Background: This essay was requested for a forthcoming collection of essays on Freud’s text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (edited by M.K.O’Niell and S. Ahktar for New Library of Psychoanalysis, London, 2010). It continues a theme that I have written about a number of times since the 2000 publication of Cherishment A Psychology of the Heart (co-authored with Faith Bethelard), namely, that psychoanalysis after Freud developed without a concept Freud himself once formulated and then almost abandoned. That is the concept of “ego instincts,” instincts for satisfying basic provisioning needs and needs for love and relationship. It is the instinct for sociability and for living together with others in a polis recognized by Aristotle as the essential human instinct. Lacking this concept, it has been difficult for psychoanalysts to develop socio-political theories on any other grounds than those Freud bequeathed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
THE TRAUMA OF LOST LOVE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
Most historians agree that in the history of psychoanalysis, Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” marks a juncture, even perhaps the juncture. Until 1920, no one could be a Freudian without subscribing to his libido theory (in its evolving formulation) and to the centrality of the sexual instinctual drive in the etiology of the neuroses. Non-subscribers left the movement. Adler’s and Jung’s withdrawals became like traumas that Freud kept trying to master in writing about them. But in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud himself brought into question the defining position of the libido theory. He disagreed with himself, and the trauma his interior debate caused among his followers has, to this day, not ceased reverberating. But, because the Master’s revision was so problematic, and got no less so as he elaborated his new theory in some later works while he rejected it in others, his followers have felt free to disagree without needing to become schismatics. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” was more a statement of felt theoretical need than a Dictat.
To me, the text seems like the great missed opportunity of psychoanalysis, a moment when an elementary form of love –long known and named–might have been described in dynamic psychoanalytic terms: it might have been shown to have a developmental course, growing to be foundational for mature human relations and political life. To make this argument briefly, I am going to pay particular attention to how this form of love slipped away, became nameless, as Freud proposed his startling hypothesis that there is a “death instinct” in all humans and, indeed, in all nature –a hypothesis of Naturphilosophie, not a psychoanalytic hypothesis.
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Let me begin with a few remarks explicating the text’s overdetermined title: Jenseits des Lustprinzips. All the psychoanalysts who, in 1920, read Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” were familiar with his 1911 paper called “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.” They knew Freud’s claim that the Lustprinzip operates on a newborn’s sexual drive or libido with few constraints as long as the newborn is cared for. That is, the well-cared-for newborn’s sexual drive produces tensions and excitations which the newborn can discharge unconstrainedly, with libidinal wishes –hallucinations—attached to memories of pleasures past. By contrast, there are drives, like the prototypical drive hunger, that cannot be satisfied for more than a brief while with a wish but are dependent for their satisfaction on real food, a real breast, a real caretaker’s responsiveness to baby communications; that is, they are more governed by a second Prinzip, called the Realitatprinzip. The sexual drive always retains some of its initial capacity to be satisfied, so to speak, “beyond (or before) the realty principle” – or to be satisfied by phantasy. Libido’s initial manifestations are like a tribe living without any constitution, and its later manifestations may be like anarchists who hark back to the state of nature and reject constitutions as constraints.
The self-preservative drives need reality from the start (as Ferenczi pointed out, in utero they need the reality of the mother’s whole body’s functioning) and thus they come to adapt more to reality at every stage of the child’s life, to become tamed by it, educated to work with it, to postpone satisfaction while real (or perhaps better) satisfactions can be found. These drives were called by Freud the ego instincts because they preserve the baby’s developing “I” (as well as its life) and because the developing ego allies with the reality principle to satisfy the ego instincts (and the sexual drive, too) in a progressively more “civilized” way, using thought, judgment, imagination, and, ultimately, scientific reasoning. The self-preservative drives, and the ego, can come, thus, into conflict with the phantasy-prone sexual drive, and then the ego becomes the director of repression of the sexual drive and its phantasy objects. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud invokes this opposition and remarks that the Realitatprinzip is (p.10) “under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation.” But that is all that Freud says about these instincts in the opening pages of “Beyond The Pleasure Principle”—thus missing his opportunity to keep them in his view and in psychoanalysis.
