A Re-Examination of The Concept “OBJECT.” Alan Compton, Dale Boesky, David M. Sachs, Leo Rangell, Sandor Abend, & Daniel Goldberg. New York:  American Psychoanalytic Association, 1982. 3 audiocassettes.

The concept of the “object” has occupied a central place in psychoanalytic theory since its inception. In his Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud (1895) makes an early reference to the development of object representations: “The wishful state of the hungry infant results in a positive attraction towards the object wished for, or, more precisely, towards its mnemic image” (p. 322). Freud went on to suggest that the infant's primary mode of relating to the external world is to establish wish-fulfillment through hallucinatory activity. In 1911, he described the sequence of events and infantile experiences which lead to investment in external objects:

It (the infant) probably hallucinates the fulfillment of its internal needs; it betrays its unpleasure when there is an increase of stimulus and an absence of satisfaction by the motor discharge of beating about with its arms and legs, and then it experiences the satisfaction it has hallucinated, (p. 220)

This satisfaction depends, of course, on the presence of a mother who fulfills the infant's internal needs and thus reduces the tension induced by the infant's internal disequilibrium. Freud (1911, 1914) clearly viewed early object relations as anaclitic: Satisfaction in these relations depends chiefly on the infant's being fed, held, comforted, and protected. Thus, Freud (1915) described the object within the context of classical psychoanalytic libido theory as “the thing in regard of which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim” (p. 122).