economics of the libido pt 2

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2. What are the economics of the libido (pt. 2)? Ontological development.

What is narcissism (pt 1.)? regression or introversion.

In the last section I showed that Freud conceived of multiple ego ideals, forms of conscience, and superego punishments that formed from the instinctual renunciation of id object cathexes. However, as a good empiricist, Freud only gave a few examples and didn’t attempt to find the inter-relations between them. In this section I’ll attempt to outline three forms of the ego ideal based upon Freud’s use of the cultural example of the different type of world views and their relation to narcissism. I’ll show that they correspond to three different senses of perfection that can be understood in relation to three different social ontologies in which the individual is able to cognize himself in relation to ‘all people’, in relation to having those of good (strong) and bad (weak) reputation, and in relation of his group identity to other groups.  These ontologies provide the basis for negative (i.e. formed by negation) perfection object. This is simply an anti-metaphysical position taken by Freud that the finite mind can’t grasp the infinite or perfection and, therefore, perfection has meaning by being the not-finite (ex. power above all people). This view regards people as experiencing a ‘Faustian restlessness’ in which satisfaction of ideals, by their nature, can’t last long before they require new objects to strive after[1]. In addition, narcissism in its regressive or introverted character of functioning at a lower level ego ideal/ social ontology is laid out because of its relevancy to the economics of the libido.   

Along with the negative perfection objects the ego ideal emulates are affect transferences and ego transferences. Although all transferences include putting a primitive parental imago on another person and attributing the other person with its powers, what I’m terming ego transferences are structural parts of the ego where the transferences in repetition-compulsion and ambivalence are based upon fixations and ‘narcissistic scars’. Freud’s example of this, as we saw in the first section, is the ego ideal being projected onto the group leader that allows for the egoistic and aggressive trends in the individual to be limited by social feeling to others who belong to his group. I must stress that there are more ego ideals than I cover in this section. I have chosen the ones I have for the sake of their simplicity and universality in development. I hope that by providing a framework to understand the three that the others will be more easily ascertained in later work. Lastly, a parallel between the findings of Klein and the early forms of ego ideal is constructed, although, it fits better with her earlier time-line laid out in The Psychoanalysis of Children than with her later time-line that begins at the first few months of life.

In Totem and Taboo Freud famously uses the history of worldviews  (Weltanschauung) to give a picture of the development of narcissism in individuals:

At the animistic stage men ascribe omnipotence to themselves. At the religious stage they transfer it to the gods but do not seriously abandon it themselves, for they reserve the power of influencing the gods in a variety of ways according to their wishes. The scientific view of the universe no longer affords any room for human omnipotence; men have acknowledged their smallness and submitted resignedly to death (Freud, Totem and Taboo, p.88)

Freud simply examines these worldviews by the decreasing amount of narcissism they represent. In primary narcissism, in which the child is its own ideal there is omnipotence (animistic stage). In secondary narcissism ego ideals emerge as magical connections with an outside power that is greater that the individual (religious stage). Lastly, in science one appeals to one’s peers in the reproducibility of the experiment and individual narcissism is reduced so that one takes into consideration the minds of others in trying to establish the merit of one’s observations or the potency of one’s point of view.

There are three important corrections to make to these world-views. The first is that Freud wrongly attributes omnipotence to the child in primary narcissism as if the ego was fully developed and had a place for an ideal and it just happened to select itself first. Later analysts like Lacan and Hartmann corrected this by introducing the concepts of the mirror stage and self-representation that represent an ontogenetic development in which the child is able to take itself as an object in a new way.  Commenting on this, Edith Jacobson writes:

Freud describes the megalomanic attitudes of children, primitives, and schizophrenics, their belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and in the magic of words, as evidence of “primary narcissism”. Actually, however these attitudes appear to be manifestations of beginning “secondary narcissism” or, as we should rather say, of preoedipal stages of ego formation and of a beginning establishment and cathexis of self and object images… To these stages the psychotic ego appears to regress (Jacobson, ‘The Self and the Object World’, p.102).

The second correction, after moving infantile megalomania to secondary narcissism, is that it is a defensive posture. Several early analysts after Freud have noted this including Glover, Bak, Hendrick, and Klein (Freeman, Some Aspects of Pathological Narcissism, p. 553; Hendrick, Early Development of the Ego, p. 57; Klein, Envy and Gratitude, p. 76). However, it’s important to note that although the subjective sense of omnipotence came to be seen as defensive and arising later in development, there is a descriptive sense of omnipotence in the child hallucinating according to wish fulfillment that is correct. At the end of the section I’ll examine it in contrast to the subjective sense of omnipotence that I’ll derive from a social ontology that references subjective feelings of power in relation to other people. 

The third correction to Freud’s analysis of world-views is that individual narcissism doesn’t simply disappear after the child renounces its bid to possess the mother and accepts that she is the father’s property (i.e. the Oedipus complex). Although science appears historically after the great monotheistic religions of good and evil have their day it is certainly still not fully accepted within any culture. The president must be religious to get elected, psychoanalysis (the science of the mind) is not accepted in universities, and the social sciences suffer from post-modern fragmentation. Freud recognized that no culture was ready to fully accept psychoanalysis and that its acceptance represented the danger of it being watered down. He also recognized that after individual narcissism (i.e. secondary narcissism) a social ideal was formed that it was possible to derive narcissism from:        

The satisfaction which the ideal offers to the participants in the culture is thus of a narcissistic nature; it rests on their pride in what has already been successfully achieved... On the strength of these differences every culture claims the right to look down on the rest… The narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal… can be shared in not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of the culture, but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen, one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws (Freud, ‘Future of an Illusion’, p.13).

In a more contemporary view, one can be a piece of white trash with massive credit card debt and harassed by child protective services but one is American! And, even though one doesn’t have a passport and has never travelled anywhere else, one knows that America is the best place in the world. Historically, science had its beginnings along with the nationalism that marked the bourgeoisie’s replacement of medieval guilds, and the church’s grip on intellectual life, with capitalism. As mentioned above, the church has only let go of intellectual life so far as it concerns the hard sciences whose subject doesn’t deal with language speaking beings. And, even here, it often seems like people want to return to a fundamentalism that ignores the light of science in these regions. Historically speaking, the world-view of science will only come into existence once this social narcissism has been overcome and neither corporate interests, national boundaries, nor post-modern relativism interfere with it. But, I digress.

