Chapter 7. Freud's Three Theories

It is a curious but easily verifiable fact that for many years Freud held three mutually exclusive views of the individual's most primitive relation with his environment. The oldest of these appeared in print in 1905 in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and remained unchanged in all its later editions, though it is worth noting that this book and The Interpretation of Dreams were the only ones that Freud tried to keep up to date, revising and amending them with each new edition to include all discoveries in the years since the previous edition. Oddly enough this passage occurs in the last section of the third and final essay which has the sub-title in German: Die Objektfindung, a beautifully concise phrase which had to be translated into English rather clumsily as ‘The Finding of an Object’ (Standard Edition, VII, p. 222).

Freud wrote: ‘At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object outside the infant's own body in the shape of his mother's breast. It is only later that the instinct loses that object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual instinct then becomes auto-erotic, and not until the period of latency has been passed through is the original relation restored. There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother's breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.’ (The italics are mine.)

I would make two remarks about the otherwise excellent English translation. The last sentence has a real beauty in German: ‘Die Objektfindung ist eigentlich eine Wiederfindung’. The English is a pale rendering of the forceful and categorical German original. Although not quite correct, a somewhat freer - and, to my mind, truer – translation would run as follows: ‘Al