The drive as paradigm-Laplanche's sexual as paradigm shift

This paper begins with the argument that Freud's concept of the drive can be viewed epistemologically as a "paradigm" using the definition developed by Agamben. A paradigm is an analogical form of knowledge where the grouping of a set of examples makes phenomena more intelligible without there being a general rule for membership in the group. Next, this view of the drive as paradigm is used to argue that Laplanche's development of his concept of "le sexual" in French, rendered in English as the sexual [in italics], is a paradigm shift for Anglophone psychoanalysis. Laplanche's distinction in Freud's German text between Trieb and Instinkt makes clear the confusion caused for Anglophones by Strachey's relentless translation of Trieb as "instinct" in the Standard Edition. The essence of Freud's infantile sexuality is connected to Laplanche's view that the drive is sexuality beyond genitality, beyond sexual difference which is extremely mobile as to aim and object with an economic regime in the pursuit of excitation. The drive is the source of enigmatic messages left by the child's caretakers and forms the unconscious. Ramifications of Laplanche's view of the drive are explored in a clinical case from the literature and in a film by Kieslowski.