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THIS PAPER TRACES CERTAIN MAJOR changes, since Freud's early theory, in how the problem of adaptation to reality has been conceptualized in psychoanalysis. It also foreshadows broad implications of these changes for our intuitions and theories about human nature, psychopathology, and treatment.
Freud's early theory of adaptation, as set forth in his model situation (1895), (1900), (1911), remains the reference point for all later psychoanalytic considerations about adaptation. In his model situation, Freud imagined a primary state of the mind in which mental processes are regulated exclusively by the pleasure principle (1911). The infant, in this primary state, is not aware of its mother's existence, or of its dependence on her care.
The infant's state of psychical rest is disturbed from time to time by the peremptory demands of internal needs, such as those arising from hunger. The infant discharges the mounting internal excitation by random motor movements and by crying. Eventually the caretaker feeds the infant, putting an end to the internal stimulus of hunger and giving the infant an "experience of satisfaction" (1900, p. 566). The next time the infant is hungry, a psychical impulse (a wish) arises to re-evoke the perception of the original situation of satisfaction. This impulse follows the "shortest path" to its fulfillment; that is, the hungry infant hallucinates the breast. The infant, when fed, does not connect satisfaction with external reality, for he does not discriminate between an hallucination and a perception that originates from outside himself.
The infant is eventually compelled to make this discrimination