In broad outline, these different stages of world-views would relate to the transference of the patient to the analyst and possible defensive positions of narcissism that the patient would take. What interests me, in this investigation of the ego ideal, is the different senses of perfection that the parental images might entail and therefore, in the child’s identification with the image, what the ideal might look like. In the beginning, as Jacobson and others point out, there is no power in the individual or in the other. I think it’s instructive here to follow other analysts such as Grotstein who talk of a terrifying nothingness or black hole psychotics experience[2]. Animism, as the projection of human qualities onto the world would essentially cover up this terrifying nothingness that exists when primitive humans wonder why the world can be so hostile (i.e. famine, floods, scarcity of food). Similar to this is the projection of individual traits onto the analyst in an early narcissistic transference as outlined by Spotnitz and Kohut[3]. The patient, in order to overcome his basic anxiety due to the otherness (non-ego status) of the analyst, takes the analyst to be a twin image of himself. As I mentioned, there is a defensive strategy in megalomania in which the person identifies with the object, the representation of God, and treats others as pitiful (as he himself feels under the defence). In this twin transference we would similarly see the person identify with the otherness itself (the representation of the object) and the analyst becomes the representation of the self (the ego)[4].   

Although Freud simply had ‘the religious stage’ follow animism I believe it is relatively straightforward to break it up into an early and a later stage. I’m not trying to be exhaustive in developing these stages- that would call for an in depth analysis of religious traditions. However, even for the layman there is a general structure which Freud thought was good for demonstrative purposes. Animism, for example, would have primitive totemistic tribal forms and develop into Taoism and Buddhism. They can all be lumped together in not having a representation of a God, Goddess, or Father god that rules other gods, who is seen as all powerful and who has a personal relation to the group of believers. They are concerned with energies and/or human like relations with spirits. In the next stage there is an all powerful Zeus or Jehova that enters into relationships with humans and can be jealous, sympathetic, angry, but who also can be appeased. In parallel to this development the analyst can receive a transference in which he is felt to be god-like in his ability to read the patient’s thoughts or in his power to harm or control the patient. Defensively, as Jacobson pointed out, the psychotic can himself become this god in megalomania.      

It seems to me that after the early religious representations of an all powerful, but also jealous and angry, divine ruler stage, another stage follows in which the all powerful God retreats into abstraction. Issues of good and evil, personal sin, and pride emerge and the relations that are important are not so much between God and humans, as between humans themselves and how they treat one another, or the ‘children of God’. The formerly all-powerful and jealous God now becomes the creator of nature and logic who isn’t directly involved in the world. Humans more importantly have to deal with the devil, who was created by God, and tempts others to turn away from goodness with worldly success and power. He offers the ability to be a king, as rich as a king, or a special talent that makes one famous. In the transference the analyst can belong to the elite class and have ‘the perfect life’. He can be regarded as the most talented therapist and the patient may brag about him or the patient may feel he looks on him as inferior or pathetic. Like the megalomania of the previous stage a narcissism of being famous, wealthy, or potent in way that we’d call grandiose can exist[5].

Freud next moved on to the scientific stage. As I mentioned, in scientific development power resides in recreating reproducible experiments that allow others to check and validate one’s work. This shows that one has accepted ‘castration’ (‘men have accepted their smallness’). This brings us to a subtle point in Freud’s theory on the Oedipus complex. Before, the Oedipus complex occurs, the worldly perfection ego ideal can be exchanged for a group leader or what I’ll call the subject supposed to lead. Deference before, and love for, a leader allows for equality with one’s competitors to be tolerated. “A primary group of this kind” Freud writes, “is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (Freud, Group Psychology, p.116, The Ego and the Id, p.37). The group leader may act as a role model for secondary identifications on what kind of success should be sought in life and it’s clear that the first group leader the child has is the father[6]. It’s only after castration anxiety is experienced and the child internalizes the actual father (i.e. accepts the father as his procreator and head of the family) and forms the basis for a guilt superego that the further step of forming social narcissism can occur[7]. In this further step, the individual’s ego ideal goes on to become a social ideal in the latency period that, as Freud pointed out, conveys a sense of power or triumph through the accomplishments of those within one’s group. Here too, a corresponding defensive social narcissism in which the’ good name’ of the group may mean being hostile to the truths of other groups is attained. Events such as the Olympics for nation groups and hostility between psychoanalytic schools readily display the loss of objective appraisal.   

I’ve now outlined four stages of the representation of power: no power or pure otherness, absolute power, worldly power, and group power. In relation to the economics of the libido there is a process of regression or introversion of the libido that can occur so that a person gives up his “desire for power” or “ego interest”, as well as love or sexual interest, at a certain stage and functions at a lower one[8]. Freud points to pathology like hypochondria or psychosis but also to states of physical illness to illustrate this point[9]. Narcissism in this sense has nothing to do with self-love, but rather represents that the ego is derived from the id and that later stages of ontogenetic development can be relinquished (or foreclosed) so that the ego is functioning in a less complex way[10]. In the first section I gave examples of how the group leader and hypnotist can take over functions of the ego because these functions initially existed outside the ego in a transference to the object before it was (partially-)internalized. While defences like melancholia and paranoia protect against defusion of the partially internalized father, regression or introversion represents the loss of the partial internalization.    

These four stages of power would correspond to four stages of ontogenetic development that Freud deduces in a very simple way. In order to account for the fact that we dream and see representations of people and things not caused by outer sources of sense-data Freud created the notion of the mnemic trace[11]. After the mnemic trace or thing-presentation Freud mentions a concept of ‘picture-thinking’ that occurs before word-presentations or thinking in words[12].  Where the mnemic trace requires that the ego be a ‘skin ego’ that has differentiated inside and outside with some continuity in time, the ‘picture-thought’ requires that one have a sense of self beyond just feeling sensations or feelings[13]. Where the skin ego is just an envelope or  ‘surface’ Freud writes that the “bodily ego… is not merely a surface entity but is itself the projection of a surface’ (Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 26). Many analysts after Freud have seen this awareness displayed in the child’s recognition of his own image in the mirror[14]. The child is able to recognize its own mirror image because of a mimetic sense in which it feels that the mirror image moves like he feels that he is moving himself (i.e. projection of surface on a surface). The next stage of development is when a child becomes ‘self-conscious’ of the opinion others have about him. He begins to ‘think in words’ to the extent that those words represent his desires (‘ego interest’) in relation to having a good reputation.

He wants to be recognized as powerful and certain activities have the reputation of being ‘manly’, ‘good’, etc. and he seeks them out and shuns those which are associated with weakness so as to control the ‘image’ others have of him.  Following the skin ego paired with mnemic traces, is the body ego paired with a picture-thought, and then what I’ll call an image ego paired with words or signifiers in reputation[15]. Lastly, the ability to cognize oneself as a group member and derive narcissistic enjoyment from it could be called an identity ego and thinking in words would develop further. However, it would require an investigation beyond the scope of this paper to establish. I hope my reader can be satisfied with my summarizing the earlier development that has already been established within psychoanalytic thought and intuitively grasp the trajectory of the identity ego by considering how latency children differ from those of the phallic stage.

