A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
Today we shall look at another angle of the development, namely the
relation of the partial instinct to the object. We shall make a hurried
survey of this development in order to spend more time upon a relatively
later product. Some of the components of the sex instincts have had an
object from the very beginning and hold fast to it; such are the
instinct to mastery (sadism), curiosity, and the impulse to watch. Other
impulses which are more clearly attached to specific erogenous zones of
the body have this object only in the beginning, as long as they adhere
to the functions which are not sexual; they release this object when
they free themselves from these non-sexual functions. The first object
of the oral component of the sexual impulse is the mother's breast,
which satisfies the hunger of the infant. By the act of sucking, the
erotic component which is also satisfied by the sucking becoming
independent, it gives up the foreign object and replaces it by some part
of its own body. The oral impulse becomes _auto-erotic_, just as the
anal and other erogenous impulses are from the very beginning. Further
development, to express it most briefly, has two goals--first, to give
up auto-eroticism, and, again, to substitute for the object of one's own
body a foreign object; second, to unify the different objects into a
single impulse, replace them by a single object. To be sure, that can
happen only if this single object is itself complete, a body similar to
one's own. Nor can it be consummated without leaving behind as useless a
large number of the auto-erotic instinctive impulses.
The processes of finding the object are rather involved, and have as yet
had no comprehensive exposition. For our purpose, let us emphasize the
fact that when the process has come to a temporary cessation in the
childhood years, before the latent period, the object it has found is
seen to be practically identical with the first object derived from its
relation to the object of the oral pleasure impulse. It is, if not the
mother's breast, the mother herself. We call the mother the first
_object of love_. For we speak of love when we emphasize the psychic
side of sex-impulses, and disregard or for a moment wish to forget the
fundamental physical or "sensual" demands of the instincts. At the time
when the mother becomes the object of love, the psychic work of
suppression which withdraws the knowledge of a part of his sexual goal
from his consciousness has already begun in the child. The selection of
the mother as the object of love involves everything we understand by
the Oedipus complex which has come to have such great significance in
the psychoanalytic explanation of neuroses, and which has had no small
part in arousing opposition to psychoanalysis.
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