Drive for Research in Psychoanalysis

Kordić, Boris and Tadić, Violeta (2025) Drive for Research in Psychoanalysis. In: Psychology Applications & Developments XI. Advances in Psychology and Psychological Trends Series, 11 . Science Press, Lisboa, pp. 248-254. ISBN 978-989-35728-9-4

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Abstract

Freud distinguished between the drive for self-preservation and the drive for the preservation of the species, and later between the life and the death drive. Between 1908 and 1915, he wrote about Wissbegierde (the greed to know), but left the question of the instinctive longing for knowledge unresolved for two reasons: (a) what kind of satisfaction is connected with Wissbegierde; (b) how to reconcile passion and impartiality in the search for truth. Our aim is to determine whether there are arguments for accepting the hypothesis of a drive for research. If we have a theory of the development of libido (oral, anal, urethral, phallic), then what could constitute the development of the drive for research? We propose Winnicott’s theories of development from the subjective object, through the transitional object, to the objective object. We could say that the prototype of the K (Bion’s term) relationship is the mother–child relationship, while the exemplar is the analyst–analysand relationship in the psychoanalytic situation. Thus, the drive for research can be understood as a key personal motive in psychoanalysis, which strives to achieve a mature object relationship through object permanence, just as love is an expression of the development of the libido.

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