While it is the task of developmental psychology to find the specific mental operations these stages correspond to, psychoanalytic investigation remains nearer to the realm of philosophy. As with the theory of the mnemic trace derived from the existence of dreams, psychoanalysis is based upon arguments for what our subjective experience of something requires in order for it to be able to function[16].

What puts psychoanalysis into the realm of science is that Freud doesn’t allow any explanations for our subjective experience to appeal to the existence of God or something metaphysical. Although Freud occasionally talked about the child as if it had a subjective sense of omnipotence, as mentioned above, he also offered a later theory to derive perfection from a negation. He writes:

It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct's persisting tension; and it is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet's words, [‘Presses ever forward unsubdued.’]. The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which growth is still free—though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal (Freud, BPP, p. 42).

Freud’s claim here is as simple one: the finite mind couldn’t possibly grasp something infinite or perfect even though philosophers have often claimed the opposite[17]. While Freud references the instinctual renunciation that leads to the creation of perfection, we saw in the last section that it always follows from an id object choice that is aimed at the object. So, to aim at perfection as a negative quality is another way of saying that one had an id object-cathexis to a finite object that then became negated to become the ‘not-finite’. Similarly, before that the mnemic trace of the object could be negated to form a representation of otherness itself. In this sense the nothingness of this otherness is a negated form of somethingness[18]. This no doubt sounds very philosophical and abstract but yet we all use words like perfect, nothing, etc. and therefore they must have meaning. The question is whether we want to ignore meaning and talk about neuroscience, ignore science and talk about God, or whether we can follow Freud and the more difficult and subtle dialectical approach he takes to meaning.   

Again, studying the cognitive capacities of a child and what age they arise or which ones arise earlier or later is very important, but psychoanalysis takes its starting place in various phantasies and mental pathologies that point to lines along which the mind can split[19]. Furthermore, in recognizing the inter-subjective make-up of the mind (i.e. Identification with archaic parental images that forms the ego ideal/superego and ego) psychoanalysis also further offers a social ontology to explain its negated objects. By social ontology I mean that the interaction between the mother and the child represents not just a one on one relation between the two but that the experience with the mother will also include expectations and transferences the child will have with others. The range of who is included in ‘others’ and consequent differentiation is what the social ontology is based upon. The first perfection object will have an ontology of representing power that is above ‘all people’. Since perfection is a negation of the mother it eventually comes to be symbolized by the father or by a part-object, the phallus. Annie Reich writes:

In a number of cases I have found the fantasy that only one grandiose phallus exists in the whole world. When the patient is in possession of it or is identified with it, everyone else is deprived of it and thus totally destroyed. In the negative phase, the tables are turned: the grandiose phallus belongs to somebody else— perhaps to its rightful, original owner— who, full of contempt, now destroys the patient. Either way, the acquisition of this glorified organ is accomplished through violent aggression… the still completely sexualized and glorified object is set up as a primitive ego ideal, as something he longs to be… reverting to magical identification, the patient who has regressed to this infantile level may feel as though he were the magnificent phallus-father… But after a short time, as we have seen, this wishful identification turns into the opposite; it is doomed to break down, as the uncontrollably mounting aggression destroys the glorified object. To relieve the ensuing intolerable feelings of annihilation, the aggression must be counteracted by a renewed elevation of the object; hence the grandiose phallus is restored to it and the entire process starts all over again (Reich, Pathologic Forms of Self-Esteem Regulation, p.225-6).

The single phallus that exists for ‘all people’ in the world is the fulcrum for defensive “megalomanic states [that] will alternate with periods of intense self-devaluation [ego ideal tensions]” (Reich, Early Identifications as Archaic Elements in the Superego, p. 237). This establishes the important subjective sense of omnipotence for the negated object. It is above ‘all people’ and the person who possesses it, in defensive narcissism, is above all people like he is a god. In cultural representations the absolute perfection-object is comparable to the ring that controls all rings (and therefore all people) in the Lord of the Rings or the ‘Force’ in Star Wars that is more powerful than even the future technology in the film. These things represent absolute power that translates into ultimate physical strength just as Zeus, for example, could beat the titans and giants and is the strongest of the gods and indestructible. 

Hand in hand with omnipotence is omniscience and an ideal for absolute power in a bodily or physical sense can be contrasted to absolute power in a mental or intellectual sense[20].  I believe, the latter is disguised in the mundane and reality oriented epistemophillic instinct of Freud’s pre-structural work. He writes: 

the instinct for knowledge can actually take the place of sadism in the mechanism of obsessional neurosis. Indeed it is at bottom a sublimated off-shoot of the instinct of mastery exalted into something intellectual, and its repudiation in the form of doubt plays a large part in the picture of obsessional neurosis.

(The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis, p. 324)

   

After implementing the structural model (id, superego, ego) Freud thought “instinctual defusion and the marked emergence of the death instinct call for particular consideration among the effects of some severe neuroses—for instance, the obsessional neuroses” (Ego and the Id, p. 41-2). I left this form of defusion out of discussion in the first section because it differs from the rest. Where the others involved aggression in relation to the father(-substitute) Freud considered this form in relation to love: A man who doubts his own love” he writes “may, or rather must, doubt every lesser thing” (Freud, Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis, p. 241). Although I will treat it as a defusion for the remainder of the paper, it is also possibly a defence against a love ideal at the same stage of development. Regardless, the point is that both aggression and affection play a part in an ideal and that the epistemophillic instinct would be included in the ego ideal in the structural system.

The picture-thought involved in the ideal can be understood in relation to the ‘primary process’.  Although ‘primary process’ thinking, through which condensation and displacement take place in dreams, is associated with irrationality, it is also a very profound part of reality-based functions in the ego. For example, in displacement or metonymy (i.e. the crown stands for the king, penis stands for boy) a thing can be understood as being made up of parts (arms, legs, head). This ability reveals that the ego is capable of real acts of perception, as well as appreciating something coming before or after in a sequence, otherwise it couldn’t manipulate these objects in dreams[21].

