ABEL DOS SANTOS BESERRA

The aim of this research is to investigate how, since modernity, the understanding of human experience has come to rely on some notion of the negative. In order to verify how this has reached contemporary times, we also analyze how psychoanalysis describes the subject's experience through an idea of the negative. The hypothesis we propose is that a certain notion of the negative emerges as indispensable for discussing human experience since modernity: first, in Cartesian philosophy with the concept of the passions of the soul; and second, in psychoanalysis with the formulation of the drive. Furthermore, we primarily draw on Descartes' The Passions of the Soul and psychoanalytic theoretical texts as our starting points.