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.
15th April 1966.
Dear Miss Peller:
In this letter I am trying to reply to the first paragraph of your letter of 28th March. It may seem rather strange that I should make this big distinction between desire and need. Nevertheless in my contact with the psycho-analytic society I was constantly in a state of frustration up till about 1944 because in the Scientific Meetings of the Society I constantly heard references to wishes, and I found that this was being used as a defence blocking the study of need. As a paediatrician I came to psycho-analysis very much aware of infantile dependence, and I found it exasperating that the only dependence my colleagues could envisage was dependence on the kind of provision that leads to id satisfactions. I took part in altering this, at least in so far as the British Society is concerned. On many occasions I drew attention to the fact that speakers were referring to infancy as if the beginning was a matter of instinct gratification. Gradually I found Miss Freud, and then others, using the word need, but it is a slow business and this same thing is at the root of one of our present troubles in the whole psycho-analytic movement.
Progress in the study of what a psycho-analyst can do in reference to borderline and schizoid personalities depends more than anything else on the recognition of dependence as something that refers to need. For instance, in anorexia nervosa and the common anorexias that have the same psychopathology, oral satisfaction has become a dissociated phenomenon, a kind of seduction. What is more important to the child is not eating, which at any rate leaves the child unseduced and existing as an individual (even if dying).
In my more recent writings you have noticed that I have tried to enumerate the psychotic-type anxieties which cluster round the word need. These have nothing to do with instincts. They have to do with such things as disintegration, depersonalization, the opposite of progress in emotional development, th