Above, I noted how developmentally Freud saw the ego ideal of worldly perfection was exchanged for externalizing the ego ideal onto a leader or subject supposed to lead in relation to the beginning of the Oedipus complex[22]. The expression ‘subject supposed to’ I borrowed from Lacan who used it in the formulation ‘subject supposed to know’ (Lacan, seminar XI, p. 137). In the eleventh of his seminars he used this subject to illustrate Descartes’ need to have his knowledge guaranteed. Without knowledge having a guarantor Descartes believes it’s possible that one is being deceived by some malevolent force or Demon. Although his appeal to God rests on the claim that his finite mind can know the infinite, or more precisely that the mind is infinite like God’s, Lacan still recognizes that there is an important function here even though God doesn’t exist[23]. The exchange for the absolute perfection ego ideal for the subject supposed to know is of vital importance.  This is brought into relief by Adler’s recognition that this primitive ego ideal:

 introduces into our life a hostile and fighting tendency, robs us of the simplicity of our feeling and is always the cause of an estrangement from reality since it puts near to our hearts the idea of attempting to over-power reality. Whoever takes this goal of godlikeness seriously or literally, will soon be compelled to flee from real life and compromise, by seeking a life within life; if fortunate in art, but more generally in pietism, neurosis, or crime (Adler, Individual Psychology. p. 8).

While Adler’s statement would fit a perverse structure which, as Chasseguet-Smirgel notes, is trying to pass off the magical anal ego ideal for a genital or paternal phallus, clinical experience also shows regressed individuals who are also trying to be god-like (Chasseguet-Smirgel, Perversion, Idealization, and Sublimation). For example, I know one obsessional, in his 30s and on disability, who purchased 3 books on how to perform a job interview for his interview for a entry level position at Radio Shack. He felt unready for the interview even after doing a lot of reading and in general could never finish a project because he was paralyzed by a need for perfection[24]. The regressed obsessional who, like Atlas, must carry the whole world above his shoulders and know everything before he can act, certainly illustrates one type of what Adler called estrangement from reality due to striving for god-likeness.

Some Lacanians have pointed out that Freud needed Fliess as his subject supposed to know, no matter how undeserving of that transference he was, before he could bring psychoanalysis into the world. The transference to Fliess, as someone felt to be a “leader in the world of science,” shows how the ‘subject supposed to know’ is an ego transference in which the functioning of the ideal is the important issue as opposed to affect (Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, p. 14).

To further corroborate this ontology of ‘all people’ Freud gives us a clinical picture of one type of paranoia that references the projection of one’s aggression onto any other person. Freud writes:

sufferers from persecutory paranoia… cannot regard anything in other people as indifferent, and they, too, take up minute indications with which these other, unknown, people present them, and use them in their delusions of reference. The meaning of their delusion of reference is that they expect from all strangers something like love. But these people show them nothing of the kind; they laugh to themselves, flourish their sticks, even spit on the ground as they go by—and one really does not do such things while a person in whom one takes a friendly interest is near. One does them only when one feels quite indifferent to the passer-by, when one can treat him like air; and, considering, too, the fundamental kinship of the concepts of ‘stranger’ and ‘enemy’, the paranoic is not so far wrong in regarding this indifference as hate, in contrast to his claim for love…. they project outwards on to others what they do not wish to recognize in themselves. Certainly they do this; but they do not project it into the blue, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already. They let themselves be guided by their knowledge of the unconscious, and displace to the unconscious minds of others the attention which they have withdrawn from their own… we may infer that the enmity which the persecuted paranoic sees in others is the reflection of his own hostile impulses against them. (Freud, Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality, p.226)

As we’ll soon see, this form of paranoia that references ‘all people’ can be differentiated from paranoia that references the later cognitive development of jealousy. Jealousy in relation to the id object choice of the mother and its social or public form, in the feeling that one more rightly deserves a position or object of higher status than another person, requires an image ego[25]. The image ego, and the word presentations that it traffics in, gives us an explicit tie to the classic psycho-sexual system of referencing bodily zones in the so called phallic stage. The stage of ‘all people’, omnipotence, and simple paranoia is often referenced to the anal stage. Although these bodily objects are certainly referenced, what is important is finally establishing criteria for characterology and ego ideals that reference concrete behaviour. To work from the bodily objects allows for the impressionistic attribution of certain traits to interactions with the breast or feces or urine that can never be validated. With a social ontology a person’s persecutory feelings, for example, can be referenced to whether they include feeling attacked by ‘all people’ or whether it’s in reference to the possession of a good reputation or a sexual object. Additionally, there are many precocious children who possess intellectual abilities before the usual landmarks of weaning, walking, or toilet training, etc. and therefore reference to the object relationship becomes more vital than the bodily zone[26].

In the phallic stage of development the child’s more complex ego is ‘self-conscious’ of its relation to others in a more differentiated way. It is no longer ‘all people’ but those who are viewed as powerful or potent (i.e. those who said to have a good reputation in this way) and those who are weak[27].  In a similar negation we are given the worldly perfection object (in contrast to the absolute one) that is above all reputation. The cultural hero, ancestor, king, or person who is a ‘legend’ or ‘idol’ and lives on in the minds of others is a manifestation of perfection at this stage. Ontologically, this negated object rests on the cognitive ability to understand one’s place in the realm of reputation and desire to belong with the powerful class. Although the symbol of the absolute perfection phallus (above ‘all people’) is less well known, the worldly perfection phallus is the most appreciated of psychoanalytic symbols. Lacan states that the phallus is the “signifier of power, or potency” (Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet, p. 51) and stresses that it is different from the organ of the penis. This also seemed to be understood among early analysts:    

the symbol of the phallus has simultaneously been accepted unconsciously, by both men and women, as an outstanding mark of fertility, of potency, and of superiority. Strictly speaking, the word “castration” refers to the actual loss of those parts of the male genital organs which contribute to sexual potency, and, as originally used, the term “castration complex” referred to the unconscious fear in the male lest he should lose his potency. The study of the various ramifications of this complex, however, led to the finding that in many cases there has been no actual fear of loss of potency, but a fear lest potency and superiority should never be acquired. The fear lest potency should never be acquired implies at least the wish to acquire potency and superiority, so that now the term “castration complex” has come to mean, not merely the fear of losing the phallus, but the desire to possess the phallus; and in this latter form the castration complex is present almost universally among civilized women… [and] amongst civilized men. (Bousfield, The Castration Complex in Women, p. 121-2)[28].

