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Even an originally revolutionary movement like psychoanalysis can become conservative and can take refuge, at last, in reactionary acquiescence. Many revolutionary minds, fighters of yesterday, are tired and now rest their cause on dogmas and preconceived ideas. The progress of science does not tolerate such refuge. The shape of psychoanalysis around the year 2000 of our era will be very different from the concept of the New York Psychoanalytical Society of 1945. No prophetic gift is needed to predict that it will be much more occupied with the total human personality than with the sexual components. The picture of psychoanalysis in the year 2000 will, I am sure, be nearer to that which neo-psychoanalysis sketches then to that of libido theory. It will be recognized then that the crude sex-drive cannot have the power attributed to it by Freud and that early mixtures of sexual and non-sexual urges are clearly to be observed in those very phenomena which impress us as “purely” sexual.” (Reik, 1945)
This paper explores the development of the capacity for mature sexual love, starting from the neurobiology of sexual excitement, attachment, and selective attraction, and exploring the transformation of the behavioral expression of these basic neurobiological systems into the complex subject experiences of erotic desire and passionate love. In this context, the integration of sexual excitement as an affect into erotic desire as an object relations—derived intrapsychic structure, reflected by specific unconscious and conscious fantasies, provides a key to the understanding of