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The differentiation of the roles of libido and aggression was used by ego psychologists in fine-grained conceptualizations of various processes. Kris (1956a, 1956b) tried to demonstrate using detailed clinical material that in repression partially neutralized aggressive drive energy provides the counterforce or ‘countercathexis’, while partially neutralized libido is used to invest in screen memories, fantasies and myths that direct attention away from, and hide, the thing repressed. Hartmann (1948, 1950) stated that there were different degrees of neutralization, and that it was not the case that more neutralization was always better. For assertiveness one would need a somewhat lower degree of neutralization than when using aggressive energy to think through a problem. Hartmann and Lowenstein (1962) noted these differences as well with the various functions of the superego: the punishing function, even in a less harsh superego, needs to operate with somewhat less neutralized aggression, as compared to the guiding function. And the ego ideal is usually invested with partially neutralized libido, which was formerly used in narcissistic investment of the self. As a final example of the use of drive conceptualizations by the classical ego psychologists, one could mention Ernst Kris’s well-known concept of regression in the service of the ego. While this is often viewed as a strong ego controlling regression for its own needs, Kris (1950, 1952) asserted that this process involved the cooperation of ego control with the capacity to neutralize drives and also to de- neutralize them, allowing a deep intermingling of drives and ego. Kris described how highly creative individuals are capable of performing these changes, from the depths of the id to the heights of the ego, from raw drives to much more neutralized versions, very quickly back and forth, thus allowing access to the depths of the id, and at almost the same time achieving the highest levels of symbolization of these depths. Among others who made important contributions during this era to further developments in the area of drives were David Rapaport (1951a, b), who explored complex relationships between affects and drives towards a psychoanalytic theory of affects; René Spitz (1946, 1965), who studied anaclitic depression and anxiety during the first year of life, Max Schur (1962,1966), who explored developmental transformation of drives, and Robert Waelder (1936, 1962), who updated Freud’s ‘complemental series’ and principle of overdetermination, and postulated the principle of multiple function where drives, together with ego and environmental factors, are implicated in the etiology of infantile neurosis, and various adaptive and maladaptive outcomes throughout life. IV. Ab. Edith Jacobson: Drives as Innate Potentials In her seminal work, “The Self and the Object World” (1964), Jacobson revised Freud’s ideas about the development of libido and aggression and started to conceptualize drives as products of interaction. Her purpose was to merge relational with classical metapsychological theory, i.e., to align the economic point of view with the phenomenology of human experience. She used two complementary theoretical strategies to achieve this goal. The first was a focus on the child’s experience of herself in her environment, analogically to what in a different conceptual network was termed “the representational world” (Sandler and Rosenblatt 1962). The child’s representational world was here derived from an innate psychobiological substrate.
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