Vicissitude

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (57)

1. #01

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.28

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-19-0"></span>[Marxist Film Theory](#page-5-1) > **Marx's norms, Marx's utopian maps**

   Theoretical move: Marx's materialism is not merely descriptive ideology-critique but also projective and normative: immanent critique of capitalism necessarily gestures toward a utopian outside (the inexistent), making Marxism both a theory of determination and a practice of exceeding that determination toward social transformation.

   consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

2. #02

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.124

   HIDDE N E N JOYME N T AND ITS V IC I SSIT UDE S

   Theoretical move: Against Bataille's ontology of excess energy, McGowan argues that capitalism does not abolish sacrifice but renders it invisible and multiplies it structurally; reactionary responses (terrorism, fundamentalism) misread this hiddenness as absence, thereby reinforcing capitalist ideology rather than subverting it.

   The invisibility of sacrifice is not its disuse but its multiplication.

3. #03

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.54

   [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The locus of speech

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian unconscious is constitutively Symbolic rather than Imaginary: needs (hunger as paradigm) are sublated into demand and desire through Imaginary-Symbolic mediation, and post-Freudian reduction of analysis to affective/imaginary phenomena distorts Freud's discovery, culminating in a socio-cultural "general infantilization" through scientistic misidentification with the subject supposed to know.

   The mnemic traces of these attributes/elements open out onto the ontogenetic vicissitudes of subsequent displacements and sublimations.

4. #04

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

   [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Abstract

   Theoretical move: Against the imaginary reduction of psychoanalysis to ego-psychology, this passage argues that the unconscious must be understood as the locus of the Other's speech, structured by signifiers via metaphor and metonymy, with the death drive as the key to repetitive speech—and that analytic training requires restoring the symbolic chain rather than reducing analysis to an imaginary dyad.

   the drives and their vicissitudes are not dependent upon real others.

5. #05

   Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.313

   I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 2. The Economics of the Drive

   Theoretical move: This endnotes section advances several load-bearing theoretical moves: it aligns the drive's structure with a satisfaction that bypasses aim (via Copjec/Lacan), contrasts psychoanalytic identification-with-the-symptom against Marxist elimination-of-the-symptom, links the drive's constancy to capitalism's logic of endless accumulation, and grounds the ego's rivalry-structure in the Imaginary to argue against ego-psychology.

   Sigmund Freud, 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,' in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14

6. #06

   Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

   3

   Theoretical move: Freud advances a structural homology between civilizational development and individual libidinal development, arguing that civilization is built on drive-renunciation (via repression, suppression, and sublimation), that order is a compulsion to repeat modelled on natural regularities, and that the tension between individual freedom and communal restriction is the fundamental, potentially irreconcilable problem of civilization.

   Other drives are induced to shift the conditions for their satisfaction, to direct them on to other paths; in most cases this coincides with sublimation (of the aims of the drives)

7. #07

   Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.214

   **XVII**

   Theoretical move: Lacan critically exposes the theoretical dead end of Balint's object-relation theory, which defines the object purely as satisfier of need and models all libidinal life on a closed, harmonious mother-infant complementarity—arguing this framework cannot account for the subject's encounter with the Other as a genuine subject, and thus deviates from the fundamental analytic conception of the libido.

   the original vicissitude of the libido is auto-erotism has to be interpreted

8. #08

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.177

   THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

   Theoretical move: Lacan insists that the drive cannot be reduced to a biological or organic given (thrust/Drang), and grounds this by returning to Freud's 1915 article to show that 'Trieb' is a fundamental concept (Grundbegriff) comprising four irreducibly distinct terms—Drang, source, object, aim—whose very enumeration reveals the drive's non-natural, constructed character.

   entitled Trieb und Triebschicksale—one should avoid translating it by avatar, Triebwandlungen would be avatar, Schicksal is adventure, vicissitude

9. #09

   Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.180

   THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the enigma of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is fundamentally decoupled from biological rhythm, kinetic discharge, and aim-attainment, establishing the drive as a constant force whose satisfaction does not require reaching its object.

   the third of the four fundamental vicissitudes of the drive that Freud posits at the outset—it is curious that there are four vicissitudes as there are four elements of the drive—is sublimation.

10. #10

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.93

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: By distinguishing gaze from vision (the eye), Lacan grounds the scopic drive as a proper drive while arguing it is uniquely non-homologous with other drives precisely because it most completely eludes castration — a claim he attributes to a careful reading of Freud's 'Triebe und Triebschicksale'.

