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This paper is itself an abstract of the Freud Memorial Lecture delivered at the New York Academy of Medicine in May 1954. At an all-day meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute which followed, the Memorial Lecture was considered as a contribution to the Symposium on Problems of Infantile Neurosis in conjunction with papers read by Drs. Greenacre and Hartmann. It precedes the report of the Symposium and was discussed simultaneously.
In a detailed discussion of the conscious and unconscious motivations of the so-called 'rejecting mother', Miss Freud emphasized that in the period of need satisfaction, where the libidinal cathexis is attached not to the image of the object but to the experience of satisfaction and relief, frustration is inevitable. The infant suffers from delays in satisfaction and from quantitative differences between insatiable wishes and rationed satisfaction, as well as from the uncoupling under conditions of cultural nurture of innately coupled needs, such as the need for sleep and skin contact. These events were profoundly influential for the nature of the mother-child relationship, for ego structure, and for symptom formation.
By accepting the principles of delay and rationing involved in infant care, the ego adopts a cautious attitude to the id drives, makes an initial step towards the reality principle, and introduces into the personality the first break between principles governing ego and id. Somatic compliance may conceivably arise when the mental representative of a need or drive is weighed down by the intense unpleasure connected with it in the period of need satisfaction.