A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses

Main ideas

• Libido is primarily object-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking. The erotogenic zones are channels through which it reaches its objects, not the source of its aims, so it is the relationship to the object that determines the libidinal attitude, not the other way round.
• Abraham's sequence of libidinal phases is set aside. The oral and genital attitudes are kept as the natural channels of the infantile and the mature relationship, but the anal and phallic 'phases' are treated as artefacts: techniques for dealing with objects rather than stages of development. Genital sexuality follows from mature object relations; it does not create them.
• Development is classified by the quality of dependence on the object: infantile dependence, a transitional stage, and mature dependence. Fairbairn speaks of mature dependence rather than independence, since a life without need of objects is impossible; what matures is the capacity to relate to an object as a separate person.
• Infantile dependence rests on primary identification, the cathexis of an object not yet differentiated from the self, and on an incorporative, taking attitude; mature dependence rests on the differentiation of the object and on an attitude of giving.
• Schizoid states originate in the early, sucking oral phase, before ambivalence, and depressive states in the late, biting oral phase. The schizoid individual's problem is how to love without destroying the object by love, the depressive's how to love without destroying it by hate; these are the two basic forms of psychopathology, and both arise in the stage of infantile dependence.
• The transitional stage is a conflict between the progressive urge to give up infantile dependence and the regressive urge to keep it, between the anxiety of separation from the object and the fear of being imprisoned or absorbed by it. In it the object is divided into an accepted and a rejected object, each of which may be treated as internal or external.
• The obsessional, paranoid, hysterical and phobic conditions are four techniques of the transitional stage, defined by where they place the two objects: the obsessional treats both as internal, the phobic both as external, the paranoid keeps the accepted object inside and puts the rejected one outside, and the hysterical does the reverse.
• The excretory functions supply the model for dealing with the rejected object, which is handled as bodily content to be got rid of: the obsessional conflict takes the form of retaining and expelling contents, while the phobic conflict takes the form of flight from the object and return to it.
• These techniques are defences against the deeper schizoid and depressive states, not regressions to fixation points. Symptoms are accordingly read as ways of managing relationships with internalised objects, and the paranoid state, classically counted a psychosis, is placed among the transitional techniques alongside the psychoneuroses rather than with the schizoid and depressive states.

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In English

• Amazon(opens the store’s page in a new tab) Print Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, Routledge, 1994
• Amazon(opens the store’s page in a new tab) Print Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, Routledge, 1994
• Barnes & Noble(opens the store’s page in a new tab) Print Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, Routledge, 1994
• Routledge(opens the store’s page in a new tab) Print Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, Routledge, 1994