His 1911 theoretical picture of two basic drives –libidinal and ego instinctual—and two basic governing principles was quite clear and unproblematic to Freud, although he had ended his summary statement with a host of questions that needed exploring. His theoretical house seemed in order and consistent with what he had been thinking for years, frequently announcing his agreement with the poet Schiller, and with the great Darwin, and with common psychological sense and language since the Greeks: human beings are ultimately moved by Sex and Hunger, that is by a sexual instinct that eventually leads them as they mature to reproduce (to preserve the species) and by an instinct that moves them to preserve themselves –initially, to satisfy their hunger, but also to live in safety, security, with healthy functioning of all organs, in a state of well-cared-for-ness or psychic holding. Crucially, Freud acknowledged that self-preservation requires the affection or love or sociality of real (not phantasy) preserving caretakers, that is, it is a relational drive.[1] Human beings are, as Aristotle had said, by nature sociable and desiring to live together in polities. Affection cannot be gotten by a baby from a hallucination, or from a wire mother with a bottle, as Harlow’s little experimental monkeys knew; it cannot even be satisfied –as Ferenczi’s pupil Rene Sptiz showed experimentally—by a well-intentioned hospital nurse with a bottle who shows no warmth or affection for her baby charge and thus causes the baby to suffer from and even die of “hospitalism.”[2]
In the early editions of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud had declared that the libidinal energy in children should be called “the sensual current” and the self-preservative drive energies should be called, collectively, “the affectionate current.” Similarly, he distinguished sensuality –Sinnlichkeit—from tenderness or affection –Zartlichkeit. Both currents of desire have as their first object the maternal breast, but when a baby is nursing, the affectionate current leads the way and the sensual current leans upon it (or is “anaclitic” on it). The breast is the “anaclitic” object, Anhanglungsobjekt, literally the object leaned upon, depended upon, by the affectionate desire, because the baby cannot survive without the breast (or as Freud would later stress, because the baby is helpless without it). Winnicott put the matter more wittily by saying “there is no such thing as a baby” –there is only a baby-and-mother. For the sexual instinct the breast is an erotic object, pleasurable but not essential to life.
As a child develops, the sexual instinctual drive (the sensual current), at first so strong in the mouth, concentrates in the site of the anus, then in the genitals, but Freud did not note a corresponding stage development or site-specificity for the self-preservative drives, although he sometimes associated a self-preservative drive with each of the major bodily organs. Generally, he left these drives very little explored once he had described their satisfaction as getting physiological needs met and getting affection.[3] Crucially, he did not explore an object relational line of development for the affectionate current, even though he had said clearly that it is object-related before the sensual current is.
When Freud wrote about Sex and Hunger, he always interpreted Sex very broadly, using the Greek word eros, as the qualitative dimension for what he would describe quantitatively as tension reduction. But he never assigned Hunger a general name comparable to eros –although such a word was available in ancient Greek, where eros was always contrasted to but entwined with philia, affection or love of the sort that exits first between parents and children, but later between children and mentors, between friends who care for each other, citizens who appear before each other in councils and are bound by respect or philia politike, and so forth, all bonds without which humans do not survive or do not survive as humans.[4] In all the European languages with which Freud was familiar it is very obvious that a distinction between libidinal desire and needs that require loving care is registered as fundamental. Further, that lexical line separates desire –chiefly sexual desire—which you must actively reach out to satisfy (even if only to touch your own body) or go after, from desire which is satisfied by taking in or binding to yourself and which originally came to you in your helpless, dependent infant state. It is from the taking in or binding desire that the higher capacities of people in their relations with each other derive. The two forms of desire are analogized with words like “appetite,” which you can have for sex as well as for food, but the satisfactions are understood to be quite different. Eros and philia, desire directed actively outward and desire directed inward (as incorporative, receptive), are in non-technical German Begierde (sinnliche) and Wunsch, in Italian concupiscenza and desiderio , in Spanish lujuria and deseo These distinctions are like the one in English between lust and desire, where lust indicates acquisitive sexual desire (and also inordinate activity, avidity, greed) and desire is closer to need.
