Freud holds all drives are mediated through images, never pure

Evidence

This is to say that for Freud there is no such thing as an instinct or drive (Trieb) in its pure or physical state: all drives are mediated through images or fantasies, through their object language, through what Freud calls, in an expression of which it is difficult to give an adequate rendering, the “Vorstellungsrepräsentenz” or “den Trieb repräsentierende Vorstellung,” the “representational presentation.” It is this object-language of the unconscious which the Surrealists aim at bringing to the surface. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 201

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the crucial Vorstellungsrepräsentanz concept — that psychic drives only appear via representational mediation — which is the hinge for understanding how the unconscious has an ‘object language’.
• XREF: This mediated-drive idea is a Freudian parallel to the Marxian insight that consciousness is always already mediated by material forms — the same anti-immediacy move at the heart of Jameson’s dialectic. — connects to: Freud never found the death drive’s form because he stripped destruction of plasticity — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 4097; Freud’s life and death drives are fused rather than mutually exclusive — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 2456

Broader Connections

• Freud never found the death drive’s form because he stripped destruction of plasticity #expands (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 4097
• Freud’s life and death drives are fused rather than mutually exclusive #corroborates (0.72) — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 2456