The Drive

Between the frontier and the concept

Abstract

This article explores some lines of enquiry that we seek to sustain from the impasses in the teaching of Freudian metapsychology at university. In the reading of Freud's metapsychological texts on fundamental concepts such as the drive, we find returns in the students' productions that question the vicissitudes of transmission. Difficulties of reading that resonate in the teaching practice and lead us to question the paths followed, in keeping with the Freudian maxim that puts clinical interpellations before theoretical certainties. In a research project based at the Secyt UNR, we propose to review the articulations and lines of flight that link the clinical accounts in which Freud constructs the mechanisms of hysteria and obsessional neurosis and the twists within the doctrine of the drives. On this occasion, we will focus our reading on the reversals of the becoming of the drive that Freud presents as drive defences and the transformations that he reconstructs in the Historial of the Man of the Wolves (1918). From there, we seek to thread the notion of limit as a function of the concept of drive in Freudian theory and clinic.