But, even though Freud’s first instinctual drive theory had the virtues of clarity and simplicity, the weight of poetic and scientific authority, and the wisdom of common speech to recommend it, he renovated it. The period of Freud’s thought between 1911 and 1920 can be characterized in many ways, but for the argument I am making here it is most important to note that this is the period in which the self-preservative instinctual drives were unexplored, then marginalized and finally redefined into unimportance. Freud’s attention was on the emergent ego as intently as it had been, until then, on the sexual drive, and, even more, it was on the relationship of the ego and the sexual drive (not the self-preservative ones). His burning question was how does the ego form and grow in relation to the sexual drive? This striking de-emphasis on the self-preservative drives came just after Freud had geared up to defend his libido theory against Adler, who had been very concerned with the ego instincts (which he thought included an aggressive drive) and just as he was beginning to realize he had to get ready to argue with Jung, who thought (monistically) that there was but one type of energy moving human beings, and it was not specifically sexual –indeed, it was more self-preservative, more affectional (even though Jung had the impertinence to call it “libidinal”). It may well be that Freud (consciously or unconsciously) steered away from the ego instinctual drive territory where he thought his opponents had set up theoretical camp to attack his libido theory. They seemed more concerned theoretically with security (or, in Adler’s case, insecurity) and social power than with sex.
As he realized that he and Jung had substantial and potentially irreconciable differences, Freud was also very concerned to clarify his own thinking about obsessionality and particularly about psychosis, that is, about ego distortion and pathology, Jung’s speciality. So it was his work on Schreber (1911) that led Freud to the hugely consequential 1914 work on narcissism. This paper is too complex to go into in detail here, but for my purposes its final declaration that there are but two kinds of love is the nub. Freud described the sexual drive, under the direction of the ego, as going to objects and hanging on them, that is, as directed toward the “anaclitic object” (which, of course, had once been the ego instinctual drive’s object). And he described the sexual drive (not the ego instinctual) as directed toward the ego itself, both in the ego’s initial emergent state (“primary narcissism”) and in later states subsequent to the sexual drive having gone out toward an anaclitic object and then retreated, either unable to hang there or suffering a loss of the object. The ego has either anaclitic objects or a narcissistic object (itself). In a normal developmental course, the child grows from narcissistic love to love of another; and if the normal child must retreat into narcissistic love after a loss, it does so without “narcissistic neurosis” (which basically means that it manages to master its loss of an object and is able to go forth again to love others, not getting stuck in pathological mourning but being strengthened by reinvesting its salvaged libidinal investment in its ego[5]).
After 1914, when he had added to his theoretical edifice these ideas about normal primary narcissism and psychotic retreat into narcissism, Freud offered a crucial redefinition of the self-preservative “affectionate current.” In his last revision of the Three Essays, the affectionate current lost its distinctiveness from the sensual current and changed into inhibited sexual desire, sexual desire that cannot proceed to full object love but remains fixed in self-investment or retreats to narcissistic love of the self. The theory of narcissism really erased the independence and the importance of the self-preservative drive as it demoted affectional love to a kind of narcissism. The new developmental theory (from primary narcissism to object love) then required a slight renovation or developmentalizing of the Lustprinzip: autoerotic tension reduction normally gives way developmentally to altererotic tension reduction (and this vastly increased the pathological significance of masturbation and of the perversions, which fall short of altererotic tension reduction). The helpless newborn baby’s need for, search for, and reception of sustenance and affection in relation to its care-givers (particularly the mother) was replaced with primary narcissism conceived of as an explanation for the newborn’s search for pleasure in autoeroticism, which requires no dependency, no other, no mother. There is such a thing as a baby, alone.
