Place and Function of the Drive in the Lacanian Structural Unconscious

• Grant number: 25/00491-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2025
• End date: December 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Vladimir Pinheiro Safatle
• Grantee: Murilo Henrique Leite Netto
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The unconscious is structured like a language": this statement is one of the most fundamental definitions of Jacques Lacan's thought. In the mid-1950s, Lacan began to see the structuralist conception of the unconscious as a way to reinterpret the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious, which until then had presented a challenge for the French thinker. Integrating a renewed concept of the unconscious into his theorization enabled Lacan to encompass, in a new way, much of Freudian psychoanalytic theory that, up to that point, could not have been fully considered in its complexity. However, while all the elements related to the logic of the unconscious and its processes of meaning construction could be addressed with this new paradigm, one aspect of Freudian theory still remained in the background: that concerning sexuality, libido, and the drives. We can imagine the difficulty: while Freud defines the drive as '[...] a frontier concept between the psychic and the somatic, as the psychic representative of stimuli arising from within the body that reach the mind' (Freud, Drives and Their Vicissitudes), Lacan insists, in revisiting the concept, that the drive has nothing to do with the organic - at least not with any definition of the organic as something bodily and prior to the supposedly "intellectualized" unconscious of Lacanian psychoanalysis. If we are to remain within the horizon of the unconscious structured as a language, without appealing to any kind of primordial, pre-symbolic corporeality, how, then, can we understand what is at stake in Lacan's interpretation of the concept of the drive and the way it operates? Unpacking this is the goal of this research. (AU)