    Freud already places this drive to the fore in Triebe und Triebschicksale ('Instincts and their Vicissitudes')

11. #11

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.190

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

    Theoretical move: Against any holistic or unifying conception of sexuality (love as representative of the total sexual tendency), Lacan reads Freud's drive-text as establishing that the drives are irreducibly partial, governed by an economic factor tied to the Pleasure Principle operating at the level of the Real-Ich (homeostatic nervous system), not by biological reproductive finality.

    import of those writings that deal with the drives and their vicissitudes, rejects such a view in the clearest possible way.

12. #12

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan theorises the drive not as an instinct oriented toward a natural end but as a surrealist 'montage' — an assemblage whose components (Drang, object, aim, source) can be reversed and recombined without any governing finality, thereby radically distinguishing the drive from biological instinct.

    the drive defines, according to Freud, all the forms of which one may reverse such a mechanism. This does not mean that one turns the dynamo upside-down—one unrolls its wires

13. #13

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.255

    OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's "Drives and their Vicissitudes" to argue that the emergence of the psychical apparatus is built on a two-stage schema in which an initial homeostatic Ich, defined by indifference to an outside, is subsequently fractured by the distinction between Lust and Unlust—a movement that lays the groundwork for the objet a as the remainder that exceeds equilibrium.

    In his text on the Triebe and the Triebschicksale, the drives and the vicissitudes of the drive, Freud places love at once at the level of the real, at the level of narcissism, at the level of the pleasure principle

14. #14

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.93

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: By distinguishing the gaze from vision (the eye), Lacan argues that the scopic drive can be added to the list of drives, and that it is uniquely non-homologous with other drives insofar as it most completely eludes castration — a claim grounded in a reading of Freud's 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes'.

    Freud already places this drive to the fore in Triebe und Triebschicksale ('Instincts and their Vicissitudes')

15. #15

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.177

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues against organicist and archaic readings of the drive by returning to Freud's 1915 structural analysis of Trieb, insisting that the drive must be understood as a Grundbegriff (fundamental concept) composed of four distinct terms—not reducible to mere biological thrust or inertia—and that this distinction is precisely what his teaching requires analysts to grasp in order to understand the unconscious.

    entitled Trieb und Triebschicksale—one should avoid translating it by avatar, Triebwandlungen would be avatar, Schicksal is adventure, vicissitude

16. #16

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.180

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four vicissitudes of the drive—particularly the paradox of sublimation as aim-inhibited yet satisfying—to argue that drive satisfaction is structurally decoupled from biological rhythm and from the attainment of any specific aim, establishing the drive's constancy as irreducible to kinetic or biological models.

    the third of the four fundamental vicissitudes of the drive that Freud posits at the outset—it is curious that there are four vicissitudes as there are four elements of the drive—is sublimation

17. #17

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.190

    THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT > THE PARTIAL DRIVE AND ITS CIRCUIT

    Theoretical move: Against the view that love represents the totality of sexual striving, Lacan follows Freud in arguing that drives are irreducibly partial — linked to an economic factor governed by the pleasure principle at the level of the Real-Ich (conceived as homeostatic nervous-system regulation) — thereby resisting any biologistic reduction of sexuality to reproductive finality.

    import of those writings that deal with the drives and their vicissitudes, rejects such a view in the clearest possible way.

18. #18

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.255

    OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: The passage reconstructs Freud's two-stage schema of the drive's vicissitudes—beginning with a homeostatic Ich defined by the pleasure/reality principle—to show that ambivalence at the level of love differs structurally from the circular Verkehrung, and that this schema grounds the emergence of the objet a as the first construction of a psychic apparatus.

    In his text on the Triebe and the Triebschicksale, the drives and the vicissitudes of the drive, Freud places love at once at the level of the real, at the level of narcissism, at the level of the pleasure principle

19. #19

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.168

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar uses Jones's 1927 article on female sexuality as a platform to reconceptualise 'aphanisis' as the disappearance of desire, and to reframe the 'unseen man' in female homosexuality as a structural-symbolic operation involving identification and the phallic gaze, distinguishing Jones's proto-structural insights from his failure to organise them rigorously.

    analysis shews that this interest in woman is a vicarious way of enjoying femininity; they merely employ other women to exhibit it for them.

