ABSTRACT
Analysis sometimes brings tangible results. Analysis has an ambitious aim—that of enabling change in those very areas where Psyche remains most stubbornly immobile: in our ways of loving and hating. Psychoanalysis is indebted to borderline patients for an astonishing discovery: all forms of psychic life, even the most basic, are the result of psychogenesis. There is no such thing as human nature from a psychoanalytic point of view. Not that nothing is innate, but there is nothing human that is not subjected to the vicissitudes of early intersubjective relationships. More strikingly than borderline adults, psychotic children show us that to be human means to be vulnerable to the psychic violence of the environment. In French, the word pulsion [drive], a translation of the German Trieb, is a strictly psychoanalytical notion, a metaphor of the violence of psychic life.
