Mirages of the negative - the human experience in Descartes and psychoanalysis

Abstract

The present article seeks to investigate how, from modernity onward, based on Descartes' philosophy, the understanding of human experience and the modern subject began to rely on some notion of the negative. In order to examine how this extends into contemporaneity, the study also explores how psychoanalysis, in its Freudian and Lacanian forms, also describes the the subject's experience based on an idea of the negative. The hypothesis we put forth is that a certain idea of the negative emerges as indispensable for an adequate discussion of the human experience of this subject that arises in modernity: firstly, on the part of Cartesian philosophy when it proposes the concept of the passions of the soul; and secondly, on the part of psychoanalysis when it formulates the idea of the drive. Finally, it is worth noting that we primarily consider Descartes' Treatise on the Passions and psychoanalysis' theoretical texts, on metapsychology, as our starting points.