Anna Freud Diagnostic Profile - The Concepts of Self, Objects, The Development of Object Relations

All right, it's too close up there. We're going to talk about the of the self. Is it you or me? It's you. Me? All right. And, um, they are essentially as you see is that where the self is affected as well as the object world. We are in page 12 now. And where there is sufficient narcissism, primary and secondary, invested in the body ego or the super ego to ensure self-regard, self-esteem, and sense of well-being without leading to overestimation of the self, undue independence of the object, and so on. And in order to do all of that, then you have to assess a number of things. One is the degree of dependence of self-regard on the object. Whether you can do that independently from the object world or you are still dependent on the object world. And that will lead us into a lot of discussion on the issue of narcissism and what that means and all of that. And that's probably where we spend the the afternoon today.

And later on, and this is a very long section. Section, you have to determine if the disturbances, the cathexes of the self and your self-esteem regulation are the result of insufficient or unsatisfactory primary narcissistic cathexes of the self during the first few months of life, leading to an absence of the indispensable minimum of positive primary narcissistic feeling on which so much hinges for later development, or whether it is due to a lack or an excess or a distortion in the capacity of the self and the self-esteem regulation and due to distorted, insufficient, and unsatisfactory but secondary narcissistic adaptations of the self. And and so that what we're going to try to clarify for you. I hope you read it. Uh, that's a very complicated subject because narcissism has been given so many different meanings.

So, we were talking, as you remember, of the libidinal phases of development: oral, anal, phallic, genital, but latency, adolescence, and then finally adult. Now, today we are going to talk about libidinal positions. Not libidinal phases of development, but libidinal positions. And what that means. So, that's different. Libidinal positions. That means, and we are using libidinal as an encompassing term. Really, you have to think of it about where is the libido and where is the aggression, but we are going to use the libido as a model, yeah? And the question is, where it is in the self or in the object world. In and in which form in the object world? Whether it is in objects, if it is in objects, in which type of object? Animate objects, inanimate objects, part objects, full objects, you know. Uh, and whether it is in the self, then it has to be clarified what we mean by self and what we mean by primary narcissism and all that.

Well, the sequence of libidinal position is as follows. There is a phase of autoerotism. Then there is a stage of primary. Well, let me put it in there. From there, at some point, you start to move into a stage of primary narcissism. Which means, as you will see in a moment, that the cathexes have gone from this, where they were at this point, to the self. Then, from there, you go to the object world. Say, object. Let's put objects to simplify things. And finally, from the objects, then there is a pass to secondary narcissism. As you see, there is quite a distance between primary narcissism over here and secondary narcissism down there. Now, what is So, this is the phase of heteroerotism, autoerotism. This is a phase of primary narcissism, this is a phase of object relatedness, and this is a secondary narcissism good stage. But there is a position. It's a position that you can. It's a used position so that you don't confuse it with spaces. But indeed, it's a phase, too.

Now, what does autoerotism mean? We have to go to the beginning. Now, a baby that is born today. Just born now. There it is, the baby. And the question that you have to ask yourself is, what does that baby knows about himself? Now, you know a lot about yourself. You know who you are, what is your name, where you came from, what kind of things you know about yourself, where your arms are, where your nose is, where every part of your body is. You can identify them. You are very familiar with all of them. What they are used for and so on. But when a baby is born, he doesn't know anything. The map of himself is very primitive and non-existent. Essentially. It exists, but in a very primitive form. Why? Because he is in a place where he receives very minimal stimuli from the outside world and where he has to do absolutely nothing to survive. It's a survival mechanism. So, if the mother is healthy, that baby is fed, his temperature is regulated automatically, he's protected from sounds from the outside, not necessarily from the sounds of the mother's body. Those he has access to, particularly the sounds of the arteries when they, yeah? That he can hear. So, what do you think he is? He is mind. Essentially nothing and a few noises and a few sensory experiences that he has. He's in liquid, which is warm, very ideal, you know, and matches his body temperature and all of that. And, um, so, what he knows about himself is very.

