Drive foundations of the visual experience as seen through the genesis of the Rorschach process

As Freud asserted several times, the psyche takes its source in the body. Numerous contemporary psychoanalytic writings tend to corroborate this hypothesis. Based on clinical elements and metapsychological constructions, they emphasize the preponderant role played by early bodily and sensory interactions which function as a container for psychic processes. Being in basic agreement with these perspectives, we wish here to help validate them by means of an objectifiable visual prop in which the sensory dimension as well as other dimensions are strongly sollicited. 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 thence from projection before cedipal thought contents become integrated during latency into a formal envelope that contains and regulates excitation. References to age and to the clinical experience of normality and pathology constantly emphasize the importance of the connections between drives and perceptions.