Chapter VI. Steps in the Development of an Object-Relations Theory of the Personality1 (1949)

On my first introduction to the academic study of psychology in 1909 I was immediately intrigued by the prospect of acquiring some insight into the mainsprings of human behaviour; but it did not take me long to observe some remarkable omissions in the account of mental life presented to me. In particular, I noted an almost complete absence of reference to two important groups of phenomena which, even at that time, I found it difficult to believe that any account of mental life could ignore. I refer to the respective phenomena of sex and conscience. Years subsequently I discovered in Freud a psychologist who could scarcely be accused of any such remarkable omissions; and thereafter it was in the direction opened up by his researches that my psychological interest was preponderantly drawn—and all the more so because the field of psychopathology, in which his researches were conducted, was one which had meanwhile come to occupy my own special attention. There was, however, one cardinal feature of Freud's theories which I always found great difficulty in accepting, viz. his psychological hedonism. This was, partly at least, because, in the course of a philosophical training, I had already become acquainted with the dilemma confronting the theory of hedonism as originally propounded by John Stuart Mill, and had observed the inconsistent, but inevitable, process of transition in this writer's thought from the psychological principle of pleasure-seeking to the ethical principle of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. It was, of course, in deference to the inexorable facts of social life that this transition was effected; and