The negated quality of the worldly perfection object means that even if one possibly attains the status of being first in one’s field or having the reputation of being the most potent in some way, he or she will feel the triumph of possessing the phallus but will again grow restless. This Faustian restlessness means that the achievements of dead geniuses can weigh like a nightmare on the mind of the living. No matter how great a writer one becomes, for example, could he ever be as great as Shakespeare? The importance of exchanging this ego ideal for “the subject supposed to lead” and the danger of regression from this exchange is brought forward in Freud’s acknowledgement of Adler’s masculine protest. The ability to love one’s work and appreciate the real contributions of others can be lost. The masculine protest is a regression from the oedipal level back to the worldly-perfection ego ideal.  Experiencing the tensions between the ego and ego ideal as a feeling of inferiority is often defended against by defensive narcissism and a grandiosity that doesn’t allow the patient to accept the interpretations of the analyst (Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, p. 250-2)[29].

Similarly, in paranoia, as I’ve already discussed, persecutory fears of others seeking to ruin one’s reputation or of losing possession of one’s sexual object show that one’s own sadism to ruin the reputation of another or one’s own desires of infidelity are projected onto those felt to belong to the ‘good reputation’ class (Freud, Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality, p.225-6). Both Wilhelm Reich and Lawerence Josephs point to phallic paranoiac as “anticipat[ing] any impending attack with an attack of his own” in regards to issues concerning their image or vanity, in contrast to the more malevolent and powerful anal paranoia (Reich, Character Analysis, p.218; Josephs, Character and Self-Experience, p. 217-8).     

At the level of group perfection the symbol of the phallus becomes manifested before us not in dreams or fantasies but in our daily life. Flagpoles, obelisks, and other monuments to the perfection of one’s country, nation, or group exist all around the world. In the family, the first group one will belong to, it’s not uncommon to hear a boy argue with another that his dad can beat up the other’s dad. There is a sense of pride that can be obtained from mere belonging that represents a higher development in cognition than that of a body or image ego.

However, classical Freudian analysis sees the character formed at the end of the Oedipus complex and an investigation into this development would take me too far away from my objectives. Instead, I’d like to follow Lacan and point to Freud’s case of the Ratman in which the payment of the debt that the Ratman’s father owed was repeated. This illustrates his concern for the loss of status of the first group, the family, when its leader endures a humiliation[30]. This trauma would point to the ongoing possibility of trauma after the Oedipus complex that has psychogenic roots and isn’t mere ptsd from abuse or accidents.

       

The last thing to be addressed in this section is the status of primary narcissism. As mentioned earlier, Freud sees the pleasure involved with the ego ideal as the recovery of the infantile feelings of omnipotence and since many later analyst agree that that omnipotence is both defensive and arises later in development than Freud thought, a new theory of motivation is required. I will address this after introducing mental bisexuality in the next section. However, though Freud, Ferenczi, and other analysts write about subjective feelings of omnipotence that isn’t possible considering the lack of cognitive development (i.e. the lack of the ‘all people’ social ontology) there is a descriptive sense of omnipotence that is correct here.

Above I mentioned the importance of the mnemic trace in that the fact that we see people, places, and things in our dreams requires that perception isn’t simply caused by outer sources. However, before the matching of mnemic traces to things in the world becomes possible there was first a state in the infant in which the mnemic traces of the infant existed alongside perceptions of reality with no distinctions between the two. In other words, Freud seeks a motivation for the mnemic traces to form and attaches it to the wishes or desires of the infant and calls it the pure ‘pleasure ego’. From this state, judgment comes into existence because a hallucinated breast might initially satisfy the infant but soon the reality of hunger will set in. Freud writes:

One comes to learn a procedure by which, through a deliberate direction of one's sensory activities and through suitable muscular action, one can differentiate between what is internal—what belongs to the ego—and what is external—what emanates from the outer world. In this way one makes the first step towards the introduction of the reality principle which is to dominate future development. (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p.67)

The pure pleasure ego, that creates hallucinations without regard for reality, can therefore, in a descriptive sense, be called omnipotence. Thanks to the work of Victor Tausk we gain a sense for how this process occurs in each ontogenetic advance of the ego[31]. In an article on the influencing machine in schizophrenia Tausk draws our attention to how not only mnemic traces first appear in the outside world as hallucinations, but the centerpiece of the article is how the mimetic sense of the body first appears outside as well and whatever happens to the ‘machine’ that represents the body happens to the schizophrenic[32]. Although Freud and Tausk write of the reality principle as if it’s acquired by the infant simply judging reality Freud in other places also directly pairs the acquired cognitive capacity with the abandoned object-cathexis of the primary caregiver[33]. This is important because, as we saw with the absolute perfection object, the superego punishment (defusion of aggression) in obsessionalism meant that ego functioning was also impaired. Furthermore, there are psychoanalysts, such as David Shapiro, who investigate the ‘economics’ of the cognitive functions in the rigidities of perception within pathologies (i.e. paranoid style, obsessive-compulsive style, hysterical style etc.). Since people are always a mixture of masculine and feminine trends and possess many different fixations and developmental adaptations it is important to recognize every manifestation of the economics of the libido. Otherwise, one ends up in the dubious position of describing an oral character’s desire to ‘mother’ the hungry as explaining someone’s altruistic impulses in social justice. To do so makes it as if the child at the breast already possessed the phallic level of social ontology to understand that some people unfairly lack the same starting point others have in competing for reputation.       

Having noted that absolute perfection is tied to the anal stage and worldly perfection to the phallic stage, in which a reference to social ontology gives a meaning to the ego ideal, there is still the question of the oral stage superego. Although it can’t have a perfection object, and indeed, other analysts have noted the terrifying representation of otherness (Grotstein, Tustin, McDougall), it can still have a role in fueling the ego ideal system. In the next section I’ll investigate the specifics of this role, but for now it’s possible to make a simple deduction. Since the skin ego provides a self-representation that extends over time the oral ego ideal, that is the result of creating a negative ‘nothingness’ object (i.e. negated mnemic trace of the mother), can simply contrast present continuity with a future. In other words, there is a supply of libido (displaceable energy) or hope for a future of regaining the lost connection to the mother before the inside and outside of the ego boundaries were set up. Again, if we drop the reference to primary narcissism as omnipotent in the subjective sense, in the descriptive sense the pure pleasure ego makes a compromise formation in identification with the nothingness object to become a nothingness itself, that wishes towards the future[34].  

Before I end this section it’s interesting to point out that adjusting primary narcissism, as we have, and locating the pleasure of fulfillment of the ego ideal in the oral ideal of anticipating future fulfillment would find very strong parallels in the work of Melanie Klein[35]. Klein stresses throughout her writings that it is the early relation to the mother and breast that forms the core of the superego[36], represents the general attitude of hope or love of fate in the ideal[37], and leads the way for the ego ideals formed at later stages[38]. What’s important about Klein’s work is that the phantasies of destruction in relation to the mother seem to precisely indicate the aggression that is at work in the formation of the ego ideal and its defusion in superego punishment[39].  

