The respondent of the drive1

Let us re-read Freud

Even if, contrary to many post-Freudian authors, he has not made any particular study on the notions of the object and object-relations, and even if he has neither made a psychoanalytical concept out of it either, we will see, from reading the following excerpts, how much the notion of object is familiar to Freud. It is even essential to the representation of psychical functioning, of the development of the love life of man and women, and of the aims of the cure, of the treatment of psychical impotence in men and of frigidity in women, for instance, these sufferings as Freud put it, for which the practising psychoanalyst is the most sought for help – apart from anxiety. As evidence for this, I will quote excerpts from the article “On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love” (Freud, 1912). I underline the most significant occurrences of the author’s thought. The first one follows just after Freud has identified two currents present in the development of the libido.

“The affectionate current is the older of the two. It springs from the earliest years of childhood; it is formed on the basis of the interests of the self-preservative instinct and is directed to the members of the family and those who look after the child. From the very beginning, it carries along with it contributions from the sexual instincts (…). It corresponds to the child’s primary object-choice. We learn in this way that the sexual instincts find their first objects by attaching themselves to the valuations made by the ego-instincts, precisely in the way in which the first sexual satisfactions are experienced in attachment to the bodily functions necessary for the preservation of life. The ‘affection’ shown by the child’s parents and those who look after him, which seldom fails to betray its erotic nature (‘the child is an erotic plaything’), does a very great deal to raise the contributions made by eroticism to the cathexes of his ego-instincts” (1912, p. 188).