Finding your Pleasure Zone

In her paper "Rezoning Pleasure" Doris McIllwain explores the psychoanalytic construct of drives, and searches for reasons as to their deletion from, and the necessity for re-inclusion for drives in the psychoanalytic discourse. Through this work Doris builds a model of personality development incorporating motivation and affective idiosyncrasies.

Citing the evidence that drives and affects are 'subpersonal knowers' and 'intentional engines', Doris reminds us that for Freud, drives particularly are 'knowers in that they are somatically anchored sources of policy with regard to aspects of reality relevant to their satisfaction or frustration'. She expresses concern about the attachment literature accounts of evolutionary behaviours that promote attachment that seem to leave the pleasure of the body, the feelings that guide the attachment, at the borders of the journal articles. This is odd when considering the fact that Tomkin's pioneering work in the 1960's established with certainty that beliefs and belief structures lack the motivational clout, in humans, of one good affect or drive.

Doris charts a loss of the body in psychoanalytic theory that begins from Freud, to object relations theory, to self psychology and intersubjectivism [only now, with enactment theory, do we see the body meet the intersubjective in the relationship between the therapist and the analysand, TN]. Noting that drives are deeply malleable within ongoing relational systems, she argues that it is pleasure that contains within the germ of subject/object distinction-making, defining 'what is me' (the pleasureable) against 'what is not me' (the unpleasurable). 'Only when the distinction between self and world is stably known (if intermittently felt) can there be pleasure in giving up that distinction, blurring self/other, self/world. as in mystical experiences, charisma and love.'

Co-assembly of affects and drives per Tomkins is invoked in an explanation of the 'cascading constraints' of a given developmental path, where our earliest exchanges with others are powerful determinants in the personality outcomes for an adult 'impulse, affect and emotion shape the structuring of thought, behaviour and patterns of relatedness. Their interlinking in the context of language and culture shapes the nuclear scenes, schemas and scripts, autobiographical memories and life memories that we come to live by.'

Expanding  the picture of drives as the frontier between the somatic and the mental, as the demand on the mind for work defined somatically but modified by cognition. Drives meet with their own vicissitudes, and are readily shaped by affective consequences once action is set underway. 'Affects and drives motivate not only what we do, but also what we attend to.' When we are shamed for example in something like experiencing excitement in the bodily presence of another, in the face of our own need, we are likely to end up preferentially attending away from that very need, and will fail to recognise the sign of inner longing.

(I love this next line):

'The affect programmes..are independent of higher cognitive processes, and can be seen as a mechanism for saving us from our own intelligence by rapidly and involuntarily initiating essential behaviours'. Without affects, nothing matters, with them, everything could. The differential definition of affects and drives allows that we're able to explain behaviour that is at cross purposes such as procrastination, being one's own worst enemy and self-deception.

Early Freud defines drives as ensuring the survival of the individual organism, pitted against drives that enhance the survival of the species. The component drives of sexuality can be taken well off the path of pleasure via stimulation of the mucous membranes - sex is biological, but the erotic is distinctly cultural.  The ego drives, as Freud defined them as including hunger, thirst, pain-avoidance and temperature regulation, can undergo an anaclitic propping on of one drive to another (sensuality in eating overdetermines satisfaction in hunger, to a certain extent, for example). The Nirvana principle, that we seek to remove all tensions, becomes coherent when we propose that there can be such a thing as 'pleasurable tensions' - demonstrable in foreplay, and in affects that underpin intrinsic motivation, which are best served in an overall environment of pleasurable affect, such as curiosity and interest in learning.

Much more to go. Er, or come. :)

Ref:

McIlwain, D. (2007). Rezoning Pleasure: Drives and Affects in Personality Theory, Theory & Personality, 17(4), 529-561.