Attachment and Aggression

This short essay on the psychical operations of the Life and Death Instincts, as seen in the Object Relations theories of Melanie Klein, was my first glance at Psychoanalytic Instinct Theory, studied and written in the Spring of 2008. Three years later, in the Autumn of 2011, I was in possession of the entire 24 volumes of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, at my home and able to study them at leisure. A Psychoanalysis research associate on the Psychoanalysis, Literature and Practice Seminar Series at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, suggested I read Freud’s essay the Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Chapter 1 in Volume 18 of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

To my dismay the Beyond the Pleasure Principle chaper 1 of volume 18 is a very long essay indeed in 7 parts, but I was curious and had a desire to explore Freud’s writings as it felt like an adventure. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Part 5 of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle essay is where Freud lays down the fundamental components of his Instinct Theory. My essay attached here is British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s interpretation, development and use of some of the possible psychical mechanisms and processes that can be said to result from Freud’s Instinct Theories. In this Abstract (also attached as an Appendix to my Kleinian, Life and Death Instincts in Object Relations Theory essay), I am tempted to summarize Freud’s actual Instinct Theory itself, as described in Part 5 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Vol. 18, p.34-43, as I have never heard it discussed or even mentioned in any Psychoanalytic context and I think it merits attention, especially considering the current Environmental zeitgeist and hegemony that we are all being subjected to.

(Instinct Is Conservative - Journal Article on Freud's Instinct Theory uploaded as a separate word doc.)

In comparison with Klein’s use of Instinct theory, it is plainly evident that she was interested in the functions of instincts as they can be seen operating in everyday life and death experiences and relations, while Freud was much more interested in the very nature of instinct itself. I hope my summary of Freud’s Instinct Theory will show how deep and wide variation in Psychoanalytic theorizing and practice is and how open and attentive Psychoanalytic inquiry and investigation is to an individual theorist’s inherent psychical constitution and conditioned psychodynamics, born of their inner personal/subjective life and death experiences, their external relations with significant others and the external collective conditions that individuals are subjected to. People, individuals/subjects, instinctively find, perceive, understand and even believe what they desire to know and this is one of the reasons why every reader/thinker is biased and projects onto and conditions a text with their own needs, ideas, prejudices, hopes, wishes and delusions. Every past thought and feeling is reawakened and modified by fresh experience through the cycles of time. I certainly can be accused of spinning Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Part 5) text to suit my own interests and purposes, just as Melanie Klein took Freud’s ideas where she and her colleagues in the British School of Psychoanalysis (that was not yet formed at that time) were heading. Individuals have their own agenda, but can’t achieve it without others, as the Psychoanalytic theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan have made exceptionally clear, in his own way, for his individual purposes and for the purposes of the collective (professional, social, political, etc.) ideologies that he chose to cathect. There can be no Self, whatever you want to call it - individual, person, human being, human organism, etc. - without an Other, because of the function of the I.

Melanie Klein (1882-1960) came to England in the late 1920’s and helped found the Object-Relations School of Psychoanalysis. In her pioneering work on child analysis, she formulated two very early developmental positions, through which infants pass and which remain unconsciously active within the adult psyche. Klein was trying to understand the earliest ego development of an individual personality and in so doing outlined what she termed the Paranoid-Schizoid Position and the Depressive Position of psychical orientation. The points at which Klein refers to these two positions in her writings are countless. For this essay therefore, I draw on two of her papers in which the two psychical positions are described in detail, her 1935 paper........

Hormones, and hormone responses to social contexts, are the proximate mechanisms of evolutionary pathways to pair bonds and other social bonds. Testosterone (T) is implicated in tradeoffs relevant to pair bonding, and oxytocin (OT) and arginine vasopressin (AVP) are positively tied to social bonding in a variety of species. Here, we present the Steroid/Peptide Theory of Social Bonds (S/P Theory), which integrates T and peptides to provide a model, set of predictions, and classification system for social behavioral contexts related to social bonds. The S/P Theory also resolves several paradoxes apparent in the literature on social bonds and hormones: the Offspring Defense Paradox, Aggression Paradox, and Intimacy Paradox. In the S/P Theory, we partition aggression into antagonistic and protective aggression, which both increase T but exert distinct effects on AVP and thus social bonds. Similarly, we partition intimacy into sexual and nurturant intimacy, both of which increase OT and facilitate social bonds, but exert distinct effects on T. We describe the utility of the S/P Theory for classifying 'tricky' behavioral contexts on the basis of their hormonal responses using partner cuddling, a behavior which is assumed to be nurturant but increases T, as a test case of the S/P Theory. The S/P Theory provides a comparative basis for conceptualizing and testing evolved hormonal pathways to pair bonds with attention to species, context, and gender/sex specificities and convergences.

Page 1. Relations between parenting and child behavior: Exploring the child's personality and parental self-efficacy as third variables Jean Christophe Meunier,1 Isabelle Roskam,2 and Dillon T. Browne1 Abstract The present ...