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happened to be disagreeable. This setting-up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step.” (Freud, 1911a, p. 219, original emphasis). Freud’s statement about the ‘mind deciding to form a conception of reality’ will be Bion’s starting point for his theories. There is a subtle change in terminology, witnessed in this paper when Freud first refers to the conflict between pleasure and reality first as principles and then as different aspects of the ego. The focus on the ego and its split between two different orientations to the world defines Freud’s inauguration of what he came to call his ‘psychology of the ego,’ foreshadowing the structural theory of 1923. What the ego does not find acceptable, it represses, which damages consciousness’ ability to contact reality. In the Rat Man case history, Freud (1909a) summarizes his psychopathology: “All through his life … he was unmistakably victim to a conflict between love and hatred, in regard both to his lady and to his father” (1909a, p. 237). Four years later, in “Totem and Taboo” (1912-13), Freud will name this as the conflict of emotional ambivalence as he discusses it in terms of taboo prohibitions: “The principal characteristic of the psychological constellation, which becomes fixed in this way, is what might be described as the subject’s ambivalent attitude towards a single object, or rather towards an act in relation to the object. He is constantly wishing to perform this act (the touching) [and looks on it as his supreme enjoyment, but he must not perform it], and detests it as well. The conflict between these two currents cannot be promptly settled because—there is no other way of putting it—they are localized in the subject’s mind in such a manner that they cannot come up against each other” (Freud, 1913, p. 29). Here Freud is demonstrating the idea that in addition to conflicts between ideas and affects, there is also a conflict within the emotions themselves. The idea of emotional ambivalence, expounded here, could be viewed as occurring within a rudimentary object relations context, which defines this period of Freud’s thinking. In this period his thinking turns on the initiation of his concept of narcissism (Freud, 1914), one of the starting points of many object relations theories. The conflict here takes the shape of the struggle between investment in the self vs. investment in the object, or as he puts it, between narcissism and object choice. This becomes particularly important in Freud’s work on loss, identification, and further elaboration of the conflicts within the ego, in “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud, 1917). Freud writes that the mind cannot stand the loss of something valued and needed, so that when there is a loss in the external world that object is incorporated in phantasy so that now the object exists in the internal world; a way to deny its absence in the external world. He writes: “The conflict within the ego, which melancholia substitutes for the struggle over the object, must act like a painful wound…” (Freud, 1917, p. 258). From another point of view, one might refer to this as a struggle over the integration of absence, later becoming an important dimension in the thinking of Lacan.
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