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Notes
1. See also the beginning of Chapter 7 in Freud's The interpretation of dreams (Citation1900).
2. This use of Bemächtigung here in the sense of a cannibalistic incorporation (a primary identification) is also confirmed in Freud's footnote to this episode: “during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear” by looking into a mirror, seeing himself and then “by crouching down he could make his mirror‐image ‘gone.’” This was translated into telling mother upon her return: “baby o‐o‐o‐o!” (Freud, Citation1920, p. 15). The outcome then is mastery in its proper sense (meistern in German).
3. Freud's effort was to conceptualize how the mind – as already existing – works. It was Bion, who went one step further in trying to describe – with the shift from beta to alpha‐elements – how mental processes occur in the first place.
4. As I have shown elsewhere Freud's “self‐preservative” drive would be better termed “preservative drive,” thus recognizing its self‐ as well as its object‐preservative functions (Schmidt‐Hellerau, Citation2001, Citation2005, Citation2006).
5. The German original reads: “Wir kennen diese Macht als den Willen, den Abkömmling der Triebe.” (Freud Citation1950, p. 410, italics in the original). Note that power and will is presented here as a drive derivative.
6. That is why I think that the discussion about the split between pleasure‐seeking and object‐seeking (Fairbairn) is based on a misunderstanding, a lack of differentiation between the metapsychological and the experiential level.
7. “Even if drives are considered as basic, first entities, that is to say, primary, we nevertheless must assume that the object reveals the drives. It does not create them – and no doubt it can be said that it is at least partly created by them – but it is the condition for their coming into existence” (Green, Citation1999, pp. 84ff).
8. “These two zones are the poles of the object's appearance and disappearance both ‘in mastery’ and ‘in satisfaction’” (by for instance, looking at it or looking away; see Freud's analysis of the child's fort‐da play, n. 2).
9. Denis mentions that Freud dropped the connection between cannibalism and mastery by focusing on the self‐preservative drive. Given Freud's position that the drive is a “Grenzbegriff” (a notion at the border between body and mind), self‐preservation, e.g., hunger, arising from the stomach, clearly related a bodily demand to one of the two primal drives; by comparison, for mastery no such source in the body could be named.
10. On different occasions (Citation1950 [1895], Citation1900, Citation1911) Freud showed that since hallucinatory wish fulfillment or fantasy will not suffice, the reality principle sets in, which allows for more direct (economical) ways to successfully perform the specific action with the satisfying object. While the infant's needs and desires may initially be purely somatic, they soon become associated with the satisfying object, which then requires its proximity and availability. Later, sublimation also allows for substituting concrete drive satisfaction.
11. The metapsychological concept of the pleasure principle (homeostasis) does not equal the experience of pleasure; sometimes the pleasure principle even demands the experience of displeasure; the principle simply requires the return to previously established levels of balance (even if they are experienced as neurotic displeasure).