Now, he's born. He has to start to breathe. You know, he has to supply himself oxygen. He starts to feel. He's not protected from stimuli anymore. They are kind of noxious and stimulation, light. There was no light in there. And and there is no switch to put the light on or anything like that. So, uh, now, all of that hits him all of a sudden. And it includes hunger, which he had never experienced, so that's not part of what he knows about himself. And it includes cold, heat, and which is not something that he was familiar with, either. As I said, mostly what he's familiar with is the few sensory experiences that he had in the uterus, because he moved a little bit and the mother moved and obviously that produces certain things. Very primitive kind of idea. He had no control over any part of his body at that point. Willful control that they say, "I will move my leg and kick my mother in the uterus." He can't do that. He kicks his mother, but it's involuntary movements. He doesn't have control over it. So, he's born and then he's bombarded by stimuli. And that stimuli, it starts at the beginning, is quite confusing. And it can be quite traumatic if the mother doesn't protect him from excessive stimuli. And yet, he needs some, otherwise his brain's not going to develop. Those of you that came to the lecture on neuroscience and psychoanalysis know that more stimulation and a stimulus of the brain is essential for the brain to develop and get organized. But too much of it is traumatic. You don't want the circuit. This is you put too many electrical appliances here that this is not designed for this. It's going to be. It's a trauma for the system, you know, it's a trauma of the circuit. The system disconnects itself. That's what the trauma is actually. And, um, now he will start to have hunger. And when he eats something, he passes something. He digests the thing that he eats and he produces a bowel movement. And because he drinks as well, he will pee. And because he has no control over his sphincter, he's done on what is called a gastrocolic reflex. In other words, you feed a kid and nearly on, he would immediately produce a bowel movement because that's the way it is designed to be, you know. If not, he immediately defecated what he what he ate in that meal, but from the one before. It's waiting there. The gastrocolic reflex, obviously, when he starts to feels hungry, gets satisfied, and swallows, more relaxes the colon, and he produces a bowel movement, and probably will pee at the same time. So, now he has two different sets of sensations. He has a feeling of hunger that is reflected in the mouth. You know, the same way that certain pains, you had a heart attack, the his may be felt on the left arm all the way down to here. It's not necessarily felt in the chest, though if it is a good one, you will feel it there, too. But it will be over here. It's reflected pain. There is a way of reflecting, you know, certain organs of the body to the external surface of the body. So, when he's hungry, he starts to recognize that there is a mouth. And you remember what we said, he has more control of his mouth than of anything else in his body. It's a more mature part of his mouth. He can suck vigorously. All he needs is there for him to use his mouth to survive. And he can do nothing else. That's the only thing that is fully developed. But then immediately he has another sensation. He never had this before. So, he's registering this in the brain in the form of memory traces. The first time it happens, he doesn't know what to make out of it. But if it repeats itself, it starts to be recognized as something that is you. And it's followed by another something that is you as well. And so you become, if you want to adapt one, a mouth and a bottom somewhere that gives sensations of being wet or being comfortable or whatever. And so it goes. He's building his body scheme. He doesn't have one when he's born. Little bit by little bit as he matures and his cognitive development proceeds, which is linked to myelination of pyramidal ways, then he can hold his head. When he holds his head, now he can turn 180 degrees. In other words, he can perceive a stimuli coming from all kind of places and he's actually learning a lot about things out there and things in him. You know. In other words, he now has some kind of mental representation of his head looking there, here and there and in between. And that's part of the schema of self. As he goes on, his hands will open. And he acquires voluntary control of his arms so he can grab something and take it on his mouth. And he will start to do that over time. He's baby's problem. The object world in his mouth, in their mouth, commonly. One thing that he learned to do very quickly is to put his thumb in his mouth at will and then he sucks. And that's an autoerotic activity. Right? Because he doesn't need an object. He can do that with himself. Autoerotic activities are things that you can do by yourself without the help of an object and there are any number of them. Sucking your thumb is obviously an autoerotic activity. It's done for pleasure. Nothing comes out. You use thumb to feed you. It's done because it, it's a comfort. It's it's pleasant. Indeed, you have a heck of a time breaking some children out of sucking their thumb or sucking a tit, you know. There are many others. Playing with your genitals is another form of autoerotic activities from a later stage. They are all stages. Um, rocking, for example, in a cot, is a form of autoerotic activity. Head banging is a form of autoerotic activity. It's autoaggressive erotic activity and so it goes.

So, what we're trying to say is that in this phase of of autoerotism, what the child does is he has a lot of autoerotic activities that he engage in and that's what he knows about himself. Now, he's hungry, he's a mouse, he's eating, he's feeling pleasure in the mouth, he's swallowing, he's relieving his hunger. He then move his bowel and he has a feeling down there which is a wetness and whatever it is. So, from being a mouse, he becomes a bottom end of the body, whatever you want to call it. I hate to say it becomes an ass, but that's what it is. And so it goes, you know. So, the phase of autoerotism means that the child hasn't got an idea of the whole self, but he is at a stage in which he only knows part of himself, of that body self that he will recreate as they become activated by the various needs of life or the various functions that these organs perform. So, he's a mouse when he's hungry, he is a bottom end when he passes, you know, uh, uh, fecal matter. So, let's call the phase of autoerotism. He has no idea of himself. He's at time a mouse that gets soft. He becomes this, but the relationship between these two is not well established yet. All right? As time goes by, he says this is followed by this. These two are linked. I'm I'm both of these feelings. And then he adds a head that move around and arms with hands that he can control. And at six months, he can sit. And so he has a notion of a thorax that he didn't know could be used to sit. And a little later, he can stand on his leg if he holds. And all of this is changing his body as skin. And adding parts to it. All right? He obviously, when he acquires willful control of his hands, he adds to his body as skin this appendix. Both arms. They are part of him and he starts to realize that they are part of him and that he can do things with it. Some of which are sometimes very pleasurable, right? And so it goes. At some point, he myelinizes long enough so he now has control of his legs and can walk. Can kick and, you know, can do all kinds of things. And a little later, we have control of his sphincter. Usually somewhere between 14 and 18 months until he can be totally trained. Before that, he cannot really, if you want to, uh, train him easily. He can do it. He doesn't have the means to control his sphincter.

Now, when he has put enough of himself together, then he is in the stage of primary narcissism. Because in the stage of primary narcissism, the libidinal cathexes that went to the part of the body that got activated during the phase of autoerotism, which is different parts of the body, which are not necessarily put together, little bit by little bit them together. When they are enough together, this cathexis that were going to the mouth or to whatever autoerotic activity he has engaged in, goes to the this concept of the self, primitive as it may be. In other words, he has a self now. Before, he had parts of the self that became activated according to what his need was. Now, he put them together, he has some kind of primitive self, and then those cathexis have drawn to the self. That's the stage of primary narcissism. Now, that takes place. This is about three or four months. Sometimes five. And this is from there to 12, 14 months. And then from 12, 14 months, he's here. And that follows immediately. Now, are these dates set in concrete? No. Obviously, there is an overlap between this phase and this phase, and for a while, he is moving between autoeroticism and primary narcissism, and finally they establish here, and this gets superseded. And over here, the same happens. He's starting to move to the object world, but at the same time he goes. There is an overlap where he's going back and forth, you know. He find like somebody who, I don't know, lives in Tampa but works in Brandon, and commutes back and forth between Tampa and Brandon. At some point he says, "Well, I work in Brandon. I better move to Brandon." And so, he's now in Brandon, right? But for a while, he may be commuting back and forth.

Now, so in the primary narcissism, he has a self that has developed. And those cathexes that go to that self, whether from himself or from the object world, he doesn't distinguish too well earlier. You see, the mother wipes ass. When he defecates, she doesn't know. The mother is wiping ass. That wiping of the ass and feeling clean and fresh is part of that autoerotic activity. It's not separated. As he grows a little older and acquires a little more cognitive capacity and more control over different part of his body, then whether the cathexes is his own cathexes are well distributed between the different autoerotic activities and now go to the self that contains all the different autoerotic elements. But those that come from outside, like the mother caressing his skin or talking softly to him or whatever it is, feeding him. The way energy was feeding the ass, now she's feeding the self. And that's experience of the child, you know. So, that's the stage of primary narcissism. And these cathexes that go to the self are called primary narcissistic cathexes.

