Studies in Gender and Sexuality

2(2):97–128, 2001

Freud and Developmental Theory

A 21st-Century Look at the Origin
Myth of Psychoanalysis

Steven Reisner, Ph.D.


This article traces both Freud’s contribution to developmental
theory and the major trends in developmental theory since Freud.
Although Freud’s developmental theorizing has been criticized
as outdated scientism, a close examination of his writings reveals
a more radical “21st-century” Freud, whose, theoretical approach,
to some extent, anticipated the deconstructive and postmodern
perspectives of the current psychoanalytic scene. Freud’s self-
subversive analytic process has been lost in the developmental
writings of his classical followers and in the writings of the
alternative schools of psychoanalysis that have arisen since. In
place of a psychoanalysis of inquiry, these theorists have reinstated
a psychoanalysis of “truths,” universalist models of normal and
pathological development, ostensibly allied to confirmatory infant
observation. Such models can best be understood as psycho-
analytic “origin myths,” selected and codified to support the belief
system, meanings, and customs immanent in the school of thought
they purport to validate.



Steven Reisner, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a Core
Faculty Member of the International Center for Trauma Studies at New York
University. He teaches psychoanalytic theory in the Program in Clinical
Psychology, Columbia University, Teachers College and is the director of
Theater Arts Against Political Violence, which has helped create works of
theater with Tibetan, Chilean and Kosovar survivors of torture and exile.
97 © 2001 The Analytic Press
98 Steven Reisner


N early 50 years ago, in celebration of the centenary of

Freud’s birth, a volume of essays was published entitled Freud
and the Twentieth Century. In its opening pages, Nelson (1957)
wrote, “Will the twentieth century go down in history as the
Freudian Century? . . . Is it possible that the impact of Freud
will in the end prove to be more decisive and far-reaching than
the discoveries of Planck and Einstein?” (p. 9). Freud, like his
contemporaries in physics, was one of those who defined the
20 th centur y. Reversing the apparatuses of enlightenment
exploration, he turned the “telescopes” inward, onto the subject
and its limitations and destabilized the comforting belief that
human beings were “masters in their own house.” As he
dislocated the intuitive base of self-knowledge, Freud attempted
to relocate that exploration on the seemingly solid ground of
20 th-century science; psychoanalysis was to be a “science” of
subjectivity. As Freud (1933) put it, “A Weltanschauung erected
upon science has, apart from its emphasis on the real external
world, mainly negative traits, such as submission to the truth
and rejection of illusions” (p. 182).
But the 20th century, with its idealization of technology and
scientific objectivity, has drawn to a close; the 21st century is
upon us. Freud’s scientific narrative has been redefined as
scientism, as Habermas (1972) succinctly put it: “‘Scientism’
means science’s belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we
can no longer understand science as one form of possible
knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science”
(p. 4). Thus, Freud’s aspiration is appearing to many as less and
less relevant to much of psychoanalytic discourse.1 As Mitchell
(1988) has noted, “We have been living in an essentially post-
Freudian era” (p. 2).
Standing against those who see Freud as the outdated advocate
of an earlier psychoanalysis are those recent theorists who find


1
The very concept of a “science of subjectiv ity” in our time appears
oxymoronic, defining one of the many fissures in the f ield, between those
who hold psychoanalysis to be primarily dialogical, hermeneutic, and
relational, and those who see in the theories a set of empirically testable
hypotheses. Indeed, science remains a force in psychoanalysis today primarily
as the ground from which its enemies mount their attack.
 Freud and Developmental Theory 99


in Freud both the heir to the enlightenment project and a chief

destabilizer of the premises of that project. These theorists find
implicit in Freud’s investigations the antecedents of much of
contemporary psychoanalytic exploration, as Barratt (1993) put
it, “the harbinger of the postmodern trajectory” (p. 6). Flax
(1990), too, argues that “Freud’s work . . . anticipate[s] and
support[s] the critiques of traditional theories of mind currently
articulated by post-modern philosophers” (p. 63). 2 Philips
(1995), has termed this the “post-Freudian Freud—the man who
was always ahead of himself, and who we are beginning to catch
up with” (p. 6).
Other theorists, for example, Casey (1990) and Møller (1991),
have made the case that, although Freud tended to assert each
of his theoretical advances, clinical constructs, and cultural
interpretations in axiomatic terms, as if ref lective of some
deeper theoretical and scientific truth, he invariably turned
around upon his own premises to take his explorations further,
taking apart and expanding his concepts beyond their synthetic
pretensions. As Møller (1991), referring to Freud as a reader of
literature, has said,

Freud’s power shows itself . . . in his will to press his

inquiry to the point where he encounters the unreadable—
that which he cannot explain; that which does not fit within
his explanatory system; or that which he can only explain
at the risk of overthrowing previous conclusions [p. ix].

It was characteristic of Freud to apply that same subversive

analysis to his own theoretical formulations; it is a technique
that Casey (1990) has termed the “auto-deconstructive” impulse
in Freud’s texts.


