ABSTRACT

In Looking for Spinoza, Damasio (2003) writes: “Because the mind arises in a brain that is integral to the organism, the mind is part of that well-woven apparatus. In other words, body, brain, and mind are manifestations of a single organism” (p. 195). The discoveries of psychoanalysis offer a perfectly cogent and unique solution to the old mind/body problem, the psyche/soma dualism. In transferring the duality psyche/soma on to the duality of the drives, psychoanalysis locates the origin of the thought process in the initial conflict. The very definition of the drives as the psychical processing of sexual somatic excitation confirms, in the two theories of the drives, a psychosexual parallel to which Freud had drawn attention as early as 1891.