DRIVE FOUNDATIONS OF THE VISUAL EXPERIENC E AS SEEN THROUGH THE GENESIS OF THE RORSCHACH PROCESS

As Freud asserted several times, the psyche takes its source in the bo dy. Numerous contemporary psychoanalytic writings tend to corroborate this hypothesis. Based on clinical elements and metapsychological cons tructions, they emphasize the preponderant role played by early bodily and sensory interactions which function as a container for psychic pr ocesses. Being in basic agreement with these perspectives, we wish her e to help validate them by means of an objectifiable visual prop in wh ich the sensory dimension as well as other dimensions are strongly sol licited. If the Rorschach is administered when language first appears in the child, it can furnish precious testimony to the way perceptive processes gradually emerge from the body's sensory-motor system and th ence from projection before cedipal thought contents become integrated during latency into a formal envelope that contains and regulates exc itation. References to age and to the clinical experience of normality and pathology constantly emphasize the importance of the connections between drives and perceptions.