So, when Freud came in 1920 to looking “beyond the pleasure principle,” it was hardly to be expected that he would find a new version of the old ideas that had been demolished during the years when he was extending and broadening in every way that he could his “libido theory,” his postulation of the omni-causality and centrality of the sexual instinct, in general, and in the development of the ego. He was not going to return to or reconsider or rebuild the old idea that there are two instincts, Sex and Hunger, particularly as such a return might have weakened his ability to distinguish his theory from Adler’s or Jung’s. And, besides, the self-preservative instincts were not at all what Freud thought he needed to deal with the pieces of evidence he brought forward in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” claiming that they did not fit with even the revised Lustprinzip postulation. Apparently, it did not occur to him that the pieces of evidence he was cataloguing were without a theoretical place because he had been so busy demolishing their place –the self-preservative instinct theory.
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Let me turn now to the pieces of evidence. They are of different sorts, but all have in common that they involve repetition — what Freud called “the compulsion to repeat”—of painful activities, some of which do finally end in pleasurable relief, but some of which bring discharge but no relief, and some of which bring only perpetual pain. He noted that children play games that they repeat, over and over, which seem to have the function of allowing them (usually) to cope with or master loss, particularly separation from the mother (in the instance of the “fort-da” game he describes in detail). He noted that people who suffer traumatic injuries, as well as soldiers who suffer from war neurosis (where no physical injury is involved), dream repeatedly their trauma –seldom to any relief. In psychoanalytic treatments, he says, recurring to what he had noted in his papers on technique, he has learned that neither interpreting the content of patient’s free associations nor analyzing their resistances to interpretations brings about a cure; that must arise from allowing the patient to repeat in the analytic situation their childhood experiences of defeat, loss, rivalry with parents or siblings, failure to be able to fulfill their wishes because of physical immaturity or prohibitions. Repetition of painful childhood experiences takes place in treatment and with the analyst (where it is called the “transference neurosis”), but it also takes place in the lives of some normal people, who: “give the impression of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some “daemonic” power. They have a character trait or a character formation that produces repetitive patterning or “perpetual recurrence of the same thing.”
Every analyst knows that compulsive repetition phenomena appear in every treatment, crucially, and are everywhere in people’s lives (and, many would say, as Freud himself later did, in the collective lives of groups). The quarrel over “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” that began in 1920 and continues is not over the commonness of the phenomenon or its paramount significance, but over the explanation. For Freud, the phenomenon points to the limits of the Lustprinzip, which cannot regulate and reduce the tension these games and dreams and enactments are themselves trying to contain or master. The Lustprinzip cannot, as Freud puts it, “bind” the energy –so far unnamed—that must be invidiously active in these activities, which have run unchecked, he suggests, because the traumas have broken through the mind’s “protective barrier” against shocking stimulation and overstimulation. The traumas have, so to speak, returned the mind to formlessness and void, like pre-life. The mind has to be somewhat regulated, somewhat constant, before it can carry through the process of finding peace and quiet; internal chaos cannot bring about the end of chaos produced by trauma or returned to in trauma. So these traumas must release an instinctual drive lying deep in the mind, there before the Lustprinzip.
At this point in the argument, Freud of the first instinct theory might have been able to say: what is released is the self-preservative drive, screaming, so to speak “Let me live! Help me! Take me in your arms!” But that is not the step Freud took in 1920. Rather he took one that caused the trauma to the psychoanalytic community that it has been repeating compulsively ever since.
