Biomedical subjects
R J Loustau
Publications and source records attributed to R J Loustau.
[Sex differentiation and psychoanalysis].
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
[Protofantasy].
The author reviews Freud's postulations on proto-phantasies, and traces the evolution of several concepts related to them, in the aim of showing that there is a common purpose along the whole theoretical development: to uncover or to explain the innate archaic legacy, its role and its effects within the Psychic Apparatus of men. The first formulations of the idea of proto-phantasies in Freud's works are as early as his letters to Fliess and the Traumdeutung (1900), where it is stated the hope that the interpretation of dreams can lead to the discovery of innate elements received from ancestors. The idea is reformulated in further works, among which, "A Souvenir of Leonardo da Vinci Infant", "Totem and Tabu", and "Three Essays", "The Loss of Reality in Neuroses and Psychosis", "The History of a Child's Neurosis", Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis", "The Ego and the Id", "An Outline of Psychoanalysis", and "The Malaise in Culture". The author spots the successive developments, and proposes an order based on the everpresent assumption that man has an important legacy: the primal imagery bequeathed by the species, constituting the unconscious organized memories shared by all members of the human race. The final conclusions stress the importance of primal phantasies and the possibility that its study broadens the scope of psychoanalitic theoretical and clinical developments.
[The Dualism drive in Freudian theory].
The author discusses Freudian dualistic conception of drives and contends that it can be reduced to a monistic one, on the basis of modern conceptions of Biology, and after scanning the original writings of Freud on the subject of drive and instinct. The word Trieb (drive) is used by Freud as compared with Instinkt (instinct); in 1915 the concept is defined through its attributes: thrust, source, objet and goal; being object and goal contingent for the drive and fixed for instincts. The first dualism is love vs. hunger; the drives are either sexual or autoconservative. But Biology demonstrates today that all life movements are autoconservative. The second dualism, love vs. hate, and the third one, Eros vs. Thantos, interpreted through Biology, show that there is always a prevailing therm, the first one. In this view, instinct should be but one successful drive, "frozen" through time because of its very success, and transmitted through philogenetic channels, in order to be enlivened in each ontogenetic process.