of these particular states where some babies do not pass the threshold to go towards an investment of libido in objects to recognize sexual drives. One can understand that this text can be read as affirming the narcissistic precondition of any drive. This holds and is consistent with the babies’ clinic. The next step that a specialist of narcissism can make, is to read that narcissism is always driven. That is to say to reject the fact that for Lacan the Ego drive is no longer a drive. In his 1914 text, Freud opposes sexual drives with Ego drives. The following year, in Pulsions and its vicissitudes, he merely substituted the word "Ego-drive" for the word "self-conservation drives" and the first theory of drives was thereby grounded. These oppositions are important because, in the background, we find the debate with Young and his monism. It is clear that narcissism is on the side of the Ego drives in Freud, all his text on narcissism goes in this direction.
Opposition between drive field and narcissistic field of love
What I read in Seminar 11, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is that for Lacan the whole register of need, the register therefore of the survival of the individual, the register of what Freud called Ich Triebe (Ego drives) falls out of the field of the drive. Where? On the side of what he calls the narcissistic field of love.
And will it be between this narcissistic field of love on one side and that of the drive on the other, that lies the point where Lacan would put into play a new dualism?
Let’s reread it together:
Lacan: "At this level, there is no trace of drive functions, except those that are not true drives, and which Freud calls in his text the Ich Triebe. The level of the Ich is not that of the drive, and it is there – I would ask you to read the text very attentively—that Freud grounds love”. 29th May, p 191
Sexuality as such is re-entering, exercising its own activity, through partial drives. These drives, for Lacan, let's note it again, are the only ones to deserve the title of a drive.
Lacan: "Everything Freud tells us shows us this circular movement of something of the thrust* that comes out through the erogenous edge to return to it as its target, after going around something x, which I call the object “a”. This is where the subject comes, to reach what is strictly speaking the dimension of the Other" (with a big O). In these three times of the drive, Lacan sees a gap that would not exist in the narcissistic field.
The clinic for babies at risk of autism stages these two registers. First, narcissism, which is first and most important but not enough to capture the baby definitively. In this clinic, the question of lack on the side of the drive is very clear. But when we praise someone, a baby for instance, there is no indication of some lack on our side. We are the ones who know, the mistress, the sports coach and we award good points. The situation is completely different when the baby has caught enjoyment in his mother's field. The baby will hear a particular form of prosody that exists only when the bewilderment, due to the unexpected of what has just happened, is found together with the illumination of the pleasure experienced. I use here the two terms of the poet Heine with which Freud introduced us in “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious”, to what happens with the third person. This is the story of the poor man Jewish, Hirsch-Hyacinth, extractor of corns, who tells someone:” I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal – quite famillionairely”[7]. The poet Heine, passing by, hears the sentence. It's not German, he might say! It's not in the code (A). Then, after the first moment of bewilderment, he lets himself be incompleted by this novelty and invaded by the light of the pleasure of this joke that the poor Jew made without knowing. Indeed! Rothschild could only receive in this mode! How adequate and funny! [8]
The second part of Freud’s book is devoted to the happy findings of children. But it is from the first day that the least of their gestures, and their gaze, bewilder and illuminate the parents. The parents then produce a particular form of prosody that needs these two elements to produce its specific curves. Anne Fernald discovered this in the early 1990s. Babies are particularly fond of this prosody in their mother's voice even before the milk rises in her breast.
Lacan, in his Seminar on the Formations of the Unconscious, has put together the graph of desire with this story of the poor Jew who says ‘Famillionar’ and the poet who, after a time of bewilderment, lets himself be incompleted and then illuminated by the pleasure of what becomes a joke.
And this is how he writes on the graph this capital S of capital O crossed out, which he later calls the enjoyment of the Other. This crossing out represents for him the moment of bewilderment, of surprise, that allows the Other to give his lack. This is the register of the drive.
The graph of desire allows us to visualize what Lacan says in seminary XI when he says that the “Ich” (which we replace here by the baby) will catch enjoyment in the field of the Other. It would be a graph that would indicate the drive closure in one of its passages.
We read that there is an innate movement from the baby to the other. But the fact that the baby is immediately so sucked in by what might bewilder and illuminate that other, forces us to recognize that the baby's psyche does not form in the “deferred action” of the satisfaction of needs (hunger and thirst), which is commonly thought by the theory of anaclisis. From the outset, there is also a push in the baby towards the second register of the graph, towards the enjoyment of the crossed out Other.
Babies quickly realize that when they offer their little foot, the other with this prosody that does not deceive tells them that they are “good to eat”, good at the enjoyment of this Other. Later, it is with a toy cup that they have fun to see how they can offer a good coffee for the imaginary enjoyment of their caregiver, the other. It is always a question of drive closure and it is only possible thanks to the lack in the Other.
[1] These are films that the parents made at home, long before they thought their baby would ever have a problem.
[2] We have to thank our friends neuro-psychiatrists Filippo Muratori and Sandra Maestro, from the Stella Maris Foundation in Pisa, who since the 1990s collected these films and made them available to us for research work.
[3] The so-called late onset category, the category of babies said to have entered autism late. Even if this concept, published in scientific research, has become an accepted term in the scientific community, these babies, for the grid PREAUT, would have been at 4 months as much at risk as the others.
[4] About the responses of babies, who later became autistic, to this particular form of prosody, there is now, in English, a consistent scientific bibliography.
[5] term employed by translators of Complete Works
[6] Freud S (1913). : To introduce narcissism, O.C. Vol XII p. 221., PUF, 2005.
[7] Freud cited the poet Heine. Freud S.: Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious, S. E. Vol. VIII, p. 12 and p. 16.
[8] That’s the way Lacan put’s the story in light in his Seminar V: The Formations of the Unconscous. Lesson of 6th November 1957.
