On Freud's Theory of Schizophrenia

For many years now there has been a continuing and sustained criticism of Freud's (1911) hypothesis that the basic disorder in schizophrenia consists in the patient's inability to maintain the libidinal cathexis of objects. The fact that patients suffering from the two principal types of schizophrenia present signs of real and fantasy object relationships has been taken as evidence that the illness cannot be based on a decathexis of object representations. This contradiction is easily dispelled if account is taken of the real likelihood that these object relationships, which are mostly of a pathological kind, represent a spontaneous tendency towards recovery. They are therefore secondary to the primary disorder and a reaction to it.

In the original theory Freud (1911) described the flight of the libidinal cathexis from the love object in schizophrenia as a form of repression. After the introduction of the structural theory (Freud, 1923) he dropped the term 'repression' when describing the metapsychology of schizophrenia (Freud, 1924) but adhered to his earlier view that the psychosis is initiated by a withdrawal of object cathexis in the face of a danger situation. The course of the illness and its clinical characteristics depend on the balance which is struck between the forces promoting the decathexis of objects and the pressure exerted by the libidinal wishes seeking to recathect the objects. This balance varies between patients and within the one patient at different stages of the illness, so accounting for the different clinical types and for the changing symptomatology in the same patient. It follows from the classical theory (Fenichel, 1945) that the symptomatology characteristic of schizophrenia must have different sources of origin and must be formed by different mechanisms.

At the onset of a schizophrenia or during its course, it is commonplace to observe a primitive identification with the object (Nunberg, 1921); (Katan 1950); (Reich, 1936). In chr