Psychodynamics of the Depressive Character: Author's Response to Charles T. Sullivan

To the Editors: Sullivan disagrees with calling the infant's need to be loved, including to be fed and held in warm contact with the mother's body, an instinctual need, which he thinks is incompatible with the psychoanalytic theory of instincts. For the purpose of my paper I have no objection to calling it simply a “vital need.” Its connection with libido is well enough known and certainly fits the libido theory. My paper deals with the effects of frustrations of this need, the loss of love, loss of love objects and particularly the many experiences of unpleasure the child has to take from love objects and which are introjected. The ego, for self-preservation, builds up defenses in the form of denial and libidinization. The latter is the libidinal cathexis by an active ego of introjects and of the unpleasure connected with them. If this cathexis is projected or acted out with actual persons or events, we see the symptom of masochism. The sexual form of masochism has indeed the purpose of satisfying somatic needs. In nonsexual masochism the goal is the satisfaction of the need for affection. Depression, in contradistinction to ordinary unhappiness, can be understood only as a libidinal phenomenon, that is, in terms of the libido theory. The admixture of aggression, at least in the depressive character, appears to be a secondary development. This may be different in the melancholic psychosis, but this needs further study.

Fairbairn's theory may also be applicable to my work, though I cannot confirm the withdrawal of libido from the ego by the object itself. On the contrary, the ego holds on, tenaciously and with the power of the libidinal instinct, to the injurious inner objects, which, in the light of this need, appear to be still better than no object at all. There is in the depressive character (perhaps it is different in the melancholic psychosis) no withdrawal of libido; there are misplaced cathexes, self-injurious object choices, suffering-centered preoccupations