2
Interestingly, Barratt (1993) f inds the postmodern Freud best represented
in his early works (1896–1914) and that “from 1914 until his death in 1939,
he systematically retreated from the radicalism of his own discourse” (p. 5);
whereas Flax (1993) finds “especially important” the radical undermining of
Enlightenment notions of knowledge found in “Freud’s post-1920s writing”
(p. 52). My own view, which I argue in what follows, is that Freud progressively
undermined his own Enlightenment notions and, further that it is this
progressive self-subversion that gives his mode of analysis its contemporary
relevance.
100 Steven Reisner


In a recent article (Reisner, 1999) I argued that the legacy of

this post-Freudian, or autodeconstructive, Freud

is psychoanalysis itself: a way of thinking about our ways of

thinking and being. In its relentless attention to the analytic
process itself, to progress via questioning, to mindfulness
of precisely what is left out of any given discourse, even its
own, Freud’s psychoanalysis is indeed contemporar y
[p. 1038].

I examined the prog ressive autodeconstruction of the

concepts of sexual drive and gender within Freud’s oeuvre to
demonstrate how this process continues to provide a radical
and fruitful inroad to human psychic functioning.
In what follows, I expand that investigation and explore
Freud’s complex developmental theories, as well as the history
of developmental theory within psychoanalysis, in order to
elucidate further what I see as the valuable and contemporary
self-critique and self-subversion at work in his texts. My aim is
both to place the psychoanalytic theory of development within
a histor ica l context and to restore to contempor ar y
developmental approaches some of the character of Freud’s
radical endeavor. This essay has four ambitions:

1. To present Freud’s theory of development in a way that

makes clear the internal creative tension between the Freud
who attempted to assert a scientific truth and the Freud
who expanded both his theory and the psychoanalytic
mode of investigation by progressively taking apart the
very premises he attempted to fortify.
2. To demonstrate that Freud’s followers codif ied and
expanded “Freudian” developmental theory in a manner
that left out what is most subversive and contemporary,
giving classical developmental theory a unified sensibility
that did not ref lect Freud’s mode of inquiry.
3. To survey the manner in which his detractors, following
the same striving to isolate and present a coherent truth
about infant development, constructed alternative theories,
which for the most part highlighted one or another aspect
of development that had been left out of Freud’s own texts.
These alternative theories, often falling into the same
 Freud and Developmental Theory 101


Zeitgeist of explanation, can best be understood, as can

cla ssica l developmenta l theor y, a s or ig in myths of
development.
4. To suggest ways that a reacquaintance with Freud’s self-
subversive theoretical endeavor anticipates and models a
multiplicity of conceptualizations of development and
supports a clinical approach to patient histories as
individualized ethnological studies in development, rather
than as variations on a grand developmental schema.

FREUD’S THEORY OF PSYCHOSEXUAL

DEVELOPMENTAL AND ITS SELF-SUBVERSIONS

Freud’s developmental theory is really a collection of theories

and theoretical aspects that do not lend themselves to a simple
summary presentation. Consequently, I am selective, presenting,
to begin with, the origin of the developmental explanatory
concept in Freud’s work. I follow with a study of the evolution
and self-subversions of a particular developmental formulation
according to which the infant traverses a series of discrete stages
on the way from autoerotism to mature object love. This stage
model has been most often cited and criticized as axiomatic of
classical Freudian developmental theory. Such a model, however,
although evident in Freud’s writings, also was used by Freud as
a construct to be taken apart, subverted, and reconstructed.
We can date the origin of a developmental theor y in
psychoanalysis to Freud’s wildly creative period between 1895
and 1897 during which time, in collaboration with Breuer, he
published the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895), and,
in close communication with Wilhelm Fliess, he wrote the Project
(Freud, 1895) and developed and modif ied the seduction
hypothesis.
Freud’s early observation that certain memories had greater
“traumatic power” upon recollection than they had when they
were originally experienced required an explanation that had
thus far eluded his and Breuer’s theory of trauma and sexuality.
In October, 1895, in the Project, he attempted an explanation
that, in retrospect, can be seen as the birth of the developmental
model in psychoanalysis. This concept, which Lacan (1977)
would revive half a century later, was Nachträglichkeit, deferred
act ion, or, a s L aplanche (1992) ha s tr anslated it,
102 Steven Reisner


“afterwardsness.” Ultimately, psychoanalysis itself would become

the study of the seemingly incomprehensible “afterwardsness”
of early experience. As Freud (1913) would later put it, “From
the very first, psycho-analysis was directed towards tracing
developmental processes” (p. 183).
In 1895, the Nachträglichkeit concept asserted that a memory
can cause tr auma “posthumously” only if, between t he
experience and its recollection, there supervened a maturational
transformation that heightened its impact—in Freud’s theory
of sexuality at that time, a transformation that heightened the
quantity of sexual substance with which the psychical apparatus
had to contend. Puberty was seen as the quintessentially
transformative period. Thus, an earlier trauma, combined with
sexual liberation at puberty, was seen to produce psychical
effects across a developmental time line. 3
Freud soon afterward borrowed from Fliess the idea that there
were two psychosexual substances: a pleasure substance (which,
for a time, he associated with a male hormonelike substance)
and an unpleasure—or anxiety—substance (which he similarly
associated with a female hormonelike substance) (see Masson,
1985). Freud believed that each of these substances circulated,
in different rhythms, in both males and females, as part of an
innate bisexual disposition.4 Ignited by seduction, the pleasure
substance was thought to f low in childhood; the unpleasure
substance was thought to f low endogenously at different periods
of late childhood and in particular at puberty. Thus, in
Nachträglichkeit terms, what may have been experienced in
childhood as a pleasurable sexual experience would have toxic


