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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. Jacobson proposed that the instinctual drives were “innate potentials” that were shaped both by internal maturational factors as well as by external stimuli, particularly in the context of early relationships, which in turn shaped the child’s representational world. This approach allowed her to maintain ties with earlier drive/structural models. Her second theoretical approach was a revision of the economic principles themselves, bringing the libido theory into synchrony with the vicissitudes of object relations: In Jacobson’s view the infant’s experience of pleasure or unpleasure is the core of her relationship with her mother (drive/structure model). From the start, experience is registered in terms of how it feels to the baby. She postulated that the feeling tone of one’s earliest experiences contributed to the consolidation of libido and aggression and lay the groundwork for self and object images determining how we ultimately feel about ourselves and others. Frustrating or upsetting experiences produce images of a frustrating, withholding mother and an angry frustrated self while more positive experiences lead to an image of a loving, giving mother and a happy contented self. Jacobson’s theory therefore addressed the interplay between actual experiences and drives. Jacobson (1954) noted that in the infant, before the formation of self-other boundaries, when the earliest images are fused rather than distinct self-contained units, at the level of mental representation, the child’s perception of the other directly shaped the experience of the self. In this state of primitive fusion objects become internalized parts of self images and ultimately one’s most profound sense of self is an outgrowth of these earliest images. Jacobson noted that the integration of good and bad images, i.e., both the “good’ and “frustrating” mother facilitated the ability to integrate conflictual feeling states. Ultimately, affectively integrated images of self and other allowed for an increased capacity for more complex emotional experience. Early preoedipal experiences of maternal constraint and prohibitions produce early images around which the superego is then formed. Previously, Freud (1938/1940) described libido as a force that brings together while aggression breaks connections. Jacobson applied these ideas to separation-individuation with libido acting to integrate opposing images of good and bad objects and good and bad self, while aggression promoted separateness and differentiated images of self and other, pointing to an integration between classical drive theory and object relations theory.
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