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Psychology 249
I. In order to understand present trends it is advisable to recall briefly the
various historic stages that psychoanalysis has passed through. In its original
Freudian form psychoanalysis presented the remarkable example of a doctrine
that explained an individual’s present by his past, therefore the adult by the
child, and which in this sense had a definite genetic intention behind it, but which
conceived genesis not as a continuous process of building up but merely as the
development of certain initial tendencies, so that the present was reduced to the
past and the different phases of development reduced merely to the shifting of
the points of application of the initial pulsive energy. In short, the character,
exceptional and unique of its kind, of Freud’s first doctrines lies in the fact that
he proceeded according to the reductionist ideal, though by reduction not from
the mental to the organic or to the social, but in fact from higher psychic forms
to elementary forms that live on throughout life underneath the former and in the
‘unconscious’. Here then is a fine example of explanation by identification:
the oral, anal, primary narcissistic, object-directed, Oedipean and other stages
are only successive manifestations of the same libido, which shifts its energetic
‘charges’ from one object to another, starting from the body and leading to
persons outside it and, ultimately, to various sublimations; images themselves
were also subjected to this overall process by hallucinating the attainment of
desires or by retaining in the unconscious a recollection of desires that were
satisfied or of failures and conflicts.
However, for there to be identification of different things with a single prin-
ciple, as distinct from mere identity from the start, there must be resistance;
hence an initial dualism that stands in the way of mere identity and which is the
dualism of the individual bearer of the libido and of society that stands in the
way of his desires. This leads to repression, the suppression of desires, censor-
ship, symbolism used as a form of disguise, and so on. Pursuing the dualist line
of approach Freud then introduced two new elements: the interiorization of
social taboos in the form of the ‘superego’ (the notion was introduced before
Freud by J. M. Baldwin and P. Bovet), which was thus incorporated with the
psychic apparatus, but without the ‘ego’ itself gaining its independence in
relation to the libido; and the promotion, under the influence of Jung, of
symbolic thought to a kind of primal thought or language, partly independent
of censorship.
11. The important stage that followed and which put an end to this integral re-
ductionism was the affirmation, due to Hartmann, of the autonomy of the ego,
conceived as a set of free adaptations of sexual conflicts. Thought thus becomes,
D. Rapaport argues, a system of mechanisms making it possible to keep clear
of spheres of conflict and to attend only to cognitive conquests: the working of
the mind is no longer sublimation or a defence mechanism, so there is therefore
ruom for real genesis involving the ego.‘8 However, as we are concerned with
trends and not just with the present state of things, the important question is
whether this window opened onto genetic constructivism and structuralism is
going to be oriented towards affectivity itself (towards the stages of the libido),
or whether there remains in contemporary psychoanalysis a duality of inspira-