17 February 1960: Animism, Destructive Attacks and Reality. Cogitations

In the earliest phases of development objects are felt to be alive and to possess character and personality presumably indistinguishable from the infant's own. In this phase, which may be considered as anterior to the development of the reality principle as Freud describes it, the real and the alive are indistinguishable; if an object is real to the infant, then it is alive; if it is dead, it does not exist. But this ‘it’ that does not exist and is not alive – why is it necessary to talk about it or discuss it? The problem is to give an answer verbally about objects in a pre-verbal state. The difficulty will constantly crop up in what I have to say, and my solution of it will constantly demand indulgent understanding from the reader.

In this instance it is necessary to talk about this object which should be non-existent and therefore impossible to discuss. Its importance lies in the fact that the infant, if enraged, has death wishes, and if the object is wished dead, it is dead. It therefore has become non-existent, and its characteristics are different from those of the real, live, existing object; the existing object is alive, real, and benevolent. (I propose to call the real, alive objects α-elements; the dead, unreal objects I shall call β-elements.) In order to distinguish the distinction between real and unreal that I am making here, from the distinction between real and unreal which is appropriate to Freud's description of the interplay between pleasure principle and reality principle, I shall call these objects proto-real objects belonging to the domain of proto-reality. The infant, in all the early phases of its life, is dominated by the pleasure principle. It is therefore, in so far as it feels pleasure, surrounded by these proto-real objects felt to be real and alive. But should pain supervene, then it is surrounded by dead objects destroyed by its hate, which, since it cannot tolerate pain, are non-existent. But ordinarily they continue to exist because t