Freudian Theory

Three main functions of external reality (E.R.) relative to the subjecto may be mentioned. a) it is a source of stimulae that promote the structuring of te psychic apparatus. In this sense, E.F. is the place where this apparatus is charged and where it is discharged (specific action). b) it is a vehicle of gratification or frustration of necessity (AnakÈ). The satisfaction of necessity is gratifying, the lackof it is frustrating. c) it is the instance that heals or makes a person ill acording to its possibility of gratifying or frustrating the subject respectively.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Freud and Pavlov made complementary theoretical splits in their observational field. This splitting initiated a dialectical interaction that tended to polarize the Freudian mental world of insight and the psyche against the Pavlovian outer world of learning theories and the soma. The 1950s saw an exaggerated polarization between strict behaviorists and "classical" psychoanalysts. The linkage of ideas of therapeutic action with metapsychology also dates from Freud and is briefly illustrated.

What I believe to be the essential contribution of this group of analysts may be summarized as follows. The role of object relations has always been a prominent theme in analytic thought and has become much more so in recent years. Instead of grafting the implications of relations onto a theory that started from a different standpoint, what the British group has done is to show that the development of the person has to be conceived as the progressive differentiation of a structure from a unitary matrix that itself interacts at a holistic personal level from the start.

Any considerations of object relations theory and love requires a clear understanding of how the term, object relations, is used. In this contribution the concept of the object as a mental representation is emphasized. Developmentally, the evolution of the object cannot be separated from the vicissitudes of the drives. Sensorimotor experience is metaphorically assimilated in terms of pleasure-unpleasure components. Since the object concept develops in this context, it is inextricably linked to the vicissitudes of the drives.

Freud once planned a comprehensive "study of man's love life." Although only fragments of this project ever appeared in print, much of it can be reconstructed from Freud's letters and other sources. After tracing the evolution of Freud's thinking on this topic, the author proposes that there are five functions of the ego which are associated with falling in love. The bliss of falling in love is seen as the result of a revival of feelings that once belonged to the symbiotic phase of infancy.

Even those aspects of transference which initially favor the analytic process and seem to have the least connection with resistance do become integral parts of the transference neurosis and contribute massively to some of the most subtle difficulties in the process, especially in its resolution. These phenomena are, by their very appearance of rationality and cooperation, all the more difficult to bring under analytic scrutiny.

Plato and Freud transformed our way of looking at love. In Plato's Dialogues one can trace the transition and transformation of the mythical view on love into philosophical conceptualizations. The waning of the mythical point of view created the demand for man to know himself, and love became a puzzle. Plato was the first to propose that erotic impulses can undergo sublimation to higher and desexualized aims.

Three distinct constructions of transference which have related though differentiable histories can be identified in Freud's writings. The postulation of discrete metapsychological, clinical, and universal constructions was completed by 1915, although many significant revisions within those constructions were made thereafter.

This paper discusses transference love, its place among other transference reactions, and other forms of love. It attempts to resolve two questions: (1) whether transference love is essentially similar to love in real life or is fundamentally different and (2) whether if it is different, it can be seen as a transitory form of love that will enable the analysand to transfer to a new object significantly better than he or she would have been able to had psychoanalysis not interfered.

The development of the concept of identification in the work of Freud, Ferenczi, and Abraham is reviewed and analyzed from the standpoint of the development of the psychoanalytic object concept in general. Problems in the theory are seen to be related to ambiguity of the terms, ego and object, especially as reflected in the idea of introjection. The concept of identification, on the other hand, is shown to have undergone consistent evolution and expansion.