Epilogue

“[I]t cannot be denied,” Freud wrote in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” that hating … originally characterized the relation of the I [ego] to the alien external world. … At the very beginning, it seems, the external world … and what is hated are identical” (Freud, 1915, p. 136). In his classic 1932 work, The Concept of the Political, the German legal−political theorist Carl Schmitt wrote: “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism” (Schmitt, 1996, p. 29), the primary “political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (Schmitt, 1996, p. 26). In both, we have the articulation of a primordial distinction between what is internal, within the (individual or collective) ego, and loved, and what is outside, the other, and the object of hatred or enmity.

Yet, of course, this is only a starting point. Although the “original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad” so that “[w]hat is bad … and what is external are, to begin with, identical” (Freud, 1925, p. 237) and the “pure pleasure-ego” stands “confronted by a strange and threatening ‘outside’” (Freud, 1930, p. 68), over time, the ego can come to accept that “some of the things that one is unwilling to give up, because they give pleasure, are nevertheless not ego but object; and some sufferings that one seeks to expel turn out to be inseparable from the ego in virtue of their internal origin” (Freud, 1930, p. 68). In the case of both recognitions, what is (or can be) involved is not a rejection of the pleasure principle, but a higher form of it; for there is pleasure in the acceptance of the complex character of the I and pleasure in the acceptance of a not-ME (Winnicott, 1971) that (or who) is good and with which/whom one can have a relationship.

But if these are developments subsequent to that of the original pleasure-ego, they, and particularly the extension of the good