Now, if anything goes wrong here, the cat. You see, if this goes well, the self becomes a reasonably good self because it doesn't give you too much trouble. You get hungry, he gets satisfied reasonably quickly and reasonably efficient. So, you learn that the little easy stress is followed by relief. All right? And that's important, very important. If you are a child that on the other hand has a psychotic mother or depressed mother and acts a mother or you are in a nursery somewhere and they have 50 children there to feed and you and they come to you an hour and a half after you feel hungry, that's not a good feeling for the self. In fact, when you have a feeling of hunger, you become very frightened because it increases, increases, increases the tension and relief doesn't come. So, instead of a little distress becoming something that you know is followed by relief, here a little distress is more distress, more distress, more distress. In other words, there aren't enough, not enough primary narcissistic access to protect the self and the self is being traumatized. And that's why things happen between these three, four to 12, 14 months can do an enormous amount of damage to the child. Many primitive disorders like narcissistic disorder, borderline disorders have histories that are very poor in this stage of life. And of course, that creates a lot of problems because remember, this is not the only thing that is happening at the same time that this is happening, your ego, which means your brain is being put together and it learns to function together and in order to do that, it needs a certain amount of quietness and quietness. If it is overwhelmed, then it's not working well. It's being traumatized. And a brain, primitive immature brain that has been traumatized doesn't get well organized. You know what I'm saying? It is it's it's not going to happen. And that happens for many reasons. One is neglect from the outside world because the child is completely incapable of self-regulating his needs. He needs completely depends on the object world to protect him from excessive stimuli, from hunger, from cold, from noises, from being sticking him in the bottle or whatever it is that you know, the nappies and things of that kind. But they can come from himself. If he has, for example, some disorders that children have, rarely but occasionally have. Think of colicky babies, which somehow have an immature, more immature than the immature brain of most children. Well, he is a cranky, very difficult to comfort baby. You try to comfort him and he doesn't he doesn't want he goes into opisthotonos, you know? And the mother says, "But I can't he I can't comfort him." Well, that baby is obviously in enormous distress and that's affecting his primary narcissistic stage. And it's not affecting the self which good catharsis that makes the self feel good, grow, confident. Some discomfort is followed by relief. Here, some discomfort is followed by more discomfort. These people learns to fear the self. The enemy is inside themselves. That's early experience. And so for the rest of their life, many of these people don't trust their bodies at all. They may become very watchful of it and very concerned about what kind of things are happening there or how the body is going to attack them and create a problem. The enemy is their own bodies. You understand what I mean? And that's true, as you know, of many borderline narcissistic type of patients that have a lot of worries in this area.

Assuming that this was well, then the child soon realizes, and that stage, primary narcissistic stage is a stage where the child, which is still is not aware exactly why relief comes. He thinks he brings about relief himself. Why? Because what he does is he cries and he moves his arms and his legs and so on. And suddenly there is something there that flows and it's relief. He doesn't know there is a mother out there cooking, uh, you know, warming the milk and so on. Not at the beginning. So, what does he do? He associates whatever it is that he does, all of these sensory kind of things that he's doing, you know, and then also that he's producing with the relief. Fortunately, no mother is that efficient so that sometimes he starts to make all of these things and then the discomfort doesn't go away. And so that as his cognitive development increases and he gets older allows him to say, you know, this is not quite right. He says, I can do all of this and nothing happens unless that thing out there comes. So, the thing out there which is an object, and we call them all the energy doesn't know he's small at all at this point, becomes important. So, he's back to watch the object. That's the beginning of object relationships. They don't come out of the kindness of the baby. They come because the object outside there is essential for his well-being and his survival. And that's why he becomes important. So, where do his cathexes go? From this concrete itself that he thought was a container, all he had to do is produce a little magic formulas. You know, in the form of notions and cries and movements. It's like magic, you know, like abracadabra. You know, and and the belief is there. That's why that phase is a phase of magic and omnipotence. That's it. And it doesn't completely disappears for a long time to come. But, it gets a little shattered when he sees that the magic fails and something out there has to come for him to feel relieved. That's the beginning of object relationships.

As he, um, develops further and becomes more and more cognizant of that thing out there and that thing becomes more of an object. All right. Then, he gets into the object relationship stage. Once he does that, it means that the cathexes have now moved from the self, which was the all important thing, to the object, which is more important than the self because it brought him relief and euphoria, which is a feeling of well-being. So, now he has become dependent on the object. And because at the same time, by now, remember he's 14 months or so, and there on was, you know, for many years to come. That's the situation, correct? Until he died. Well, once he had become dependent on the object, it means that in order to feel good, the object has to be a smiling to him. Has to be in. He has to be in the good books of the object. All right? And if he's in the good book of the objects, then his mother smiles to him and say, "Good baby," and kisses him and all that, then he receives from outside like a glow, you know? It's called secondary narcissistic cathexes. They come from the mother. They come from the objects, from the object world. I always say, it is like this. You have money, which is yours in your pockets, in the self. It's at the cathexes of the self, it's all there. Then you discover that there are banks, but you need a bank because maybe it can be stolen from your pocket. So, you go to the bank, which is the object, and you put your money there. Now, the bank has become important to you the moment you do that. That's where your money is, right? And because you put that money there in certain accounts, the banks pay you interest for that investment. And that's what that is. You invest in the object, the object pays you interest, and that's secondary narcissistic cathexes. All right? So, you want to know when you see somebody with a disordered narcissistic phenomena as part of the pathology, whether you where that comes from here or from here. Whether what happened to him was during the stage of primary narcissism or well much later when he had developed object relationships and he concerned the return from the return from the object of the cathexis. You understand that well? Disturbances of secondary narcissism are typical of neurotic conflicts. Neurotic people, true neurotic people, don't have, generally speaking, problems in the primary narcissistic stage. That leads to much more profound, severe, and primitive, and early psychopathology. So, this problems that take place around this take place from this moment onwards and it can take place at five, six, ten, fifty years of age. As long as you are object related. What does that mean? It means that for a certain time, the child, in order to feel well, depends on the object world. If the mother is feeding him, secondary narcissistic affections she's having with him, is he loves him, he kisses him, he says, "Good boy." You see, "Look at that, isn't he clever? He is growing." Yeah. The mother becomes rejecting, punitive, hits him, rejects, sends him away, locks him in his room, and that's very, very disturbing to him. Because he can only regulate his self-esteem on the basis of the relationship to the object. If you stay there, then you become completely dependent on the object world. And you are a sitting duck for trouble because if your object turns on you, you are devastated. You have no resources for yourself. All of your investment is in the object. So, you have to recover some of that investment. Hence, you need the secondary narcissistic affects, and you need your primary narcissistic affects sufficient. Primary narcissistic affects and retain the self when you move from here to here. You don't pass it all the way here. You retain sufficient affects in there. In normal condition. In abnormal conditions, maybe they will move completely to the object world, which will be bad for you. All right? Because it makes you even more dependent on the object world.