His thoughts about traumatic breakthrough had been propelled by the question: if the compulsion to repeat can over-ride the Lustprinzip (“to which, after all, we have hitherto ascribed dominance over the course of the processes of excitation in mental life,” p. 23), is this compulsion “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual that the pleasure principle which it over-rides”? Freud then asks (p.36): “But how is the predicate of being ‘instinctual’ related to the compulsion to repeat?” His next, fateful question was: Does the compulsion to repeat express an instinctual drive toward an earlier state of things, toward a state of dissolution, breakdown –ultimately, toward death? Does it express an inertia inherent in organic life? And might this instinctual drive toward dissolution even have brought the ego into being in the first place –that is, might the ego have grown up to try to control this dissolving energy? (Not to try to preserve itself by getting love and care.) A fragile ego trying to control this dissolving energy would have had to have its own energy, of course, and that would, of course, have been an energy of binding and building up. Such an energy could be, he argued, none other than the sexual instinctual drive, the species preservative drive that eventually brings sperm to ovum, creating new life. Eros. So Eros, which had once been the source of disruption in the psychic economy, the source of ego pathology, because it resisted the reality principle and maintained its phantasy-proneness following the Lustprinzip, becomes now the redemptive force of binding, unification, building up (on its eventual way to reproduction[6]).
The biological speculations and reviews of contemporary biologists’ speculations that followed as Freud took up this questions and began to construct his theory of “the death instinct” (later to be called Thanatos in contrast to Eros) are not, I think, of great interest now. What seems to me most important in the theory construction is the act of demolition required to make way for it. Specifically, the self-preservative instincts, long under threat of theoretical superfluity, had to be completely broken up and recycled. Remarkably, they do not appear as forces of binding and building up, but as forces that serve the death instinct! Freud himself seemed shocked at this strange development:
The hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to all living beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward of any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organisms puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death…(p. 39)
As they struggle against dangers and threats to life, the self-preservative instincts may seem to serve life –as the sexual instincts actually do, Freud believed, by leading to unification, reproduction. But, in fact, self-preservation serves only to stave off any externally dealt death blow while the death instinct follows its inevitable immanent or interior course, which is so inexorable that it does not even require a Todesprinzip, a regulatory principle (although, in effect, it follows a principle of inertia). As we compulsively repeat, we struggle mightly to take our own path to death.
Not surprisingly, this idea soon seemed to Freud himself to be far-fetched, and he eventually redeemed the much-diminished self-preservative drives somewhat by saying that, really, they must serve the sexual instinctual drive –they must be its guardians.[7] But he did not then, as he might have, realize that the compulsion to repeat can very well be seen (as I suggested before) to be manifesting these very “instincts of self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery” as they go about trying to heal the effects in children and adults of traumas (which may be traumas primarily effecting the sensual current or the affectionate current or, more usually, both). He did not say: if reality is traumatic to a sufficient degree, reality will overcome the Lustprinzip, reality itself will be beyond the pleasure principle. And the self-preservative drive, rather than serving the reality principle, will have to fight it; survival will depend upon the self-preservative drive not being knocked completely out of commission. If, in a manner consistent with Freud’s first instinct theory, in which his notion of the “protective barrier” was framed, we describe a trauma as an event (or events) that, producing psychic chaos, cuts a person off from caretakers, security, safety, allegiances, comrades, civility –all the aims of the affectionate current—as well as from any sexual desire satisfaction, then a compulsion to repeat is a compulsion on the part of the drives for preservation to heal, to overcome, to make a different outcome, to reconnect. It is self-care-taking or solicitation of care-taking from others. The traumatized person wants her own path to life, which has been obscured, demolished.
In fact, this line of argument that I have imagined had been taken by Freud himself back in the 1911 Schreber case, where Freud had described the psychotic’s symptoms as manifestations of an effort to return to a benign reality and to other people, a self-preservative effort or an effort at self-healing. And the line of argument was also taken in the 1926 text Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, where Freud constructed a brilliant definition of anxiety as –in effect—a signal that an elemental expectation of love had been or was about to be disappointed. He even constructed a developmental line for anxiety. This definition and this developmental line obviated the need for a death instinct theory.[8] But Freud compulsively repeated the theory anyway.