20. #20

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.168

    Mademoiselle Grazien

    Theoretical move: By tracing Jones's concept of aphanisis and the structural logic of the "unseen man" in female homosexuality, Lacan argues that Jones — despite himself — arrives at structural (symbolic/metaphorical) references that he cannot properly organise, and that what Jones calls aphanisis corresponds clinically to the disappearance of desire, while the "unseen man" scenario turns on a symbolic operation in which the Gaze (the phallic eye of the father) is the true object of the ritual.

    Analysis shews that this interest in woman is a vicarious way of enjoying femininity; they merely employ other women to exhibit it for them.

21. #21

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.215

    Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation, as Freud formulates it, is a mode of drive satisfaction that operates *with* the drive (mit dem Trieb) rather than through repression, and that its satisfaction is achieved precisely by being goal-inhibited (zielgehemmt) — eliding the sexual goal while still satisfying the drive. This pivot is used to distinguish sublimation structurally from repression and to set up the question of what exactly is satisfied when the drive bypasses its sexual goal. The passage also stages a critical dialogue with Deleuze's appropriation of Lacanian concepts, particularly around the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.

    sublimation is essentially attached to the fate, to the avatar, to the Schicksal of drives. It is one of those avatars, the ones stated by Freud in the article entitled Trieb und Triebschicksal, drives and their avatars. It is the fourth of them

22. #22

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.269

    XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic order of marriage is constitutively androcentric (drawing on Lévi-Strauss), positioning the woman as an object of exchange rather than a subject, which generates an irreducible structural conflict between the symbolic pact (fidelity directed toward the universal) and the imaginary vicissitudes of libidinal relations; the myth of Amphitryon reveals that only a triangular structure involving a transcendent "god" (Name of the Father) can sustain the conjugal bond above imaginary degradation.

    the pact of speech goes far beyond the individual relation and its imaginary vicissitudes

23. #23

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.108

    THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Introduction to the Entwurf > That's all rro saying.

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's Entwurf to argue that repetition—not harmony with an Umwelt—is the structural condition for the constitution of the human object-world, and that the Real is without fissure and only accessible through the symbolic, thereby grounding both the pleasure/reality principle distinction and the function of repetition in a proto-structuralist reading of Freud's neurological sketch.

    preparing for us next time this little chapter entitled 'Instincts and their vicissitudes'.

24. #24

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.104

    THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Introduction to the Entwurf

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's methodological text "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" to argue that psychoanalytic conceptualisation is not empiricist in any naive sense but proceeds through iterative, convention-like abstractions that are progressively refined through their relation to observed material — thereby positioning Freud as a rigorous philosopher of science despite common dismissals.

    Look up the article 'Instincts and their vicissitudes'.

25. #25

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.65

    **II** > Love and the signifier > Aristotle and Freud: the other satisfaction

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that jouissance is constitutively deficient — it is the "other satisfaction" that language-structured beings cannot fully live up to — and proposes that reality is approached through "apparatuses of jouissance" (language), thereby correcting Freud's pleasure principle and rejecting developmentalist (Lust-Ich/Real-Ich) accounts as mere "hypotheses of mastery."

    Freud's references to the 'pleasure-ego' and the 'reality-ego' can be found, above all, in... 'Instincts and their Vicissitudes' (1915).

26. #26

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.40

    **II** > **The meaning of delusion** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Schreber's delusion is not merely symptomatic content but a structural double of psychoanalytic theory itself — the delusion explicitly theorizes the very structures (of the unconscious, of intersubjective exchange, of libidinal economy) that analysis laboriously extracts from neurotic cases, thereby granting psychosis an exemplary status for structural investigation.

    the relation between the nerves, principally between the subject's nerves and the divine nerves, which comprises an entire series of vicissitudes

27. #27

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.288

    **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formation of the Ego Ideal has a fundamentally metaphorical structure: the father-object, desired and refused, is substituted for the subject and becomes a metaphor of the subject, thereby transforming desire and reorganising the subject's entire signifying history — a process categorically distinct from the prohibition of jouissance and the foreclosure-like rejection (*Verwerfung*) that produces melancholic states.

    This leads us to attempt to formulate the relationship between the ego-ideal and a particular vicissitude of desire in the following manner.

