ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the drive concept can serve as a fruitful attempt to bridge the mysterious leap between psyche and soma in psychosomatic symptoms. In her contribution, Marina Perris suggests that Bion is restricted in the way he sees the body not as the soma as such but as a conception of the mind. In the case of Jasmine, Marina suggests that somatisation occurred at the moment of excessive re-actualised traumatic drive activity, which had not achieved representation. Marina therefore calls for metapsychological conceptualisations that account for the physical mechanisms that underlie the alpha and beta phenomena. In his contribution, Christian Seulin starts with a differentiation between the psychic phenomenon of affect and its physical quantification. Regarding the death drive, he criticises an over-extensive use of the concept. He stresses the importance of the different levels of the relationship between the drive and the drive object, which depend on the different levels of severity of early traumatisation, as reflected in the countertransference. Jörg Frommer points out some more fundamental epistemic problems of the drive concept. In his view it can serve as a heuristic tool for the exploration of the primitive borders of psychic life, re-conceptualized by semiotics, but without the claim to introduce the body as such.