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In the history of psychoanalysis after “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” two roads eventually parted in the woods. At first, there was some agreement. All Freudians were impressed with the emphasis that Freud put after 1920 on aggression, because everyone who survived the First World War realized that aggression and aggression against the self (masochism) had been underemphasized and undertheorized in psychoanalytic theory. But there agreement ended. And most subsequent psychoanalysts have either followed Klein and Lacan in elaborating the death instinct theory in various ways, or followed Hartman and Fenichel and others among the Ego Psychologists in repudiating the biological theory while accepting the idea that sex and aggression are fundamental drives. (Anna Freud stood diplomatically aside: speaking of sex and aggression as fundamental drives, but neither embracing nor rejecting the biological death instinct theory, which she felt called for she called for confirming or disconfirming empirical research.)
In only one camp did refusing the death instinct theory flow from recognition that the theory had cost psychoanalysis its path to exploring the self-preservative drives or the ego instincts and thus developing a philosophy of love and a moral-political theory: this was the Budapest School, starting in the 1930’s, after Ferenczi’s death.[9] Ferenczi himself had opened the way for his trainees with his asides in Thalassa about a self-preservative longing for the nourishing protective enclosure of the womb. But he had also emphasized a sexual drive for return to the womb and accepted a version of the death instinct theory. Even more significant were Ferenczi’s efforts to theorize about protective, affectional love in the therapeutic situation, which, of course, which often veered off into reflections on eroticism in the therapeutic situation and to dangerous experiments with “mutual analysis.”
The most empirically oriented Hungarian explorer of the self-preservative relational drives was Imre Hermann, a researcher well-versed in ethology and primatology, who wrote a famous paper on the self-preservative drive pair “to cling” and “to go in search.”[10] Michael Balint recognized that the original affectionate current had a developmental history that needed exploring (and he eventually thought that the developmental history might be clearest in group relations, hence the Balint Groups). As children grow more complex, they do so on the basis of an original relational love, which he called “primary passive object love” or sometimes just “primary love” (Balint, 1935). Depending on the reality –the traumas—they encounter and how they react, children become characterologically “ocnophile” (loving to cling to objects) or tend toward “philobatism” (love of open spaces that are free of dreaded, anxiety-producing obstacles). His first wife Alice Balint spoke of “archaic, egoistic object love” in a 1938 book called The First Year of Life (1958) which, when it was finally translated into English, contained an appreciative Preface by Anna Freud.
To my knowledge, the difficulties of finding an adequate single noun for the affectionate current (as a range and development of drives, not just in its prototype, Hunger) have been considered only by a psychoanalyst who did not think in the lexicon that Freud inherited from German philosophy and physics. Takeo Doi notes that in his mothertongue, Japanese, there is an everyday noun, amae, which means “the expectation to be sweetly and indulgently loved.” Amae, Doi argued (and Michael Balint accepted the argument in his 1967 book The Basic Fault), is Freud’s old ego instinctual “affectionate current” and it is a template for all later affectionate love, in children and in adults and societies. But neither Michael Balint nor Takeo Doi recognized, it seems to me, that the distinction Freud drew in his early work between “the sensual current” and “the affectionate current, ” like the one he drew between the sexual instincts and the ego instincts, actually represents the commonsense of the European eros/philia tradition as well as of the Japanese.