28. #28

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.280

    **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a privileged "crossroads-signifier" through which desire must pass to gain recognition, and uses this to pivot into a differentiated account of ego-ideal versus ideal ego, showing that the ego-ideal structures intrasubjectivity as an intersubjective (signifier-governed) relation — a framework then deployed to analyze the masculinity complex and female homosexuality via Horney and Deutsch.

    the vicissitudes of what presents itself as the masculinity complex in women already indicate a connection with the phallic element, a game with or a use of this element

29. #29

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.283

    **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes a minimal three-term schema for secondary identification: a libidinal object is transformed into a signifier that anchors the ego-ideal, while desire undergoes substitution via a third term (the rival/father), with the phallus functioning as the universal "lowest common denominator" — the metonymic pivot through which desire must pass in any signifying economy, regardless of sex.

    experience shows, on the contrary, that what comes up is the entire past, the vicissitudes of the extremely complex relations that to this point have modulated the child's relations with its mother

30. #30

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.64

    THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (representative of the representation) is strictly equivalent to the signifier, establishing that what is properly unconscious is a signifying element — not affect, sensation, or feeling — and uses Freud's dream of the dead father to demonstrate that dream-interpretation proceeds via the insertion of missing signifiers into the dream-text, not via wishful thinking or affective content.

    the vicissitude of an affect may be threefold: 'Either the affect remains, wholly or in part, as it is; or it is transformed into a qualitatively different quota of affect, above all into anxiety... or it is suppressed'

31. #31

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.438

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXIV - Identification via** *\*ein einziger Zug***"**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a set of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, Chapter XXIV, providing textual variants, source identifications, and cross-references; it is non-substantive for theoretical extraction.

    See Freud's 1915 paper entitled "Instincts [or Drives] and their Vicissitudes," SE XIV, pp. 117-40.

32. #32

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.268

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the obsessive's structure to articulate aphanisis as the specific failure of the Φ (phallic) function when it encounters the real dead end of fantasy, distinguishing this from Jones's naturalistic reading and tying the subject's vanishing to the barred Other—while introducing "real presence" as a homonym for Eucharistic dogma that illuminates this phallic function at the surface of obsessive phenomenology.

    Now, a vicissitude can arise here that is designated by the bar that strikes through the A - namely, that the Other's speech is lacking.

33. #33

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.212

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the gap between demand and desire is irreducible: every demand structurally evokes a counter-demand from the Other, and it is precisely the meeting of these two demands—not a meeting of tendencies—that produces the discordance in which desire exceeds and survives (or is extinguished by) satisfaction, illustrated paradigmatically through oral demand and the nursing relationship.

    Today we will put our finger on it again by briefly retracing what comes first in analytic theory - namely, Triebe, drives and their vicissitudes.

34. #34

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.362

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the Jekels-Bergler theory of narcissism and the ego-ideal by showing that their reliance on a "neutral energy" oscillating between Eros and Thanatos, and their attribution of object-creation to the death drive, result from a failure to distinguish the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real registers — a failure that his optical schema (mirror A, real image *i(a)*, and flowers *a*) is designed to correct and generalize.

    the vicissitude - das Schicksal [fate or destiny], to use the term Freud himself used regarding the drives - of this neutralized field was explained to us in their article

35. #35

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.244

    *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*

    Theoretical move: By mapping the torus topologically, Lacan formalises the structural inversion between the subject's demand/object and the Other's demand/object, deriving from this the differential structure of obsessional and hysterical neurosis, and showing that the neurotic's impasse consists in pursuing objet a through the specular image i(o) rather than acceding to it directly.

    I referred them to the article 'Trieb und Triebschicksale' which has been bizarrely translated here by 'Avatars des pulsions'

36. #36

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.91

    Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that utilitarianism's equation of use with pleasure—and its corollary that pleasure is usable—is the hidden engine of functionalism's imperialism and social despotism; against this, Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis intervenes by positing a subject constituted by a 'beyond the pleasure principle' (the death drive), making pleasure structurally unavailable as an index of the good and thereby exposing the utilitarian subject as a fiction of zero-resistance manipulability.

    the image of the modern woman was defined and redefined several times over by the vicissitudes of vestiary codes.

37. #37

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Notes

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs terminological clarification, tracing the evolution of Freud's drive nomenclature from the ego/sexual drive opposition through narcissistic libido to the final antithesis of Eros (life drives) and death drives, while also noting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and situating Freud's speculations within a broader intellectual genealogy (Spielrein, Ferenczi, Plato, Upanishads).

    Cf. 'Triebe and Triebschicksale' ['Drives and Their Fates'] (1915).

38. #38

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    III

    Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the Ego Ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishing it sharply from sublimation, and identifies conscience as the psychic agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—an agency whose regressive form reappears in paranoid self-scrutiny delusions and whose normal operation underlies dream censorship.

