Wish and drive. Making the distinction

Wish and drive. Making the distinction. - On the basis of close reading of the meta-psychological arguments in Chapter 7 of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and with reference to Laplanche's recasting of drive theory, the authors see the relation between desire and drive as one of precarious proximity. For them, the role of drive is to disrupt the hallucinatory fulfillment of desire and create space for subject-object differentiation. Thus the real opposites are not so much drive and reality (external world) as wish and reality, with drive performing more of a mediatory function. Thoughts on Walter Benjamin's short story Wintermorgen (Winter Morning) serve as an illustration of the authors' view on the matter.