14 The Notion of Object

Foreword. In the remaining chapters of this book I am going to deal essentially with concepts which can be employed only partially in present-day clinical work but which, I feel, will become important in due time. It will be a challenge to future generations of psychoanalysts to understand how and when these concepts may apply and to create new notions which may serve to modify or complete them. If they respond to this, perhaps not only psychoanalysis but also mathematics and epistemology could be enriched. Perhaps too the aspects, either of knowledge or of being, where there is unity in nature will become more apparent. Psychoanalysis, especially through the study of dreams, offers unique opportunities of discovering recondite aspects of being, some of which may even eventually apply to other subjects.

The aim of this chapter is, in the first place, to study those aspects of the concept of object which are implicitly employed in the conception of the internal world. I shall try to make these more explicit and also to discuss some of the difficulties which the present-day concept of object raises.¹

I will begin with a definition from Freud:

‘The object of an instinct is the thing in regard to which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable about an instinct and is not originally connected with it,

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but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible. The object is not necessarily something extraneous: it may equally well be a part of the subject's own body. It may be changed any number of times in the course of the vicissitudes which the instinct undergoes during its existence; and highly important parts are played by this displacement of instinct. It may happen that the same object serves for the satisfaction of several instincts simultaneously, a phenomenon which Adler (1908) has called a “confluence” of instincts.’

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