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During the past five years I have come across a number of patients whose psychic structure differed considerably from that of the usual run of neurotic patients. In calling these patients hungry, I am deliberately choosing a common characteristic on which my observations have centred. Naturally, I cannot hope to introduce two of these patients to you as individuals within the limits of this paper. In fact, the most I can hope for is to describe how I got into theoretical difficulties and reached some tentative conclusions. I shall refer to the patients only to illustrate my points.
I am using hunger in a specific sense here, yet I want to make it clear that none of the patients considered themselves hungry when they were first seen. However, the subject of food and eating took a prominent place in their analyses. Both patients were under 30 years of age, and were immature personalities suffering from considerable ego weakness. The main burden of this paper will be to expound what I mean by ego weakness, a term which has been used increasingly by analysts writing about the psychodynamics of schizophrenia (e.g. Metman, 1956, 1957, 1958; Freeman et al., 1957).
These patients had to be studied more through their behaviour in the analytical sessions than by other evidence of unconscious activity, e.g. dream analysis and active imagination. They did dream, but their interest could not be got by dream interpretation: other manifestations were more urgent. A modification of what might be regarded as classical analysis was therefore required.
In the abstract of this paper I referred—rather loosely—to the relations between hunger and sexual instincts. Much work has been done of recent years on the subject of instincts by ethologists, who now look upon instincts as whole sequences of behaviour. Regarding this topic Lorenz (1950, p. 261) says:
“What formerly was very simply conceived of as ‘an instinct’ is shown by the advance of analysis to be a very complex mechanism of very dist