Klein also has a few important discoveries that prepare the way for the next section. Firstly, she has found that the phallus isn’t just a symbol of power but also of restoration and fertility[40]. Secondly, she holds that altruistic acts of helping or saving others “is far more than a mere reaction-formation” as many classical analysts held it to be (Klein, A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States, p. 149). The only caution I feel about appealing to her findings it that she continued to place her oedipal conflicts earlier and earlier. This is in contradiction to evidence gained by the child’s reference to part-objects. For example, Klein notes that feces is often attributed with omnipotence (“the omnipotence of excrements”) and this means we should consider omnipotence to occur, on average, when toilet training occurs and this object is salient for the child (The Psychoanalysis of Children, p. 280, 363)[41]. Even if she is in error in dating the genesis of the early triangulations, her work is invaluable and in the next section I hope to place it in a framework of Freud’s mental bisexuality. 

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[1] Lacan gives the suggestive formula that “suicide is the only successful act” because upon achieving it the individual will not get used to it and desire a new object.

[2] Grotstein, J.S. (1990). The “Black Hole” as the Basic Psychotic Experience.

[3] “’Do we want a narcissistic transference to develop?’ We do because in a negative, regressed state, the patient may experience the analyst as being like him or part of him. Or the analyst may not exist for him. The syntonic feeling of oneness is a curative one, while the feeling of aloneness, the withdrawn state, is merely protective. Because traces of narcissism remain in everyone, we seek, when beginning treatment, to create an environment that will facilitate a narcissistic transference so that, first we can work through the patient’s narcissistic aggression.” (Spotnitz, 1976b, p. 58).

Twinship or alter ego transference is a form of narcissistic transference defined by Heinz Kohut as expressing the analysand's need to rely on the analyst as a narcissistic function possessing characteristics like herself. Kohut first defined the concept in The Analysis of the Self (1971) as one of the possible forms of mirror transference. In How Does Analysis Cure? (1984) he made alter ego transference a type of transference unto itself, corresponding to the existence of an autonomous narcissistic need, the alter ego (Psychoanalytic Dictionary Entry, enotes.com)

[4] Hypothetically, this “oral” defence can be taken up in certain types of homosexuality in which someone is looking for a sexual partner who is identical to himself.

[5] I’m only covering power and narcissism here but I feel like I should mention that next to the devil the other child of God is Jesus who represents the passive trends I’ll discuss in the fourth section. Altruism in caring for the meek/weak or the underdogs is seen in the figure of Jesus. Just as the devil’s power can seduce one away from friendship, love, and family, so too can the way of Christ bring about a solitary existence as monasteries and the lives of saints often show.

Also, I’m aware that a psychotic person can have a delusion about being a millionaire, but be much more regressed in terms of ability to work or love. What I have in mind in talking about grandiosity here is not a psychotic with a delusion but a narcissistic or perverse personality with an illusion about themselves. The illusion is that he is special: stronger or more intelligent than many but not all people.

[6] In this way the Oedipus complex… leads to an ever-increasing detachment from parents, and their personal significance for the super-ego recedes into the background. To the imagos they leave behind there are then linked the influences of teachers and authorities, self-chosen models and publicly recognized heroes, whose figures need no longer be introjected by an ego which has become more resistant. The last figure in the series that began with the parents is the dark power of Destiny which only the fewest of us are able to look upon as impersonal (Economic Problem of Masochism, p.167-8).

This role model is a model that will actually impact the behaviour of the child and is oriented to how the child will consider his relations to groups or people at large. This can be contrasted to the child having an ‘idol’ who epitomizes potency in the worldly perfection sense and arises earlier. In the sense that the individual can view themselves as equal to other members in a group and under a leader this is a progressive development. However, ‘Group Psychology’ is also about the regressive aspect of mobs in which the later developed conscience is circumvented.

[7] Thus, to be clear, this role model relation to the father is before he is actually internalized after the castration threat. As mentioned in the previous section, Freud holds that a child may not internalize the mother or father in the Oedipus complex and thus never develop a full conscience. Edith Jacobson echoes this: “Clinically we know that persons whose superego has not developed under the influence of loving, kindly, guiding parents have castration and other infantile fears, but may be unable to experience real guilt feelings” (Jacobson, Self and Object World [book,] p 128).

[8] Freud clearly equates the ego drives not with just hunger but power: “In acknowledging this obvious division, we distinguish in Psycho-Analysis also between instincts of self-preservation or Ego-tendencies on the one hand, and sexual impulses on the other. We call the mental aspect of the sexual instinct Libido (sexual hunger), this being analogous to hunger, desire for power, etc., in the sphere of the Ego-tendencies” (Freud, One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis, p. 17)

Thus, when the superego of the structural model replaces the ego vs. object instincts of the middle period the ego ideal would take over this striving for power in identification with the perfection of the parental images.

[9] Closer observation teaches us that he also withdraws libidinal interest from his love-objects: so long as he suffers, he ceases to love. The commonplace nature of this fact is no reason why we should be deterred from translating it into terms of the libido theory. We should then say: the sick man withdraws his libidinal cathexes back upon his own ego, and sends them out again when he recovers. ‘Concentrated is his soul’, says Wilhelm Busch of the poet suffering from toothache, ‘in his molar's narrow hole.’ Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and are once more indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should behave in just the same way (On Narcissism, p. 82-3, emphasis mine).

[10] Ontogenetic development is just a fancy way of saying the ego is derived from the id in both animals and humans and that there are observable levels of ego functioning as baby develops. For psychoanalysts, ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, is the study of how the human ego passes through stages shared with the ego of animals.

[11] For Freud’s separation of thing presentations and word presentations and their relation to the unconscious processes, as well as the explanation of hallucinations and dreams it is a requirement that “[t]he first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there (Freud, Negation, p. 237). In this he has strong ties to Kant and German idealism. Addtionally, the mnemic-trace actually corresponds to the part-object stage before the oral stage in which there is a whole object + breasts. Freud didn’t name this difference but developmentalists such Piaget show a difference in cognition by way of object permanence that would be vital in the distinction.

[12] We learn that what becomes conscious in it is as a rule only the concrete subject-matter of the thought, and that the relations between the various elements of this subject-matter, which is what specially characterizes thoughts, cannot be given visual expression. Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically (The Ego and the Id, p.21).

[13] “By Skin Ego, I mean a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body. This corresponds to the moment at which the psychical Ego differentiates itself from the bodily Ego at the operative level while remaining confused with it at the figurative level…. the Ego acquires its sense of temporal continuity only in so far as the Skin Ego constitutes itself as an envelope that is sufficiently flexible in its interactions with its environment and sufficiently ‘containing’ of what can then become its psychical contents”  (Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 40, 87).