Now, as you grow older, what you do with the object world, you put it inside your head. Becomes your conscience. And then you regulate your behavior not on the basis. You may say, "No, no, don't do that." As you grow older and you develop your own superego, he is stands for the for the object world, and now you don't look at your mother. Your mother doesn't need to be there for you to behave. You look at your superego and you say, "Am I being good?" He says, "Yes." You feel good. He says, "No, you're a son of a gun." You feel terrible. You see? What happened? The regulation of one's self-esteem and self-regard has changed from the object world to a mixture of some from the object world and from and some internally. And the balance ought to be so that the chips where to be counted had to be counted. You can say to yourself, "You don't agree with me. I don't agree with you. But I'm going to do it my own way because my best judgment tell me that I'm right and you are wrong. And if it cost me your relationship, so be it." You understand what I mean? Because your your life tell you that's the reasonable thing to do. What your object wants is inappropriate and is not viable, is not sustainable, is not desirable, is not going to lead to a good place. So, if you can regulate your self-esteem normally, then you say to yourself, and you cannot do that at six years of age. You are too dependent on on the object. As you grow older and you introject your objects and your relationship move in terms of controlling your behavior and deciding what you're going to do from what your parents want and what they forbid you to do to what you want that your superego allows and says, "Yeah, you can do that." You know, and when it says, "No, you cannot do that." Then you are negotiating with your superego. You don't need to negotiate with the object world as much. It doesn't mean to say that your object world disappears for you. If that was true, we wouldn't be object related. So, a degree of dependence is healthy and is good as long as you are able when the chips have to be counted to stand on your own two feet and say, "No, that's not reasonable. What you want is not desirable and I'm not going to do it and if it is the end of the relationship, so be it because anything else will be catastrophic." Do you understand what I mean? You understand that up to there? Anybody has questions? Well, you are a good audience. You seem to understand everything. I I've got one I've got one question. Huh? About, um, about, uh, colic. About the what? Colic. So, does that mean that most children, infants who have severe colic, let's say three, four, five, six, seven months, They have troubles. They have primary narcissism troubles. They have problems in the primary narcissistic stage and the feeling of well-being of the self between the during the time of the colic, all right? Uh, is going to be likely to create problems. Now, these things have to be qualified. They are never as simple as we want them to be. You see, up to four months or so, whatever happens earlier than that can be erased. So, if the colic stage is during the three or four months of life and is not very severe, it's very likely that it won't create a great deal of problem. If it is very severe, it would. But if it is past that stage, then your cognitive development is such that it will produce memory imprints in your in your brain that you can deal with it. The brain cannot erase that. Do you understand what I mean? And so, it seems to. And this is why I say that? Because experience tells you that. When you observe children in a large number of children and particularly children that have this kind of difficulty, which we did in London, then you find out that that's what happens. That the first three months is like object relations. You can change a mother up to the six months and you know much problem if you do that. And you do it once it is 14 months, that's the catastrophe. You see what I mean? And we will talk about that a little later. All right. So I hope you understand that and I hope that now you understand what you are being requested to do. Which is where is where are the cathexes in the self or in the or in the object? If it is in the self, you know, how much of it is primary narcissistic cathexes and how much of it is secondary narcissistic cathexes. There have to be a good balance. If you don't have enough primary narcissistic cathexes, you have a weak ego. And probably damage your structure and you probably can't cope well with stress and conflicts and then, you know, the vicissitudes of the world out there pushing and creating anxiety. You have a poor ego. That's what you have. It's a poor brain badly put together, you know. Because during the time that it has to be put together, all of these bad things are happening and the brain to put itself together and get the appropriate links and develop the right kind of functions in the right kind of way needed certain amount of quietness. At the same time that it needs stimulation within limits. Excessive stimulation is bad, it's traumatic, it does damage. No stimulation is bad, it's traumatic, it does damage. And so it goes. So, this is what you are playing with in your mind. Because that's from bottom. You see, you change that. There's nothing you can do about it. Except teach the patients that they can deal with situations like these and they need to avoid them. Because whenever they fall in that trap, they'll be devastated. And will regress and become very disturbed and may have to be hospitalized and God knows what else. So, these patients you train to see that there are certain places where they can't go. Because if they go there, that's an entrance door to a severe regressive form of pathology and possibly a hospital and suicide attempt, God knows what. You know. So, you train them. You say, "Don't ever go there." Now, that's not easy to do, but if they have a wise and evil that is responsive to someone damaged by these things, they may say, "No, no. I'm not going in there." And they save themselves a lot of problems. These are people that sometimes you see once in a while when they need to see you. And if you do that, you keep them out of hospitals. They just call you in crisis. They say, "I need to see you. I need to see you. Something terrible has happened." You see them. They probably will stand on their two feet after two or three sessions. You don't, they may have to be hospitalized or they have a suicide, you know, event or whatever, you know. So, you need to know whether it is a dynamic state or you need to know whether it come from here. This is a neurotic phenomena. This is a much more primitive form of psychopathology. It has done a lot more of damage. It's a lot more difficult to deal with. And that's rock bottom. You may not be able to change it. All of the things that happen here, you can change. Why? Because brain development, mind development has been finished. What you're adding now is object relationships of a certain deep type and quality and so on. But the building is there. And it's well-built. You know what I mean? It may be that this window is a little crooked, but the building is okay. You can put the window straight. Now, if the foundation of the building is crooked, you are in trouble because what you put on top of it is unstable. You understand what I mean? All right. So the self-esteem that comes from the superego when we've done something that we're proud of. That secondary narcissism? It's not secondary narcissistic effects. This is the return from the object, but it's very similar to it. Only that the object is now on the side, you know. So, we now call it the relationship between the ego and the superego. And secondary narcissistic effects is we keep to the relationship of the child to the object when the object return something, but the only difference is that the object now is symbolic and inside you have it in the form of your superego. And yes, it feeds you secondary narcissistic effects. It tells you that you're moral. Yes, you are a good boy. You did well today. You feel achieved. I I have they don't today. So, any deficits in secondary narcissism will also mean deficits in superego formation and conflict. They might be. They might be. Not necessarily in superego formation. In fact, it may be your superego may be very primitive and the man says that are not reasonable. And so, he never feeds you any good feelings because he says, "That's not good enough, boy." And you say, "But I can't do no more." He says, "I don't care. It's not good enough." So, it's a different kind of relationship, you know. It's like having a parent that whatever you do is a problem. They are never satisfied. You get five A's plus a one A. And they say, "Ooh, that's fair." You mean you want an eight? You know that is this imagine that inside here is is very difficult, you know. The one is a reflection of the other. One is in the outside world. Whatever is in the outside world we take into the inside world and the relationship is the same, only that is now contained between you, your ego and your super ego. So hence there are either disturbances in the cathexes of the self