Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (SPEP) by Johnston, Adrian (2005) Paperback

by Adrian Johnston

Elaborating the fundamental concept of Trieb, or drive, Freud outlines two basic types of conflict that at once disturb and organize mental life: the conflict between drives and reality; and the conflict between the drives themselves (as in amorous Eros against the aggressive death drive). In Time Driven, Adrian Johnston identifies a third distinct type of conflict overlooked by Freud: the conflict embedded within each and every drive. By bringing this critical type of conflict to light and explaining its sobering consequences for an understanding of the psyche, Johnston's book makes an essential theoretical contribution to Continental philosophy. His work offers a philosophical interpretation and reassessment of psychoanalysis that places it in relationship to the larger stream of ideas forming our world and, at the same time, clarifies its original contribution to our understanding of the human situation.
Johnston draws on Jacques Lacan's oeuvre in conjunction with certain philosophical resources-elements from transcendental philosophy, structuralism, and phenomenology-to rectify the inconsistencies within the Freudian metapsychological model of drive. In doing so, he helps to answer a question haunting Freud at the end of his career: Why is humanity plagued by a perpetual margin of discontent, despite technological and cultural progress?
In Time Driven, Johnston is able to make sense of Freud's metapsychology both as a whole and in its historical development of Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud, and of the place of both Freud and Lacan in modern philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy

Paperback

First published January 28, 2005

About the author

American philosopher. He is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. Johnston’s books are guided by his “transcendental materialism,” which in sum calls for a materialist ontology that nevertheless does not reduce away the gap or figure that is human subjectivity.

Reviews

[Joe Romano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Johnston is a lucid and earnest explicator of Freud and Lacan. He touches on some incredibly interesting things, namely, why we are all perpetually frustrated in the realization of our object(s) of desire. How internally to human subjectivity itself there is a temporal split that prevents this from occuring. Though it was very promising the at the beginning, with a lot of intellectual buzz, it definitely tapers off towards the middle/end. A good 1/3 of the book is numbingly repetitive, as it seems that Johnston only has 2 or 3 major points to make in a 400 page book. But all in all a good book on Lacan that (refreshingly) is not by Zizek.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This text is centered around clarifying a few seeming "contradictions" in theorizing the drive: for instance, that between the atemporality of the unconscious and the stubborn stain of history, yet while I appreciate the reading of Lacan's "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty," the distinction between synchrony and diachrony is revealed to be a false one, for the synchrony of "logical time" unfolds itself diachronically - so the answer was already there in Lacan! Johnston's disdain for the late Lacan is found here to be based on a very simple misunderstanding, the conflation of topography and topology, which are used interchangeably here, topology being deemed spatial, when it is topography which is indeed spatial! Without differentiating between Cartesian space and topological space, the whole discussion becomes quite confused (deconstruction is also strawmanned here, via Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe). Another false contradiction explored here: the necessity of the repetition of the drive versus the contingency of its object - but there is precisely no contradiction here to be clarified! I am therefore left a bit confused as to what the "problem" is that this text sets out to solve, since I disagree with the characterization of the topics discussed here as true antinomies, for the answer always seems to simply be "both", though it functions well as a primer on the death drive in Lacan and its implications for a Lacanian temporality. I will also admit that these questions have become much clearer in the interim between this text's publication and today, given advances in contemporary Lacanianism. However, the reading of Kristeva's semiotic is abhorrent, for it fails to account for the fact that "drive" is ultimately a masculine category (in the sexuation graph, the androcentric subject is oriented towards objet a, the structure of fantasy) and therefore must be supplemented by another concept to account for the other pole.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

Johnston demonstrates that Freudian-Lacanian meta-psychology contains resources valuable to (or perhaps even necessary for) any serious theoretical attempt to reckon with the depths of our predicament as altricial beings caught in the no-man's land between biology and psychology, instinct and drive. His exposition can get frustratingly repetitive at times but he does manage to get all the theoretical pistons firing at full throttle, which makes Time Driven a rewarding read. Could use some editing though (many of the sections on Lacan feel bloated and detract from the reading experience i.e. they're tedious as fuck). But Johnston is here to demystify the theoretical and practical stakes of psychoanalysis. Rest assured that he is not out to enchant impressionable readers with irresistible jargon and charming turns of phrase.