[14] It was found that recognition of the mirror image does not occur until two years and two or three months. A few weeks before this occurs the observers 'noticed a kind of disorganization, as if a sudden state of awareness of self had caused an affective upset.'. Up to the end of the third year the child displays a certain fearfulness and at the same time a certain pleasure in looking at himself in the mirror. At about two years and ten months the image has become familiar and no longer causes uneasiness. It is at the same time, that is, two years and ten months to three years of age, that the personal pronoun 'I' begins to be used without hesitation and grammatically. (Mahler, Autism and Symbiosis, Two Extreme Disturbances of Identity, p. 79-80).

Animals too must develop their egos from the id and ‘the mirror test’ shows what species of animals are capable of recognizing their own image in a mirror and thus possess a body ego. Even though they don’t speak, as a child would do at this stage, some of them can be taught to use signs in a similar way (i.e. Koko).

[15] The ‘image’ here is the image of oneself that others have in their thoughts of you. Ideology often seeks to justify capitalism by representing people as rational choosers who are free to work or not, and free to break the law or not and are therefore responsible for being rich or poor and innocent or guilty. The individual capitalist, it is argued, must be given the chance to make as much money as he can in the free-market because otherwise he might choose not to work as much and therefore won’t “create” as many jobs for others. This naïve view of human nature pretends as if such an individual cared nothing for his image and ignores different political economies in which individuals still compete for the smallest differences of status or wealth. Of course there are psychotics who have regressed from their image ego and given up their ‘ego interest’ here, as well as defensive (worldly power) grandiosity and forms of social perversion in which the individual avoids work. However, these forms of mental pathology aren’t cured by offering more money for work and seldom seduce the psychopath to an honest day’s work.     

[16] In philosophy this is called a transcendental argument and begins with the work of Kant who Freud often referred to in his work.

[17] One could say the whole history of philosophy from Plato onwards is trying to deal with this error in epistemology until Wittgenstein (and arguably Hegel before him) establishes that we “blindly obey” a practice when we do such things as count. In other words, just because I can count (1,2,3,4…) doesn’t mean that I can grasp infinity when I say this practice could go on indefinitely. This puts mathematics, the foundation of rationalist philosophy, on a psychological foundation based upon the inter-subjective construction of the mind. An individual can count using the same ability that psychoanalysis has found in identification that forms the superego.

[18] The arrival of the mnemic trace at the part-object stage doesn’t have to mean that no object relations occurred earlier than this. Rather what is important at the oral stage is that the skin ego and therefore a self-representation is in effect which can contain the ego ideal. As analyses of autistic and psychotic patients have shown there are fixations to 2-d perception and pre-geometrical shapes (autistic shapes) that show the existence of earlier object relations. The ‘somethingness’ referred to here must therefore be qualified as a 3-dimensional somethingness that is commensurate with the cognitive capabilities of the mnemic trace that shows some object permanence. 

[19] If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along the line of its cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of the same kind ... They have turned away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more about internal, psychical reality and can reveal a number of things to us that would otherwise be inaccessible to us (Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p.93).        

[20] This difference is established by whether one has a schizoid character from earlier development (see footnote 80).  

[21] Abelin, in work on early triangulation, coordinates the work of Mahler and Paiget to make a similar point: “there is a striking isomorphism between these two basic mechanisms of identity formation on one hand, and on the other the development of the two logical operations according to Piaget: seriation (or rank-ordering) and classification (or ordering by attributes). (Abelin, Some Further Observations and Comments on the Earliest Role of the Father, p. 294).   

[22] Again I must stress that ‘the subject supposed to’ is a partial-internalization relationship to the father and is coupled with signal anxiety that after full internalization becomes ‘depersonalized’ as mentioned in the first section.

[23] Lacan’s position is not “God is dead” but “God is unconscious” (Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 27). Lacan isn’t alone, other analysts such as Grotstein, have linked understanding typified by primary process relations to things as being linked to a representation of God:

I have now come to believe that the human being undergoes a series or a sequence of caesuras in which he experiences a sense of separation from the object from whom he emerges, i.e. the Background Object of Primary Identification. This Object ultimately becomes God…  The Background Object helps to coordinate the… focus on all objects of scrutiny so that the sense organs can individually and collectively categorize and conceptualize strange and separate objects so as to make them familiar. We may also see an aspect of the Background Object as ourselves when we stand behind our expressed creations and thoughts. The Background Object is the creator and guarantor of our sense of containment and constitutes the counterpart to the Object of Destiny (Grotstein, Who is the Dreamer who Dreams the Dream and who is the Dreamer who Understands It, p. 122).

[24] Although I’m focusing on omniscience and its tie to obsessionality because more writers have supporting data for this omnipotence would have a similar relation. As much as a perfectionism can paralyze an individual because he feels he needs to know everything before acting a person striving for omnipotence can similarly paint himself into a corner as he leaves every relationship he can’t control and can only rely on himself to do things the ‘right way’. See Josephs Character and Self-Experience for discussion on the ideal of omnipotent self-control in obsessive-compulsive characters. Additionally, consider movies or novels with post-apocalyptic fantasies of being the sole human survivor or of a man retreating into nature to test his metal. The preoccupation with survival in the world created by God becomes an expression of one’s equality to God.  

[25] Although there is desire to control the sexual object and jealousy present in the anal stage and absolute perfection ego ideal I understand Freud in ‘Some Neurotic Mechanisms’ to be talking about a more complex jealousy. This will be differentiated further in section III.  

[26] Freud was open to the idea of the ego or object relation being parallel to sexual organization and even taking the lead before the structural theory was introduced:

 It is not our belief that a person's libidinal interests are from the first in opposition to his self-preservative interests; on the contrary, the ego endeavours at every stage to remain in harmony with its sexual organization as it is at the time and to fit itself into it. The succession of the different phases of libidinal development probably follows a prescribed programme. But the possibility cannot be rejected that this course of events can be influenced by the ego, and we may expect equally to find a certain parallelism, a certain correspondence, between the developmental phases of the ego and the libido; indeed a disturbance of that correspondence might provide a pathogenic factor (Freud, p.351-2 –Introductory Lecture XXII).

[27] ”the second or deutero-phallic phase [in which] there is a dawning suspicion that the world is dividied into two classes… penis possessing and castrated” (Jones, The Phallic Phase, p. 2-3).

[28] Unfortunately, the castration complex in this sense seems to have been lost to many analysts (no doubt because of confusion with castration as signal anxiety in the Oedipus complex). Fortunately, its revival in Lacanian thought has kept alive the insights of Alfred Adler in psychoanalysis where their dynamic and genetic relations can be explored. 

