ABSTRACT
According to psychoanalytical theory, therapy does not only consist in pacifying the drives, it is also involves symbolic reorganisation. This means that the drives must link to representations other than those which led to the pathology, which arises from a fault in symbolisation: either the drive is not symbolised and ‘errs’ in the organism by awakening anxiety, or it is represented by a pathogenic symbolisation which is destructive or devalourising. For example, if the drive is represented by figures such as monsters or wolves, the child will be subject to anxieties of destruction and of being devoured which could, if they are excessive, make it regress to a stage where it lives its body as dismembered. It is, therefore, essential in therapy, to endow the subject with the capacity of linking its drives to other representations: either those which the therapist proposes from the exterior, as we saw in the case of the shaman, or those which the subject produces himself, which is the case in the psychoanalytical cure.
