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E. Bleuler introduced the term ambivalence to characterise one of the fundamental symptoms of schizophrenia. Since then, it has been readily adopted by psychiatry,194 psychology and psychoanalysis. However, in spite of the time elapsed since then, the term was not completely clarified in the literature, and studies aimed at clearing up its meaning and scope are infrequent.
In The History of Psychiatry, Alexander and Selesnick note the precedents in Spinoza's Ethics, in which this philosopher presents the details of the phenomenon that ‘two hundred years later, Bleuler called ambivalence’ (Alexander and Selesnick, 1966, p. 99). Thus, in Proposition XVII [Part III] he says:
If we conceive that a thing, which is wont to affect us painfully, has any point of resemblance with another thing which is wont to affect us with an equally strong emotion of pleasure, we shall hate the first-named thing, and at the same time we shall love it.195
Spinoza calls this mixture of two opposing emotions ‘vacillation; it stands to the emotions in the same relation as doubt does to the imagination …;
I shall refer only to the psychoanalytic literature and more especially to the works of Freud.
After reviewing the Reports of the Second International Congress of Psychiatry (Stoll, ed., 1959) dedicated to the theme of schizophrenia, I now doubt this statement, since it is very difficult to find the use of this term in them.
[Quotations in the original are from the Spanish translation by C. G. Bardé. We have substituted the English translation by Elwes.]
vacillation and doubt do not differ one from the other except as greater differs from less.’ (p. 74). He ends the Note to this Proposition: ‘Hence we can easily conceive, that one and the same object may be the cause of many and conflicting emotions’, (p. 74).
However, it is undoubtedly Bleuler who introduced the term, identifying three types of ambivalence: affective, volitional and intellectual.
Of the fi