and in self-esteem regulation. And the result of this is insufficient or unsatisfactory primary narcissistic cathexes of the self. During the first few months of life, leading to an absence of the indispensable minimum of positive primary narcissistic healing or which so much in in this or later development. And the other is is that the experience of the cathexes of the self and in self-esteem regulation are you are distorted in because of insufficient and unsatisfactory secondary narcissistic cathexes of the self. Obviously they come from there. Yeah, coming back to my question. If you have a parent and that is difficult for whatever reason, then what you introject is a parent and that introject is going to be a difficult of your parent or worse because if your parent plus what you add to it, which is your own projection of your own aggression. You understand? All right. If you understand that you are in business. The other thing that is asked in this section is, well, it might be here, it might be here. There are cases where it is in both places. So, tell me, you think it's here, here, or in both places? You understand what I mean? Once you do that, that has a lot of element for prognostic consideration. Then you decide how far your patient can go in psychotherapy, what kind of psychotherapy you are going to use, whether it be supportive, uncovering, cognitive, behavioral. Did you decide on this basis? You look at This is looking at the resources of the patient. Right. All right, what else? Anybody have any questions in relation to that or not? Yeah. I I somehow missed the point of it when you were talking when the chips are down. I guess in regard to the the superego. Um, if if you if you if you if a person or a child or whatever. Are you talking about a child or an adult can say, no matter what you. No, a child is dependent on their parents. Right. So, it could right. It's if you say. So, it's once he had developed into an adult to be able to say. Yeah, because the distance between you and your primary objects while you are in latency is practically nonexistent. We are going together in good time. Once you move into adolescence, you put some distance. Once you move into adulthood, presumably, you grew out of the dependence on your primary objects. Now, you should be able to regulate yourself completely by internal means. But you cannot do that when you are not even when you are in adolescence. You still have an enormous attachment to the primary object. It may not look like that because they may have chosen to fight you. Right. You know, and then you say, "Hell, he doesn't give a Oh, he gives a damn. He's about irritating me and doing exactly the opposite of what I want." But, he's still attached to you. Yeah. Okay. I know I have forgotten something that I wanted to tell you, but I can't retrieve it at the moment. We'll come back to it in the morning. All right, let's take that out of there, then. Let's move to objects. Since we are here, we are now object affected. We recognize the object. The object becomes more and more important to us. And, um, so we become. We invest more and more in that object. And we get more and more returns from that object. And we. Even if the object is bad, that's what you have. That's what you're going to introject. That these are your objects. For. You cannot invent objects. You will introject whatever your developmental experiences like. For the most part. So, how do you? How does an object world develop for children? When they are born, let's go back to the baby. Born now. You think he knows that there's a world out there populated with. He has no idea of any of that. Indeed, he doesn't have cognitive power to make the discrimination that is necessary to be made to start to distinguish between the self and the object. So, if the mother breastfeeds him, the mother's breast is part of himself at that particular point. If he is in the state of primary narcissism, the breast and the face of other disease part of his mouth. They don't know brought to the self. Little bit by little bit, partly by the same processes of recognizing that something now plays a role, he start to pay attention out there, let alone the stimulus come from out there, yeah. Yeah. How does that happen? Well, how do we know here? No idea. What is the difference between self and the object? Well, if the mother comes and touches him, he that sensory experience is ascribed to the self. It's not still separated. You know what I mean? It's like, uh, I don't know. If you touch yourself as an adult now, here, you feel two feelings, right? One where you are touched and the other one with the thing you are touching and you know that the two are distinct. At this stage, that's one and the same. You understand what I mean? So, the breast and the mouth are one and the same thing. That's how it goes. That's what the clients develop all the theories about the good breast and the bad breast and the breast of the part of the object and all of that. Which are interesting and then valid somehow, somehow. You one of the border locations, but not necessarily others always. So, I was telling you earlier that for the first few months of life, the child's relationship to the object world as he discriminates. And let's say that now he knows that there are things out there that are distinct from him and that are necessary for him to get relief. So, his past the fourth, fifth is in the stage of primary narcissism, slightly moving to the object world, starting to recognize it. Well, this is a story about it. You take a child away from his mother bear before the third month of life and absolutely nothing happens. Nothing. You cannot notice any any distress in the. Nothing happens. He will accept a substitute with no problem at all. You do it after the third month and you start to see some distress. When when he needs the object to do something for him. In other words, if now somebody is is five months and the mother die and somebody comes and give him the bottle, he's likely to spit it out, not want to suck from it. Why? Because somehow he noticed something as strange about the whole experience. How long will that last? Two or three days at most and then he will accept the bottle. Why? Because at this stage he is in what is called the need satisfaction is stage of object relationships. In other words, the object itself is not important, what the objects do for you is important. So, if the object change, yeah, you may notice it as you grow older, few more months, but you still accept the substitute because the need overwhelms the object. And so it goes. By the time the child is nine or ten months, if you do that, you will have several days of trouble. Bad trouble. The child may refuse to eat for quite a long period of time. You try to feed it, it will turn to self around from you, and start to cry, and become aggressive and things of that kind. If you do it, I told you that it is about the 14th month of life that the human being, if he has the opportunity of interact with a constant object for a sufficient number of hours during a day, and in a sufficient number number of activities, I want to finish this and then I let you go. We have what? Five minutes on the tape. But we still have 26 seconds to go. All right. Let me know when that finishes. If you do it after the 14th month of life, then it will be catastrophic. Why? Because usually by that time the child has achieved object constancy. Not in the Mahlerian Margaret Mahler's sense, of the word object constancy, which is perceptual object constancy, but in this sense, at this stage of need satisfaction, what is important is not the object, but the satisfaction of the need. Once you get to the stage of object constancy, what is important is not only the need that gets satisfied, but who is the object that satisfied the need. And though you will be forced to accept a substitute, the protest that you see in the child is consistent and does a lot of damage. It will imprint him for the rest of his life. That's how dramatic it is. I have told you that in the case of the geese imprinting takes place immediately. The moment the geese hatch the egg, whatever moving is field of vision that's mother goose. And as I was saying here the other night, that that's what Konrad and that's what Konrad Lorenz did. He he walked in front of these hatching geese and then he became mother goose and they followed him all over his where he was doing all of his experiments. He was more like this. That's why these animals go very far away to isolated places where this doesn't happen. The only thing that is going to move is the mother when the when the babies hatch, the little geese. For a dog it takes three months to get attached. To develop object constancy, to choose what is called Once you achieve object constancy, you have developed a primary object. Your primary object. That means that's the most important object in your life at that point and it will be a prototype for all of your other object relationships. So, once you reach object constancy, it means you have reached a primary. You have chosen a primary object, your mother. Or whoever ministers you. And as I told

