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The specific stimuli for this paper have been three:
(1) Freud's work on the economics of libidinal ontogeny, limits of absorption of libidinal quantities, etc. (e.g. 'On Narcissism: An Introduction', Collected Papers, Vol. IV, p. 42), which runs through all his later writings, and is particularly striking in Hemmung, Symptom und Angst.
(2) My own work on infantile libidinal positions founded, of course, on Freud's wonderful insight into these complex states, and further supported by Klein's powers of empathy in this direction. In particular the effect on the child of 'primal scenes' has exercised me.
(3) The extraordinarily interesting paper by Brun, of Zurich, on 'The Theory of Selection and the Pleasure Principle' which appeared in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse as long ago as 1923, Vol. IX, No. 2. I seem ever since that time to have lived in expectation of seeing some flowering and fruiting from that suggestive sowing. It is largely my amazement at the apparent lack of fulfilment of this expectation2 which has incited me to venture on the field of thought to which I invite attention here.
In order to bring the second, the more directly biological part of