You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1949, Vol. XVIII, p. 325.
The purpose of the paper is to investigate further and to seek for psychological motives which may explain Freud's statement that the ego employs object cathexis in order to avoid an increased damming up of libido in the ego. The authors discuss the wish to be loved, and state that spatial separation as an expression of anxiety is based fundamentally upon the feeling of the threat to narcissistic unity. The ego-ideal is regarded as a zone for which Eros and Thanatos battle. One root for the ego-ideal derives from the ego's ability to project the aggression on to objects. These feared objects are incorporated into the ego and become the subject of one's own narcissism. The second root of the ego-ideal is the ego's seeking to recover the early perfection that was wrested from it. The ego-ideal is suggested as being that displaceable neutral energy which Freud postulated as being capable of joining with either an erotic or destructive impulse. The ego-ideal stems from narcissistic reserves of the libido and is desexualized Eros.
In love the ego-ideal is projected on to the object and is reintrojected. Thus Eros becomes preeminent,