You, in the dog, it takes 3 months. And it's just. The dog doesn't get attached just to anyone. The dog is in a family; there may be five, six members. He gets attached to the person that feeds him, plays with him, caresses him, takes care of him. Though he is a member of the family of the pack, if that person calls, I was saying the other day, they that primary object that he has chosen, which is the equivalent of that object constancy. Say this side of the room and the rest of the family is there, and everybody is calling from there, and the master from here, the dog is going to go over there. Though he's a member of the family, that's his master. He's attached to that primary object where he achieved object constancy for the rest of his life. It doesn't matter if this object is good, bad, or indifferent. It can be a very cruel fellow who kicks the dog, and the dog, of course, doesn't like that and will run away without looking back, frightened, but he doesn't go too far. He wants to come back. That person calls him; he probably comes crawling, very frightened because he fears that he'll be kicked again, but he's not going to say, "This is someone calling me or someone else." He's attached to him for life. And I tell you, it lasts a long time.

When I was a child, my father once found a dog, a beautiful dog in the street that looked very neglected. Oh, you know, he had been lost, you know. So, he took him home, and we took care of him for a couple of years. I was very fond of that dog. And one day, the dog was in the garden. My father was on the porch, and a man came and said to him, said to my father, "That's my dog." And I said, "Why do you say it's your dog?" And he said, "Well, I lost my dog, and that's my dog." And I showed him. The dog went immediately to him, you know, jumping and happy. My father said, "Take the dog." He said, "No, no, obviously, kept it for you for 2 years. I found it in the street. It doesn't go away. They can change and move with somebody else, and you go there, and the dog comes to you real fast. It recognizes you."

So, with a human being, that's even worse. It takes 14 months old. Doesn't happen before the 14 months of life. And it needs, as I told you, a certain amount of positive interactions between whoever is doing the modeling and that infant for an extended period of time every day and of a positive, constructive kind of manner. Now, that's the idea. As you know, nowadays, unfortunately, a lot of people put children in daycare. Very wealthy. As babies. You pay your money, and you take your chances. You make your choice, as they say. The likelihood is that that child is going to have significant problems later on in life. The problem is that you probably won't see them until he's an adult or later on. Lessons, and so everybody is kind of happy about it, but then later you would see it. Because you can have multiple caretakers and not enough esteem. And remember, the brain needs a certain amount of stimulation to develop. In many of these places, there is either too much, because there is a lot of noise and baby crying and chaos, a loose, or there is not enough stimulation, which means talking, carrying the baby, touching the baby, and things of that kind. In any case, to achieve object constancy and choose a primary object, you need a long period of positive interaction.

