The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 

About: The International Journal of Psychoanalysis is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Psychoanalytic theory & Poison control. It has an ISSN identifier of 0020-7578. Over the lifetime, 4793 publications have been published receiving 104757 citations. The journal is also known as: International Journal of Psychoanalysis & International journal of psycho-analysis.

The nature of the child's tie to his mother.

Abstract: This chapter begins by describing very briefly few alternative views which in greater or less degree of purity are to be found in the psychoanalytic and other psychological literature. Psychoanalysts are at one in recognizing the child's first object relations as the foundation stone of his personality: yet there is no agreement on the nature and dynamics of this relationship. A child's intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotogenic zones, and he proceeds to praise the mother who "by stroking, kissing and rocking him is fulfilling her task in teaching the child to love". Freud begins, as formerly, by telling us that "a child's first erotic object is the mother's breast which feeds him" and that "love in its beginning attaches itself to the satisfaction of the need for food".

Notes on some schizoid mechanisms.

Abstract: This chapter explores the importance of early paranoid and schizoid anxieties and mechanisms. For the schizoid mechanisms imply a dispersal of emotions including anxiety, but these dispersed elements still exist in the patient. Such patients have a certain form of latent anxiety; it is kept latent by the particular method of dispersal. For if persecutory fear, and correspondingly schizoid mechanisms, are too strong, the ego is not capable of working through the depressive position. This forces the ego to regress to the paranoid-schizoid position and reinforces the earlier persecutory fears and schizoid phenomena. As regards normal personality, it may be said that the course of ego-development and object-relations depends on the degree to which an optimal balance between introjection and projection in the early stages of development can be achieved. As a consequence, introjection may then be felt as a forceful entry from the outside into the inside, in retribution for violent projection.

The theory of the parent-infant relationship

Abstract: The main point of this paper can perhaps best be brought out through a comparison of the study of infancy with the study of the psycho-analytic transference.2 It cannot be too strongly emphasized that my statement is about infancy, and not primarily about psycho-analysis. The reason why this must be understood reaches to the root of the matter. If this paper does not contribute constructively, then it can only add to the existing confusion about the relative importance of personal and environmental influences in the development of the individual. In psycho-analysis as we know it there is no trauma that is outside the individual's omnipotence. Everything eventually comes under ego-control, and thus becomes related to secondary processes. The patient is not helped if the analyst says: 'Your mother was not good enough ... your father really seduced you ... your aunt dropped you.' Changes come in an analysis when the traumatic factors enter the psycho-analytic material in the patient's own way, and within the patient's omnipotence. The interpretations that are alterative are those that can be made in terms of projection. The same applies to the benign factors, factors that led to satisfaction. Everything is interpreted in terms of the individual's love and ambivalence. The analyst is prepared to wait a long time to be in a position to do exactly this kind of work. In infancy, however, good and bad things happen to the infant that are quite outside the infant's range. In fact infancy is the period in which the capacity for gathering external factors into the area of the infant's omnipotence is in process of formation. The ego support of the maternal care enables the infant to live and develop in spite of his being not yet able to control, or to feel responsible for, what is good and bad in the environment. The events of these earliest stages cannot be thought of as lost through what we know as the mechanisms of repression, and therefore analysts cannot expect to find them appearing as a result of work which lessens the forces of repression. It is possible that Freud was trying to allow for these phenomena when he used the term primary repression, but this is open to argument. What is fairly certain is that the matters under discussion here have had to be taken for granted in much of the psycho-analytic literature.3 Returning to psycho-analysis, I have said that the analyst is prepared to wait till the patient becomes able to present the environmental factors in terms that allow of their interpretation as projections. In the well-chosen case this result comes from the patient's capacity for confidence, which is rediscovered in the reliability of the analyst and the professional setting. Sometimes the analyst needs to wait a very long time; and in the case that is badly chosen for classical psycho-analysis it is likely that the reliability of the analyst is the most important factor (or more important than the interpretations) because the patient did not experience such reliability in the maternal care of infancy, and if the patient is to make use of such reliability he will need to find it for the first time in the analyst's behaviour. This would seem to be the basis for research into the problem of what a psycho-analyst can do in the treatment of schizophrenia and other psychoses. In borderline cases the analyst does not always wait in vain; in the course of time the patient becomes able to make use of the psycho-analytic interpretations of the original traumata

Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession.

Abstract: Die fruhesten Erfahrungen des gesunden Sauglings, die sich in der Beziehung zu seinem ersten Besitz ausern, bieten ein reiches Beobachtungsfeld. Dieser erste Besitz ist nach ruckwarts mit autoerotischen Erscheinungen, mit dem Lutschen an der Faust und am Daumen, nach vorwarts mit den ersten weichen Stoffpuppen und Tieren und mit hartem Spielzeug verbunden. Er steht mit dem auseren Objekt (der Mutterbrust) wie mit den inneren Objekten (der magisch introjizierten Brust) in Zusammenhang und unterscheidet sich doch von beiden. Die Ubergangsobjekte und -phanomene gehoren dem Bereich der Illusion zu, die am Anfang aller Erfahrung steht. Diese fruhe Entwicklungsphase wird durch die besondere Fahigkeit der Mutter ermoglicht, sich den Bedurfnissen ihres Kindes anzupassen und dem Saugling damit die Illusion zu gestatten, das, was er sich erschafft, auch wirklich existiert. Im allgemeinen zieht das Kind seine Besetzungen vom Ubergangsobjekt allmahlich ab. Die Sucht kann als Regression auf das fruhe Entwicklungsstadium verstanden werden, in welchem die Ubergangsphanomene noch unangefochten bestanden; beim Fetischismus last sich der Fetisch als beharrlich festgehaltenes Objekt auffassen, das den fruhkindlichen Erfahrungen im Bereich der Ubergangsphanomene entstammt und mit der wahnhaften Vorstellung eines mutterlichen Phallus verbunden ist; Pseudologie und Stehlen konnen aus dem unbewusten Bedurfnis verstanden werden, die Kluft in der Kontinuitat des Erlebens vom Ubergangsobjekt her zu uberbrucken.