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Levin re-examines Freud's hypothesis that the avoidance of pain, i.e., the baby's hunger, is the original motive for object experience and relationship. The reality principle, the search for real satisfaction, is essentially a pragmatic extension of the pleasure principle. But this does not fully answer the important question: What accounts for the infant's ability to delay gratification? What leads to pleasure in the object experience? Pleasure in the object depends not only on drive relief, but on the simultaneous development of many psychological processes in the infant. While waiting, the baby begins to play with thought and fantasy and is thereby creating pleasure through interaction and elaborative construction of the inner object.
An alternative to Freud's theoretical formulation would combine the pleasure and reality principles in the economic and regulative senses of these terms, calling them together the pain principle. The capacity to defer drive satisfaction would belong to an independent object principle, although this would necessarily develop in close relationship to the pain principle and the particular qualities of the rudimentary ego. We would then begin to have a more multigenetic model, the development of the psyche conceived of as an ongoing interaction and growth of many psychological capacities.
The author proposes that the infant has an aesthetic experience residing in the basic symbolic processes, which constitutes the internal world. This creates the particular qualities of the self and the infant's own construction of her or his internal objects. Clinical attention to this layer of experience may eventually lead to a more satisfactory formulation of a new pleasure principle.