If that doesn't happen, it may be that that child has never grown out of the need satisfaction stage, which means he only values objects on the basis of what they do for him. And because, you know, they are intelligent animals, he will grow if he has a good ego and realize that if he goes and says, "Give me." That person will say, "I don't give you that same because you're always asking and you don't give anything." So, he will play the game. You know, and play give and take within limits. And I mean within limits because the moment you disappoint him seriously, he's out of there looking for somebody who satisfies his need. Or he sees somebody that may be a better need satisfier than you are, and you lost your wife or your wife or whatever it was, you know. Because they are really stuck at this stage of need satisfaction. If you don't develop object constancy and choose a primary object, your object relationships are going to be damaged forever because that's not regressible. There's nothing you can do as a therapist to undo that damage except tell them. Show them what happened, why it happened, and how they react to objects, and why that is happening because it is stressing for these people to feel that way and to react that way. And of course, it may lead to a lot of disappointments in marriages and divorces and what not, you know. Angry, angry scenes with objects that they feel are not feeling the needs. And there is no give and take. The give and take is only in appearance because they are intelligent and they know that only asking doesn't get you very far. So, you give a little, but they don't have that capacity. So, they get quickly disappointed, and you will get into a lot of trouble.

So, once you reach object constancy, you're in business. Your object relationship then is start to acquire. It's like the bone structure. Start with our primal muscle and fat and traits, and I mean, the people become more people. What the quality of your relationship to this object is going to be then is going to depend on where you got a stock in your phases of development. You are stuck in the oral phase. You are, you are hopeless and helpless. You expect these people to feed you, you know. You still may have reached object constancy, maybe. But it'd be very precarious, and it's a kind of constancy that is mixed. You value the object, but the object they have less at the same time. So, I'm making inappropriate demands from the object, but you're not going to lose the object like the other one does for a better object, the most satisfying object. If you are stuck in the oral stage, your relationship may be a sadistic relationship with your object with fights and the conciliations and whatnot, you know. And so it goes. It, it, it will acquire shape according to the to developmental experiences. And whatever it is that your developmental experiences create fixations, that will give form, shape, and color and to the quantity and quality of your object relationships. There is a lot more to be said for that, but that should, should suffice for you to see what we have to do with the profile, yeah.

Now, again, these, these that psychoanalysts worry about. Because they are important. And if you can determine these things, obviously you are in a much better position to see how you can help a patient that is stuck here than if you are not. And I can assure you that most therapists only they get some very special education, simply don't get this kind of knowledge. This is the difference between, you know, types of training, really. In any case, if you're going to do supportive psychotherapy, you know, once a week psychotherapy and so on, well, you may not need a lot of this. You really need it, but you may go without it. And psychotherapy is so the transference phenomena is so powerful that sometimes without having gone anywhere, the results just because of the transference phenomena, it's like magic, you know. The problem is that generally it doesn't last very long and it doesn't solve too many problems.

So, in any case, in the way that people chooses objects in their own body. There are people who doesn't choose objects in the outside world. Generally, these people may not have reached object constancy, properly speaking, or chosen a primary object. So, they are stuck in their bodies, and they have something to do with the stage of primary narcissism. The self is all important. The object becomes irrelevant. So, these people don't need an object. They masturbate. They have fantasies. They are self-contained. These are narcissistic type of characters, you know? And there are many types of narcissism. There are lower functioning narcissistic personalities and high functioning narcissistic personalities.

Would, would the, would the fantasies though contain objects? The fantasies may not contain objects of necessity or contain objects that are fabricated objects. It's not usually a person that they know. It's a person that they fabricate because nobody that they know is good enough for the fantasy. So, they make them up frequently. Though, it's not impossible that it is a very beautiful. Let's say it's a male, and it's a very beautiful woman. They use the body of that woman as a fantasy to masturbate, but the woman itself is irrelevant to them. What is important is that he has a good body or big teeth or whatever it is that they get attracted to. But the object itself is irrelevant. It may be anybody. Happened to be with a woman because she's the one they saw. They said, "Ooh." And that's it. But if they know other people that are object-related, need that object. Usually, even for their for autoerotic activities. They don't have a relationship with somebody. They probably use objects that were meaningful to them, you know, at some point or another. Okay.

So, people can use part of the body. They can't affect the whole body, you know? These people are usually in the primary narcissistic stage, obviously. They can't affect objects, human objects in their psychic world. And they can't affect the whole person. Which means the whole person means psychologically and bodily. In other words, they are not attracted at this person. She is beautiful in their eyes. And as you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But it's not just that. It's who that person is at the same time. That's a more complete type of attachment to an object than if you look at them for the how pretty they are or handsome or how tall or how whatever it is that you look for, you know. So, there are all kinds of distinctions, and these are important. They are telling you a lot, uh, what about where the problems took place developmentally, what the prognosis is, and what you have to work with and why, where the conflicts were, what you will have to get to, what you will have to interpret. And so, you have a road map of the things that you will have to do with the patient before that type of treatment is completed. Okay?

So, all the times they look for a part of that person. Fetishists do that. Maybe a foot. It may be anything else. They do that. Maybe a deformity, you know. In fact, deformities in women are very attractive to a lot of men which tend to be fetishists, have developed fetishists. And so, a woman with some abnormality, a bigger teeth than another or a shorter leg than the other, something like that, you'll be surprised how attractive they become to a lot of people because there are a lot of fetishists around, and they lend themselves for that kind of phenomena. Now, the fetish is not necessarily always uses a part of the body of a human object, but something that the human object carries. A blue coat, a certain shape of foot of shoes. And in that case, as you see, he's relating to something that the object offers, not to the object itself. It may be that he is interested only in the woman's breasts, or the woman's legs, or the woman's face, or the woman's butt, or the woman is interested in how much butt he has got, or how he has strong his biceps are, or how small his body is. Oh, God knows what it will be. People's choices and likes and dislikes in this regard is infinite, you know. But as you see, that is a relationship to an object that is tainted by a lot of problems. It's not a relationship to a whole object, not only because they have a good body or they are attractive, but because of who they are, both psychologically and emotionally. You love the whole object, and that's the ideal situation, all right? And if you do that, then when that person gets old, you still love that person. If what you choose is somebody for their beauty, then that man will divorce that girl when she is starting to age and find a younger girl, because that is what he's looking for. Or a woman will do the same. Though it's more common a phenomena in men, but it is, it's not the way it is. And of course, if he only relates at this stage, and no reasonable person see, and that lady gets sick and can no longer gratify sexual needs and whatever other needs he feels he needs to be gratified, he's out of there in no time. So, you get sick, you're done. He going to run, you know. And unfortunately, I'm sure that you know a lot of examples of that type, because it's a common phenomena, I guess. Um, yeah, that's in the world of objects.

