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The origins of many of the intractable difficulties of Freud’s early theorizing can be located in the formulations of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905b). One of the most momentous of these derives from Freud’s insistence on isolating “the sexual aim” from “the sexual object” (1905b, 135-36). He argues that abnormal sexuality shows that “the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together” (148). He urges us to “loosen the bond” in our minds because “it seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object,” and shortly thereafter he stresses that under a great many circumstances “the nature and importance of the sexual object recedes into the background” (149). This emphasis allows Freud to valorize sexuality at the expense of object relations, such as when he remarks that children behave “as though their dependence on the people looking after them were in the nature of sexual love,” adding, “Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they love” (224). Freud’s language also performs the maneuver of constituting all objects as sexual objects, by definition, with the paradoxical result that while sexuality can be discussed more or less independently from objects, objects themselves can never be divorced from sexuality, a position that soon hardens into doctrine. Further instances of Freud’s perspective can be found in the following statements, some of them from late in his career. After claiming that “sexual life does not begin only at puberty, but starts . . . soon after birth” (1940, 152), Freud goes on to characterize the child’s tie to his mother as an erotic one: “A child’s first erotic object is the mother’s breast that nourishes it; love has its origin in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment” (1940, 188). He adds, in the language of seduction theory, “By her care of the child’s body she becomes its first seducer” (188). Thus it is that Freud comes to regard all initial object relations as incestuous in their essential character, all subsequent relations as tainted by the lingering psychological influence of the earliest ones (1905b, 225-28), and he even goes so far as to think of “an excess of parental affection” (223) as potentially harmful.

Freud’s conceptualization of sexual behavior as instinctive does not, in itself, constitute a problem within the scope of the issues being considered here, though it should be noted that in place of speaking of “the sexual instinct,” as Freud does, I shall try to speak instead of “sexual behavior” in order to remain closer to the actualities of human experience and to avoid the common tendency in psychoanalysis to reify abstractions (as in the case of such nominative phrases as “the unconscious,” “the ego,” “the libido,” and so on). Neither does Freud’s construction of a general theory of the development of human sexuality from particular bodily zones and events and experiences and stages into the more complex design of adult sexuality constitute a stumbling block, though judgment may be reserved with regard to specific features of this developmental theory. Nature does not make jumps, as an ancient proverb reminds us, so adult sexuality cannot be supposed to blossom overnight out of nowhere. What do constitute major problems with Freud’s early theories are, first, his assumption that sexual experience, including fantasy, serves as a privileged arena of psychological conflict; and, second, his metapsychological suppositions known collectively as libido theory. I address the latter problem first.

An endless source of confusion in psychoanalysis results from the common practice of casually using “libidinal” as a synonym for “sexual.” Doing so effectively blurs two levels of discourse, the high level of abstraction belonging to libido theory and the clinical, everyday level of immediate observation and experience. Freud himself obscures the difference at the outset of Three Essays by equating the term libido, Latin for “pleasure,” with “sexual instinct” (1905b, 135). Later he calls it “the energy of the sexual instinct” (163). He thinks of this sexual energy as a psychic, or “mental” energy, a “force” (177). Freud’s inclination to describe the action of the libido in the naively concrete language of hydraulic flow has been a target of widespread criticism. Freud depicts “the libido” as flowing through “channels” that are like “inter-communicating pipes” (15In); these “mental forces” can be dammed up, and “diverted” (178), and of course “repressed”; in some cases “the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty” (170). Elsewhere Freud describes libido in highly abstract ways: “We have defined the concept of libido as a quantitatively variable force which could serve as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation” (217) and as “a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work” (168). Freud explicitly distinguishes “libidinal and other forms of psychical energy” from the energy made available by metabolic processes (217), lest there be any question on that score. But the more one reads, the more difficult it becomes to decide just exacdy what Freud did have in mind by the concept of libido—quite apart from the problem of whether or not this concept can be found to correspond to anything in the real world, a problem to be addressed late in this chapter in idle context of considering various published critiques of libido theory. In any case, it becomes understandable that even those discriminating and indefatigable lexicographers, Laplanche and Pontalis, lamely concede that “the concept of libido itself has never been clearly defined” (1973, 239).

Although related ideas of Freud involving such distinctions as those between the sexual instincts and the ego instincts, and the distinction between ego-libido and object-libido, will be passed over for the time being, it will be useful to dwell for a moment on the comparison Freud makes between the sexual instinct and what he refers to as “the herd instinct” (1923, 257). Freud doubts the innateness of any social instinct, but he believes that even if it were innate it could probably “be traced back to what were originally libidinal object-cathexes” (258). He claims that the social instincts belong to a class of aim-inhibited sexual impulses. “To this class belong in particular the affectionate relations between parents and children, which were originally fully sexual, feelings of friendship, and the emotional ties in marriage which had their origin in sexual attraction” (258). These assumptions on his part stand in stark contrast to those of person-oriented object relations theory in general and to attachment theory in particular, as later discussion will emphasize.

The underlying purpose of Freud’s theory of sexuality is to account for neuroses, “which can be derived only from disturbances of sexual life” (1905b, 216). In “My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses” (1906) Freud summarizes his position. Although he says he had earlier attributed to sexual factors “no more significance than any other emotional source of feeling” (1906, 272), he eventually arrives at a different decision: “The unique significance of sexual experiences in the aetiology of the psychoneuroses seemed to be established beyond a doubt; and this fact [in midsentence an opinion becomes a “fact”] remains to this day one of the cornerstones of my theory [of neurosis]” (1906, 273; italics added). These experiences lie in “the remote past” of the developmental continuum (274). Freud mentions one further constraint: for childhood sexual experiences to be pathogenic, they must have been conflictful (have been repressed), the reason being that some individuals who experience sexual irregularities in childhood do not become neurotic (276-77). This qualification can be regarded as a pivotal one. If the essential etiological factor is the presence of conflict, as distinct from what kind of situation is involved, then it may turn out that conflicts relating to sexuality are by no means unique in the sense of constituting the sole class of crippling influences. From the perspective of a person-oriented theory of object relations, in contrast, conflicts with important others may or may not include sexual elements, but if the others are important persons, such as parents, the potential for serious conflict must necessarily be of a high order whether or not sexual factors are present.

What is plain to see is the mixed nature of Freud’s legacy. Try as he will, his theory of sexual motivation (as distinct from his theory of sexual development) never manages to divorce sexual impulses from objects more than momentarily, and analytically—in the root sense of the word (from analyein, to “break up”). It therefore becomes reasonable to say that in addition to a drive-oriented motivational theory he bequeaths elements of a person-oriented theory of object relations, especially if one thinks about the relative weight of object-relational factors in the oedipus complex. The same point holds true a fortiori with regard to the transference, which is nothing if not a replication of variants of earlier object relations. Also worth mentioning here, if only in passing, is the object-relational orientation of the mental processes known as incorporation, introjection, and identification, particularly where Freud talks about the internalization of aspects of an object relation, as in the case of the development of superego functions, and the introjection of an object in the instance of mourning. While it is true that Freud conceptualizes the “introjection of the object into the ego” as “a substitute for a libid-inal object-tie” (1921, 108), one has only to replace “libidinal” by “emotional” for such a passage to be harmonious with a person-oriented perspective.