Concept
Leaning-on
Freud's term (Anlehnung) for the way the sexual drives at first lean on the self-preservative functions: the pleasure of sucking arises from feeding before it becomes independent of it. The term also names the choice of a love object modelled on the people who fed and protected the child. Laplanche and Pontalis restored the term, which the English 'anaclisis' had obscured, and Laplanche made it the centre of his account of how sexuality emerges from the vital functions. He later held that leaning-on alone cannot explain this emergence without the adult's seduction.
Development
1905
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In the second of the Three Essays, Freud describes infantile sexual activity as at first attaching itself to the functions that serve self-preservation. His example is the child's sucking, which begins with feeding at the breast and only later becomes independent of it.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
1970
developed by Jean Laplanche
The Vocabulaire (1967) translated Freud's Anlehnung as étayage and brought the term back from obscurity. In the first chapter of Vie et mort en psychanalyse (1970), Laplanche makes it the model of how the sexual drive arises: it leans on a vital function such as feeding and then turns away from it. He later judged leaning-on insufficient without the adult's seduction.
In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970);The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967)
Relations
- 1905 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In the second of the Three Essays, Freud describes infantile sexual activity as at first attaching itself to the functions that serve self-preservation. His example is the child's sucking, which begins with feeding at the breast and only later becomes independent of it.
- 1970 developed by Jean Laplanche
The Vocabulaire (1967) translated Freud's Anlehnung as étayage and brought the term back from obscurity. In the first chapter of Vie et mort en psychanalyse (1970), Laplanche makes it the model of how the sexual drive arises: it leans on a vital function such as feeding and then turns away from it. He later judged leaning-on insufficient without the adult's seduction.
- gave rise to Anaclitic depression
Spitz took the word 'anaclitic' from Freud's notion of Anlehnung, the leaning of the drives on the functions of self-preservation, rendered as anaclisis in the Standard Edition.
Works
- 1905
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Freud's three essays, published by Deuticke in 1905, deal with the sexual aberrations, with infantile sexuality and with the transformations of puberty. Together they argue that the sexual drive is present from infancy, that it is made up of component drives bound to erotogenic zones, and that it reaches its adult genital form only through a course of development. Later editions added an account of the pregenital organisations of the libido.
- 1946
Anaclitic Depression: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood, II
The second part of René Spitz's inquiry into psychiatric conditions in early childhood, written with Katherine M. Wolf and published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child in 1946, following his paper on hospitalism. Observing infants in the nursery of a penal institution, the authors describe a syndrome that appeared in children who had enjoyed good relations with their mothers for at least the first six months of life and were then separated from them. Weepiness and clinging gave way to withdrawal, loss of weight, insomnia, greater susceptibility to illness and a fall in the developmental quotient. They name the syndrome anaclitic depression, after the infant's dependence on the mother as its first object, and compare it with depression in adults. The condition lifted when the mother returned within a few months, while longer separations threatened lasting harm. The paper sets the syndrome beside hospitalism: anaclitic depression follows a partial and reversible loss of the mother, hospitalism a total deprivation of her.
- 1967
The Language of Psycho-Analysis
A dictionary of the concepts of psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, prepared over eight years at Daniel Lagache's instigation and published by the Presses universitaires de France in 1967, in Lagache's Bibliothèque de psychanalyse. Donald Nicholson-Smith's English translation, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, appeared from the Hogarth Press in 1973. Freud kept revising his theory and never fixed it in a final system, so instead of bare definitions each entry traces how a concept arose and changed in his writings, supports the account with the relevant passages, and sets out its difficulties. The alphabetical entries run from abreaction to working-through and also take in terms of later analysts, such as the mirror stage and the transitional object. Some entries brought neglected Freudian notions back into use, notably après-coup (afterwardsness) and Anlehnung, rendered as étayage (leaning-on). The book has been translated into more than twenty languages and become a standard reference.
- 1970
Life and Death in Psychoanalysis
Laplanche's first major theoretical book, published by Flammarion in 1970 and translated with an introduction by Jeffrey Mehlman as Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). It grew out of the research for the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse and sets out to 'put Freud to work', reading his texts as psychoanalysis reads its material, for their latent and partly unconscious history. Many critics had resolved the contradictions in Freud by imposing a unified system, even at the cost of discarding metapsychological concepts such as the death drive. Laplanche argues instead that a series of crucial Freudian terms each carries two concepts belonging to rival conceptual schemes, so that the work becomes a structured polemical field. Rather than choosing between the variants, he interprets them together, as the elements of a dream are interpreted, and follows how Freud's most radical discoveries keep escaping him and being rediscovered. The first chapter makes leaning-on (Anlehnung, étayage) the model of how the sexual drive arises: it leans on a vital function such as feeding and then turns away from it.
See also
People
References
- Life and Death in Psychoanalysis1970Evidence for a relation
- The Language of Psycho-Analysis1967Evidence for a relation
- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality1905Evidence for a relation
- Anaclitic Depression: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood, II1946Evidence for a relation