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In this all too brief essay we are presented with a text of enormous complexity, a distillation of Loewald's thinking concerning sublimation. The complexity is due not only to the degree to which Loewald has compressed and condensed his ideas: it also reflects something that is characteristic of Loewald's earlier contributions to psychoanalytic theory. It could be described as a paradox in which Freudian theory is both preserved and transformed. I know of no other contemporary author who can explicate Freudian theory with such passion, depth, and subtlety. Yet Loewald manages to both retain and transform Freudian concepts: he continues to employ terms that are associated with Freud's instinct theory, such as object libido and narcissistic libido, primary narcissism, and so forth; he retains these terms but at the same time transforms the theory with which they were formerly associated.
Freud, in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," considered instincts to be forces arising from within the interior of the individual, without reference to the human environment. But Loewald, on the other hand, conceives of instincts, such as Freud's life and death instincts, as residing not in an already separate psychic unit, the infant or the infant-self, but as intrinsic to the interactional process that occurs within the mother-child matrix. In this view, Loewald comes close to expressing a position similar to that of Winnicott,1 who said that "ego relatedness" takes precedence over the forces of the id. I must confess that despite the fact that Loewald understands object libido and narcissistic libido to refer to "the products of differentiation, within the mother-infant matrix," these terms no longer possess meaning for me. The problem, as I see it, is with the concept of instinct itself.
Freud admitted that his use of the instinct concept was entirely dependent upon biology. He stated, with regard to his discussion of