    Psychoanalytical research, which normally serves as the means for us to track the various fates of the libidinal drives when they have become isolated from the ego drives

39. #39

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    The Two Types of Drives

    Theoretical move: Freud advances the structural-dynamic thesis that the psyche's tripartite division (id, ego, superego) must be articulated with the dualism of Eros and the death drive, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido as the energetic medium that links drive-fusion/de-fusion to the pleasure principle and to the indifferent displacements characteristic of the primary process.

    The problem of the quality of drive-impulses, and how that quality is maintained throughout the sundry vicissitudes that drives are prone to, remains decidedly obscure

40. #40

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes for a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud's writings, clarifying translation choices for key Freudian terms (Angst, Trauer, Triebrepräsentanz, Inhalte, etc.) and cross-referencing other Freudian texts; it is paratextual apparatus rather than theoretical argumentation.

    see also the Editor's Preface to 'Instincts and their Vicissitudes' in Standard Edition, vol. 14

41. #41

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    V

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that in obsessional neurosis the regression of the libido doubly exacerbates the conflict between ego, id, and super-ego: it forces erotic impulses into aggressive forms, enabling the super-ego to punish the ego for drives the ego cannot consciously recognise as its own, and symptom-formation gradually shifts from defense to surrogate gratification until the ego reaches paralysis of will.

    Both developments are the result of a single factor: the regression of the libido.

42. #42

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda

    Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Driven Destiny Makes a Voice

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian drive *is* destiny (Triebschicksale = tautology), because drives are the constant, inescapable force that determines the subject from within, and the four modes of drive-destiny (reversal, turning against the self, repression, sublimation) are defense formations that never abolish what they defend against—meaning psychoanalysis is a rationalist theory of psychical determinism that collapses the distinction between fate and will.

    the concept of destiny—elided in the English translation—appears in the title of his 1915 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' ('Triebe und Triebschicksale')

43. #43

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.80

    **The Sartorial Superego** > **Guilty versus Useful Pleasures**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that utilitarianism's conversion of a descriptive claim (use is pleasurable) into a prescriptive one (pleasure must be maximized as duty) is the hidden motor of both architectural functionalism's "extensibility" and colonialism's "civilizing mission," and that Lacan's seminar on ethics exposes this maneuver as a despotism rooted in the belief that pleasure is fully usable—rendering man infinitely manageable.

    the image of the modern woman was defined and redefined several times over by the vicissitudes of vestiary codes.

44. #44

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.5

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > To Recall Freud's Witch

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freudian metapsychology is coextensive with psychoanalytic theory as such, and that its central—if problematic—pillar is the concept of psychical energy, which undergirds everything from displacement and condensation to repression, narcissism, and the dual drive theory; the repeated attacks on metapsychology are therefore nothing less than attacks on the theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis itself.

    the entirety of the psychical process down to its minutest increment is to be reckoned in terms of the two great destinies of energy: the gathering together into ever greater unities under the influence of Eros and the splitting apart and disintegration effected by the death drive.

45. #45

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.282

    <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "return to Freud" is not a Oedipal critique but a structural recovery that reveals the inner coherence of Freudian metapsychology, and that the Freudian-Lacanian subject is constituted by an irremediable gap and a double ground of representation (imaginary/symbolic) that situates psychoanalysis at the intersection of phenomenology and structuralism.

    In his 1915 paper, 'Instincts and their Vicissitudes,' Freud acknowledged the approximate and provisional character of the basic concepts of psychoanalysis

46. #46

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's identifications with lost objects—culminating in the Oedipus complex's resolution—produce a differentiated agency within the ego (the super-ego/ego-ideal), and that this mechanism of converting object-libido into narcissistic libido via identification is the general pathway for sublimation and character formation.

    whether this transformation cannot perhaps affect the destiny of the drives in other ways too, for instance by bringing about a de-mergence of the various drives that are interfused with one another.

47. #47

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    Notes

    Theoretical move: This notes section traces the conceptual evolution of Freud's drive theory from the sexual/ego drive opposition through narcissism and Eros to the final life drive/death drive antithesis, while also documenting translation controversies (Standard Edition bowdlerizations) and cross-cultural precursors to Platonic myth.

    Cf. 'Triebe and Triebschicksale' ['Drives and Their Fates'] (1915).

48. #48

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    III

    Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the ego-ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishes it sharply from sublimation, and then derives the superego/conscience as the agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—thereby also accounting for paranoid self-scrutiny, dream censorship, and the role of narcissistic libido in self-feeling.

