Clinging Object Ties: Without Desire or Play

From its inception, psychoanalysis has been baffled with patients who seem to cling to a single individual from whom they seem unable to detach themselves despite lack of interest from the object of their affection. The lives of such patients seem held in suspension as their fate awaits the requited love that never comes. Fixation on the one object of their love seems, quite simply, to consume their lives. Whether the figure is an analyst or someone outside the consulting room, the therapeutic process tends to become stalemated as the patient's emotional life is invested in the frustrating pursuit of a relationship. Freud (1966a/1916, 1966b/1937) conceptualized such tenacious attachments to one person as “adhesiveness of the libido,” an id resistance. However, Freud was well aware that the libido can be quite plastic, and he was admittedly unable to explain its “stickiness” in some people. He did refer to it on one occasion as a constitutional given (Freud, 1966a/1916), which seemed to consign the phenomenon to an unexplainable and insurmountable barrier.

Although some analytic writers have concurred with Freud's view that “adhesiveness of the libido” is a resistance, there has been widespread agreement that this concept is not useful (for example, Frank, 1983; LaPlanche & Pontalis, 1983, Sedler, 1983, Maze, 1993) The phrase does little more than describe the patient's clinging attachment without providing an account of why it occurs. All seem to agree it does little to shed light on the phenomenon and is therapeutically pessimistic.

For Freud, as for some later analysts, adhesive object ties led to a therapeutic dead end because constitutional drive strength is analytic rock bottom. However, since Freud's gloomy final statement about the possibility of giving up a binding connection to a loved object, theoretical advances have suggested different conceptualizations of the problem of unyielding adherence to single figures. The most decisive shift took place with Fairb