[29] More will be said about this defensive narcissism in the next section and its dynamic relation to suppressing the passive-feminine pole of the personality.

[30]Lacan calls this “a kind of castration of the father” and explores the Ratman’s repetition in detail (The Neurotic’s Individual Myth, p. 415).

[31] This isn’t to say that Freud didn’t have this in mind, but only that Tausk gives clinical examples:

While the ego goes through its transformation from a pleasure-ego into a reality-ego, the sexual instincts undergo the changes that lead them from their original auto-erotism through various intermediate phases to object-love in the service of procreation. If we are right in thinking that each step in these two courses of development may become the site of a disposition to later neurotic illness, it is plausible to suppose that the form taken by the subsequent illness (the choice of neurosis) will depend on the particular phase of the development of the ego and of the libido in which the dispositional inhibition of development has occurred. Thus unexpected significance attaches to the chronological features of the two developments (which have not yet been studied), and to possible variations in their synchronization (Formulations on the Two, p. 224-5)

[32] Let us suppose that the projection of one's own body is a pathological repetition of that psychical stage when the individual was endeavoring to discover his body by means of projection (Tausk, The Influencing Machine, p.544)

[33] Freud gives an example of this mental functioning in his chance viewing of a child playing a game of throwing a wooden reel exclaiming ‘gone’, collecting it, and saying ‘here’ with pleasure (fort-da). He writes

The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p.15).

The id object cathexis to the mother has been renounced and the child has both set up the mother inside him as an ideal (a cultural achievement) and realizes this ideal through the cognitive ability to form opposites or binaries in language. Winnicott, and Kleinians, locate the acquisition of cognitive abilities in projective identification so that the mother allows the child to control her. Winnicott, for example, writes “The mother places the actual breast just there where the infant is ready to create, and at the right moment” (Winnicott, Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena, p. 95). Again, I have not strongly differentiated the mnemic trace from the part-object stage Winnicott is writing about and the oral stage in which otherness is formed but I recognize the difference.

[34] “What he [the child] projects before him as his ideal” Freud writes “is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (Freud, On Narcissism, p. 94, emphasis mine). 

[35] Klein isn’t alone in noting the importance of oral libido in all higher functioning of the mind. Otto Rank discusses the importance of the oral libido and ‘displacement downwards from above’ in the Genesis of Genitality. Both writers show the interesting link or orality to common phrases i.e. the altruistic person is being sweet, the sweet taste of success, etc. and when the ideals fail and the superego starts up we have ‘the bite of conscience’. Also symbols like the vagina dentata clearly relate later phallic sexuality to orality. As mentioned above, there is a part-object stage relation to the breast and later a whole object + breasts at the oral stage. Because of the oral symbolism in both it is difficult to use symbols alone to say when the ego ideal is set up. However, the skin-ego development at the later oral stage with the object representation of otherness/nothingness seems like the proper stage. 

[36] … both an ideal breast and a dangerous breast are introjected and form the core the core of the super-ego (Klein, The emotional life of the infant, p 70). 

[37] The breast in its good aspect is the prototype of maternal goodness, inexhaustible patience and generosity, as well as creativeness… it remains the foundation for hope, trust, and belief in goodness (Klein, Envy and Gratitude, p. 180).

[38] However, while the oral libido still has the lead, libidinal and aggressive impulses and phantasies from other sources come to the fore and bring about a confluence of oral, urethral and anal libidinal and aggressive desires (Klein, The Emotional life of the Infant, p. 102).

[39] Klein seemed to only focus on superego punishment and used ego ideal as if there was but a single instance of it instead of seeing the ego ideal and superego dynamically related. Her epistemophillic instinct arising at the anal stage would be equivalent to what I pointed to as the ego ideal of absolute perfection above:

The early connection between the epistemophillic impulse and sadism is very important for the whole of mental development. This instinct, roused by the striving of the Oedipus tendencies, as first mainly concerns itself with the mother’s womb, which is assumed to be the scene of all sexual processes and developments. The child is still dominated by the anal-sadistic libido-position which impels him to wish to appropriate the contents of the womb. He thus begins to be curious about what it contains, what it is like, etc. So the epistemophilic instinct and the desire to take possession come quite early to be most intimately connected with one another and at the same time with the sense of guilt aroused by the incipient Oedipus conflict (Klein, Early Stages of The Oedipus Complex, p.169-70) 

“Thus what had brought symbol-formation to a standstill was the dread of what would be done to him (particularly by the father’s penis) after he had penetrated into the mother’s body. Moreover, his defences against his destructive impulses proves to be a fundamental impediment to his development. He was absolutely incapable of any act of aggression, and the basis of this incapacity was clearly indicated at a very early period in his refusal to bite up food… the defense against the sadistic impulses directed against the mother’s body and its contents— impulses connected with phantasies of coitus— had resulted in the cessation of fantasies and the stand-still of symbol formation. Dick’s further development had come to grief because he could not bring into phantasy the sadistic relation to the mother’s body (Klein, The Importance of Symbol Formation, p. 29-30)

…the deeper insight was the result of an advance in the development of his ego which followed from this particular piece of analysis of his threatening super-ego. For, as we know from our experience with children and with very early cases, analysis of the early stages of super-ego formation promotes the development of the ego by lessening the sadism of the superego and the id (Klein, A Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibition, p. 213).

[40] Genital sublimations in the feminine position are linked with fertility- the power to give life- and thus also with the re-creation of lost or injured objects. In the male position, the element of life-giving is reinforced by the phantasies of fertilization and thus restoring or reviving the injured or destroyed mother. The genital, therefore, represents not only the organ of procreation but also the means of repairing and creating anew (Klein, Envy and Gratitude, p. 82)

[41] This phase is characterized by a sense of omnipotence on the part of the child in regard to the functions of its bladder and bowels and a consequent belief in the omnipotence of its thoughts. As the result of this it feels guilty on account of the manifold assaults on its parents which it carries out in its imagination. But this excess of guilt which results from a belief in the omnipotence of their excrements and thoughts is, I think, one of the very factors which cause neurotics and primitive peoples to retain or regress to their original feeling of omnipotence (Klein, Psychoanalysis of Children, p. 239).

Other analysts, such as Jacobson, also link omnipotence to the anal stage. She observes that the modifications in the concept of value “announce themselves during the preoedipal, anal-sadistic period in the predominance of magical ideas and feelings… [and] are centered around the high value of omnipotence' (Jacobson, Self and Object World [book], p. 101).