So, when we say "Look at the objects and their relationship to the objects that you see, that's complex." It's not impossible to do. You learn to think this way, and automatically you, when they talk to you and you hear the history of the object relationship, you are looking for all of these. You frequently don't even have to ask any special question. If it is said, they are telling you. The way they describe what they do and how many times they go mental and what they go divorce and all of that. You, you draw all of this information immediately. Um, now, other people doesn't affect animate objects that are humans. They affect animate objects that are animals. And that goes from having pets that you love instead of humans because they don't disappoint you and they don't make demands or whatnot, to bestiality. In other words, you use animals as sexual objects, and you have sexual relationship with these animals. And that's another type of object relationship. It's a very abnormal one, but it has always a whole rational behind it that tells you a lot about these patients. Now, because we're in the business that we are as analysts, we don't pass judgment. We are there to try and understand. We don't justify the behavior, but we try to understand, and if we can help, we help. Same do therapists, yeah? So, it's not your business to say, "Oh, he's a fellow that engages in bestiality." Well, yeah, actually he or she did the horse, and that may not be very pleasant, but if they come to you for help, your role is going to help them. And you saw how in which way and what, what is your road map to help them? If you don't understand these things, how the hell are you going to develop a road map? Do you understand what I'm saying? You need to know about these things, and you can figure out can from there, from here, maybe that's related to this, that's where we have to go and visit, and that's the area where we have to work. Otherwise, you are hitting in the dark, see if you hit something, you know, and that's not good therapy, that's the reality of it.

So, fetishes or the attachments to inanimate objects or animals, they can always be traced back to a human object. Yeah? Not necessarily, no. No, not necessarily, but yeah, frequently, yeah. But not necessarily all the time, no. No, it's people that for some reason have developed a fear of relating to an object and consequently chooses something that cannot make the demands that a human being can, be that a dog or a cat or a whatever pet they choose, and some of them are very interesting. And they include all kinds of things. I have one patient whose favorite object was a snake. A python snake that was several meters long. Dangerous like that. Had to be fed by killing rats, big rats that he bought somewhere, he would kill the rat with a pistol and feed to the animal. It was something incredible. But you see, you, you are not there to say, "Jesus, what is that?" That's his bad luck. I mean, you, by the grace of God, you are not where he is. So, when you're trying to lose to help them, you know, and put aside your feelings of, ah, God, what is this, and so on, you know. That's left to other people.

Inanimate objects, people relate to, too. Things. There are people that only relate to things. They collect things, and that's what is important to them. They, other human objects and animal objects are irrelevant. Their stamp collection or their painting collection or their sculpture collection or their gun collection or whatever, knife collection, whatever it may be, that's what is important to them. Now, all that is meaningful. People don't get there out of the blue. They get there because they had the determinants that lead to development in one direction or another in combination with whatever resources you have genetically and whatever developmental experiences you had, you know.

Now, an example of taking the your whole body as an object is a stage of primary narcissism. That's what you do at that point. And at that point, that's normal. But if you stay there as an adult, that's no longer normal. That means that you got fixated in there for some reason, couldn't, couldn't move out. Now, you find somebody like that, and then you know what to do immediately. How the hell did he or she get it stuck at that stage? And you know where you have to look? Because it happens in the first year of life. In the first year, first and a half years of life, so you start to look in there. And then the answer will be there. May be difficult to find, but it is there. You don't have to look when he was 14 years old. It has nothing to do with it, you know. Um, now, some things, particularly on, and this is the way the term object has been used in psychoanalysis, and consequently is a term that you will hear bandied around there. Though frequently people don't understand what they are saying. But for example, I told you earlier that the breast is considered a bad object. And it's true. At the beginning, I told you the child doesn't distinguish his mouth from the breast. At some point, he does distinguish the mouth from the breast. But he doesn't encompass the whole mother. It's like when he was in the autoerotic stage where he knows his mouth, but his mouth is not related to the self. Well, in the object world, something similar happens. It's like a mirror image. You recognize that it is. You know it's not yours. It's somewhere out there, but you don't know where it belongs. That comes later. And so, as you see, that's called a biological object of the instinct. That's the object of an instinct. The sucking, feeding instinct has an object in the mother's breast. And it's an object that is determined by evolution, you know, and he's genetically prepared to use that object. In other words, the moment he finds it, he knows what it is for. You don't have to teach a baby to suck at the breast. He knows how to do it. You put him at the breast, and he immediately starts to suck, you know. You don't have to tell him, you know, this is to put your mouth this way, and you do this. No, he knows what to do, you know.

Now, there are objects, you remember we talked of component instincts? You remember that when we talked about the sexual drive having many component instincts? Each one of these component instincts has an object that is more suitable for the gratification of the erotogenic zone to which the object belongs than anything else, you know? It's more suitable for that. And so, there is a kind of correlation which is part of the make human human beings between the component instinct and the things that act as the object of that component. For the mouth, it's the finger or the breast or whatever you can put in your mouth and suck. It's an object. At the beginning, it has to produce food. Later on, it doesn't have to produce it. That thing is still an object. Why? Because it lends itself to the gratification of that erotogenic zone. All right, let's leave it at that. And I told you, just let me remind you, that objects can be taken as things rather than psychological beings. And the ideal object type of relationship is one that encompasses the whole person, you know, the person's body, the person's self, the person's psychology as well, who that human being is, yeah? That's the ideal estate of object choice in an adult. And when he marries or she marries, if that's not the form of the choice of the object, they're going to be trouble. You know, there's going to be trouble. Because people, unless they somehow found the fitting between the two of them, they don't fit anymore. You know, you expect to be a husband, not a father, or, or I don't know, a thing that can be used when they need you and ignore otherwise and so on, you know, things like that. Okay, we'll continue next time. And we are going to go then to the ego.