    Psychoanalytical research, which normally serves as the means for us to track the various fates of the libidinal drives when they have become isolated from the ego drives

49. #49

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    The Two Types of Drives

    Theoretical move: Freud recapitulates his dualistic drive theory (Eros vs. death drive), articulates their fusion and de-mergence as the dynamic mechanism underlying libidinal regression, ambivalence, and neurotic phenomena, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido that operates as a qualitatively indifferent energy serving the pleasure principle across both ego and id.

    The problem of the quality of drive-impulses, and how that quality is maintained throughout the sundry vicissitudes that drives are prone to, remains decidedly obscure

50. #50

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.346

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the opposition between liberal cynicism and fundamentalism is a false one masking a deeper shared pathology—both substitute direct knowledge for authentic belief—while the structural logic of the symbolic order (fetishistic disavowal, the big Other, les non-dupes errent) requires a "third term" to reveal the true antagonism beneath ideological surface oppositions, and that "the truth has the structure of a fiction" applies to political, aesthetic, and theological domains alike.

    These vicissitudes of violence (violent outbursts as symptomatic of a fundamental passivity; withdrawal into inactivity as the most radical violent gesture)

51. #51

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.48

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian subject is not a substantial self that undergoes dispossession but IS the void that emerges through that dispossession—a retroactive, self-positing structure—and uses this to mediate between Kantian autonomy and Hegelian ethical substance via the Lacanian logic of the Not-all, showing that irreducible contingency in ethics is the very condition of genuine responsibility and act.

    The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

52. #52

    The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.12

    The Real Gaze

    Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive front matter (title page, copyright, table of contents, preface, and acknowledgments) for Todd McGowan's *The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan* (2007); the preface sketches a methodological argument for a psychoanalytic film theory that locates context and spectator immanently within the filmic text rather than in external historical or empirical factors.

    Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and Its Vicissitudes

53. #53

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.49

    **Name of the Father**

    Theoretical move: The passage performs two related theoretical moves: first, it defines the Name-of-the-Father as a signifier/metaphor that installs the symbolic order of desire and lack via the Oedipus complex; second, it grounds narcissism in Freud's drive theory, showing how drive vicissitudes (scopophilia, sadism/masochism) are structurally dependent on the narcissistic organization of the ego.

    the [drive's] vicissitudes which consist in the [drive's] being turned round upon the subject's own ego and undergoing reversal from activity to passivity are dependent on the narcissistic organization of the ego

54. #54

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.19

    **Demand** > **Drive**

    Theoretical move: The passage constructs a composite theoretical account of the Freudian/Lacanian drive by distinguishing its structural components (pressure, aim, object, source), separating it from instinct/need, and establishing its paradoxical logic: the drive is never satisfied by reaching its object but finds satisfaction in its own circular, repetitive movement—making every drive simultaneously sexual and a death drive.

    It may be changed any number of times in the course of the vicissitudes which the [drive] undergoes during its existence

55. #55

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.93

    **Vicissitude**

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Freud's taxonomy of drive vicissitudes — reversal into its opposite (change of aim or content), turning round upon the self, repression, and sublimation — as modes of defence against the drive, with the theoretical pivot being the distinction between transformation of *aim* versus transformation of *object* or *content*. The second half of the passage is a non-substantive bibliography of sources.

    Observation shows us that a [drive] may undergo the following vicissitudes: – Reversal into its opposite. Turning round upon the subject's own self. Repression. Sublimation.

56. #56

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.69

    **The Real** > **Reality**

    Theoretical move: The passage surveys a cluster of interrelated psychoanalytic and Hegelian concepts — Real/reality, pleasure/reality principle, repetition, repression, self-consciousness, and separation — showing how each marks a site where symbolization both constitutes and fails to exhaust its object, leaving a remainder (the Real, the repressed, desire) that persistently disrupts any stable closure of meaning or satisfaction.

    the task of fending off [the drive's] impulses is dealt with by the other vicissitudes which [drives] may undergo–e.g. reversal into the opposite or turning round upon the subject's own self.

57. #57

    What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.16

    It's Getting Strange in Here … > <span id="page-13-0"></span>Did Somebody Say Sex?

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Freud's radical move was not to normalize sexuality but to expose its constitutive ontological impasse—sexuality as the "operator of the inhuman" that disrupts identity and grounds a theory of the subject; contemporary psychotherapy's reduction of sexuality to empirical practices is thus a defense against this fundamental negativity, which Lacan restores by returning sexuality to the dimension of the Real.

    Psychoanalysis does, of course, start out from the vicissitudes of human beings, on which it focuses its investigations.