Psychoanalysis doesn’t disprove---drives, even if real, are conflicting.

Adrian Johnson 05. PhD from SUNY-Stony Brook, 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, “Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive,” p. 340-1

Despite the apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed by an irreducible inner antagonism, there is, surprisingly, what might be described as a liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives. Since drives are essentially dysfunctional, subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be dictated by instinctually compelled pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the mandate of nature is forever missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program and saddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses—impulses mediated by an inconsistent, unstable web of multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's “barring” of the Symbolic Other—the parlêtre has no choice but to bump up against the unnatural void of its autonomy. The confrontation with this void is frequently avoided. The true extent of one's autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and behavior. The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidinal economy mark the precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance briefly to flash into effective existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the space for the sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the default physical and sociopsychical “run of things.” Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and, hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures of nature. The pain of a malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling a capacity to be an autonomous subject. This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identifies as the guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might (also) be the case: Such freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely “curing” individuals of this discomfort, even if it were possible, would be tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects. As Lacan might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are far from perfection, insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute.