You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The recent widespread interest among psychoanalysts in the theory of schizophrenia has received its impetus from the newer developments in ego psychology, especially the attempts to describe in meta-psychological terms the very early stages of infant development. This has led to many efforts to reformulate Freud's basic theory of schizophrenia as outlined in the Schreber Case; these efforts are, in the main, attempts to recast the earlier libidinal interpretations in light of the newer knowledge of structural and ego psychology. As Hartmann has indicated: “we see in the analytic study of psychosis a mirroring of the trends of psychoanalytic psychology dominant at a given time” (16). This problem, however, has been approached from many individualized points of view, even within an analytic framework, so that there appears to be a greater divergence of theoretical views than is actually the case. Therefore, it would be useful to systematize the recent literature with a view towards an integrated theory of schizophrenia.
Freud and Abraham's early descriptions of the libidinal transformations in psychosis are now well known (1, 9). Freud considered the exciting cause of the illness to be an outbreak of homosexual libido; the struggle against this impulse produced the conflict that gave rise to the pathologic phenomenon. The primary process of the illness, however, was the detachment of libido from formerly loved objects. The libido was secondarily “aggrandized to the ego” so that there was a regression from “sublimated homosexuality to narcissism.” Attempts to recover the lost objects follow the detachment of libido and consist of externalized projections of libido in the form of delusions and hallucinations—the basic symptomatology of the illness. Freud's formulations dealt mainly with the phenomenology of the illness and were not proposed as etiologic explanations.
It is characteristic of Freud that we find in his earlier writings the germ of concepts that come to frui