The relative silence in psychoanalysis over the lost ego instincts has not been recognized in recent years because those who have felt the need for an “affectionate current” have thought that such was supplied by John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory, which was developed by Mary Ainsworth but also by the contemporary Freudians at the Anna Freud Center, like Peter Fonagy. Bowlby had posited an attachment drive wwhich must be satisfied for normal development, while pathology flows from its frustration or its traumatization by environmental factors. Others have felt that Winnicott’s distinction between the object mother (recipient of erotic love) and the environmental mother (supplier of vital needs and protector from trauma) recognizes the love that had no name other than Hunger. These are crucial contributions, which have inspired most of the fruitful work in child analysis in recent decades, but the Bowlbyan line really has no theory of the unconscious, and the Winnicottian line has no drive theory (and it has thus been attractive mostly to Object Relations repudiators of drive theory).
So, it seems to me, what was lost in 1920 has not really been refound, and psychoanalysis remains relatively unconnected to the ethical and political insights first articulated in the West by the Greek explorers of philia. The ways in which we are supplied with the necessities of life –the ways in which we are lovingly fed and cared-for tenderly– set the developmental stage for mature life when people are no longer under the sway of necessity, no longer helpless and dependent, and can tend to others, including their parents, in a well-regulated state that guarantees their freedom to act, or to direct their own actions according to worthy principles like courage and magnanimity. Affectionately reared children, Aristotle says in the Nichomachean Ethics (IX.ii.8), will later impart to their parents “nourishment” (trophe), and find this care more beautiful than they find caring for themselves. Receiving affectional love is the root of altruism.
And in our world it would be a great benefaction were altruism understood this way.
[1] John Bowlby was inaccurate when he asserted that Freud thought of the baby’s self-preservative drive as aiming only at satisfaction of hunger or vital needs; getting affection is involved. Bowlby wrote in Attachment and Loss (1969, p. 178): “In so far as the baby becomes interested in and attached to a human figure, especially the mother, this is the result of the mother’s meeting the baby’s physiological needs and the baby’s learning in due course that she is the source of his gratifications. I shall call this [Freudian theory] the theory of Secondary Drive.”
[2] Rene Spitz, “Hospitalism,” PSC 1 (1945)
[3] Sandor Ferenczi noticed this absence, and wrote a paper in 1913, after the Prinzip concept had entered the Freudian lexicon, called “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Realty.” He set out a preliminary sketch for a line of ego instinctual development that had great influence in the Budapest School, particularly upon Michael Balint.
[4] Philia was the word used by Aristotle to reflect an earlier Homeric system of words focused around the verb trepho, cherish or nurture, which was translated as colere in Latin, the verb underlying the noun cultura. The philia bonds are the cultural bonds, compassing child-rearing methods, education, mentoring from older to younger citizens, and creating cultural objects, monuments, and cities. Cf. Russo and Young-Bruehl, “Amae in Ancient Greece.”
[5] In the technique papers contemporary to his work on narcissism, Freud recommended to analysts who felt erotically drawn to their female patients that they withdraw, mastering their “counter-transference” (a new term) and enhancing their ego-strength thereby. This was another matter on which he and Jung disagreed, particularly as they both treated an incurable extreme obsessional patient, Elfriede Hirschfield. See E. Falzedar
[6] In his writings on sexual development after 1920, Freud emphasized the normality and importance of reproductive sexuality and heterosexuality more than he ever had before, because homosexuality and the perversions made no contribution to opposing the death instinct. The consequences of this emphasis were disastrous for psychoanalytic understanding of homosexuality and the perversions.
[7] In the unfinished An Outline of Psychoanalysis (SE 23:148): “The contrast between the instincts of self-preservation and the preservation of the species, as well as the contrast between ego-love and object-love, fall within Eros.”
[8] As Anna Freud seems to have understood, so she could use that text as the framework for her The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), in which she did not need to mention of the death instinct theory.
[9] There was American interest in the ego instincts after WWII, but that interest focused on the ego instincts as instincts of mastery or “effectence” ( Robert Knight’s word), not on their modality of love. This was a kind of Pragmatist Darwinism.
[10] Hermann has a contemporary advocate in the Belgian analyst Tomas Geyskens, but Geyskens does not see the ego instinctual line of development outlined in Hermann’s work.
