Critical Essays on the Drive

"Lacan famously singled out Freud’s notion of the drive as one of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, whereby he went so far as to argue that every human drive is effectively a death drive. Thanks to Lacan’s revisionist ‘return to Freud’, the drive has now become an indispensable conceptual tool for scholars and researchers in the humanities and social sciences, but this proliferation of the drive has often coincided with a lack of critical reflection on its status and function in the human mind. In this superb collection of essays, the authors truly advance our knowledge and understanding of the drive, both by teasing out lingering inconsistencies in its conceptualisation and by reaching out beyond its conventional figurations in psychoanalysis. Enlightening and exhilarating, this book puts the drive back in the driving seat and invites its readership to be driven by its drift. Whoever takes on the challenge may not feel safe,but will undoubtedly emerge from the experience with a renewed sense of vitality."

Dany Nobus, psychoanalyst, Brunel University London, UK

"This collection of powerful, thought-provoking essays—adroitly brought together by Dan Collins and Eve Watson—sheds considerable light on the concept of the drive in psychoanalysis in all its thorny complexity. Leading us at times almost to the point of feeling that Freud’s accounts of it are so confused and/or self-contradictory that we might wish to jettison it altogether, the subtle explorations of facets of the drive included here convince us, in the end, of its continued usefulness in psychoanalytic practice, as regards activities as fundamental as breathing, speaking, looking, eating, and defecating. The case studies provided in the later chapters beautifully illustrate the continued clinical relevance of distinguishing between drive and desire. À lire sans modération!"

Bruce Fink, Lacanian psychoanalyst

"This book is a delight. Robust critical intelligences are brought to bear on what has been so often, a dry and uninviting topic. Lacan himself has described the problematic form, bristling with questions which characterized the introduction and subsequent elaborations of the drive by Freud and Freudians. Here however, instead of pious iterations of canonical statements by both Freud and Lacan, these are pulverized, to be on some occasions set aside, on others broken open to reveal new directions for psychoanalytic thinking. These directions are wide-ranging, challenging, and in no way conducive to any kind of summative orthodoxy. Also welcome is the fact that throughout this weighty volume, abstract discussion is balanced by chapters that evoke the immediacy and concreteness of the experiences through which the drives become uniquely encoded for each human subject. Readable and invigorating, this book will be of particular insight to psychoanalysts in search of innovative thinking."

Olga Cox Cameron, psychoanalyst, Dublin

"Lacan was never very fond of the concept, which is why we urgently needed this book with its wonderful collection of essays that explore the many Lacanian transformations of Freud's drive theory."

Stijn Vanheule, psychoanalyst, Ghent University, Belgium