3
Freud believed, at this point, that it was only the memory of actual
stimulation of the genitals, emblazoned on the neurons, that would, on
recollection after puberty, release a traumatizing surplus of sexuality (the
seduction hypothesis). Over time, the importance of actual stimulation of
the genitals would fade in favor of his view that childhood sexuality is a
ubiquitous and complex phenomenon.
4
See Masson (1985), in particular the elaborate developmental model of
December 6, 1896: “I am trying to introduce the notion that it is a male 23-
day substance the release of which produces pleasure in both sexes, and a
[female] 28-day substance the release of which is experienced as unpleasure”
(p. 211). It is notable that Freud’s (1954) hypothesis about the different f lowing
substances was deleted without ellipsis from the original publication of these
letters.
 Freud and Developmental Theory 103


neurological consequences at puberty or thereafter, evoking

delayed neurotic symptoms.
Of the two sexual substances, the unpleasurable one fit well
into Freud’s constanc y principle, particularly as it would
reemerge as the pleasure principle. Unpleasure, in this theory,
is the same as a build-up of sexual tension; pleasure, from this
perspective, is not something in and of itself, but is the discharge
or reduction of the unpleasurable substance. It was this version
of sexuality that Freud’s followers codified and expanded and
that his critics attacked: sexuality as a drive to reduce tension,
with objects that facilitated that discharge. Such a psychosexual
driving force provided the metaphoric fuel for Freud’s psychic
“apparatus,” enabling him to align psychoanalytic energies and
forces with the discourse of other turn-of-the-century sciences.
It permitted Freud to describe psychic development in terms of
the evolution of the mind’s interaction with the body’s evolving
sexual drive and gave his developmental narrative the rhetorical
force of biological science.5
Thus, one reading of the Three Essays (Freud, 1905), for
example, would reveal it to be a text demonstrating the power
of a sexual driv ing force extant from birth, prog ressing
according to a plan laid down by heredity through discrete
erotogenic stages to maturity, all the while aiming to carry out
a single biologically determined imperative: the appropriate
discharge of sexual tension and ultimately of the sexual
substance. In fact, this is the most frequent and typical
representation of that text.
So much of what is thought of as “classical” Freudian theory
is seen as having been generated from this developmental key,6
including the primary and secondary processes, the pleasure
principle and its progressive transformation into the reality
principle, ontogeny as a recapitulation of phylogeny, and
theories of developmental psychopathology. Each of these
represent s variations on the underlying developmenta l
conceptualization that the drive undergoes a maturational

5
Strachey’s (1952) translation of trieb as “instinct” further emphasized the
biological association.
6
Part of Freud’s scientif ic ambition was “to be able to open all secrets with
a single key” (Masson, 1985, p. 25n). For a history of the “key” metaphor in
Freud’s work as representative of his attempt to place psychoanalysis among
the sciences, see Reisner (1999).
104 Steven Reisner

process that takes it from “autoerotism,” a state in which the
infant satisfies its sexuality without recourse to an external
object, through a series of discrete stages to object love, the
state of maturity where the ego seeks in the outer world for an
object particularly well suited to satisf ying its needs. As
Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) have commented, “The thrust
throughout Freud’s writings indicates that a relationship to an
external object is achieved developmentally” (p. 40).
But what became of the “other” substance of childhood
sexuality? This other “chemistry” of sexual pleasure for itself,
not for the reduction of something that is too much, but for the
restoration of something of which there is not enough, will weave
in and out of Freud’s ensuing theories. Though minimized in
the codifications of Freud’s followers, it emerges as a theory of
sexual development metaphorized rather differently than the
traditional, scientistic one—it emerges as a theory of sexual
development emphasizing the interactive subject and the psychic
construction of relations, a sexuality of longing and desire,
rather than of tension and discharge.
Where the traditional history of psychoanalysis explains
Freud’s abandonment of the seduction hypothesis as a turn from
the ef fects of env ironmental stimulation to the press of
endogenous sexual tension, the history of this other sexuality
explains that shift, and the developmental theory that is derived
from it, quite differently—as a replacement of the focus on genital
stimulation by a focus on psychic dislocation:

[There are] days when a f lash of lightning illuminates the

interrelations and lets me see the past as a preparation for
the present. . . . [I]nfantile character develops during a
period of “longing,” after the child has been removed from
the sexual experiences. Longing is the main character trait
of hysteri a . . . . D u ring this same period of longing
fantasies are formed and masturbation is (reg ularly?)
practiced, which then yields to repression [Masson, 1985,
pp. 274–275].7


7
This letter was written on October 27, 1897, a month after the so-called
abandonment of the seduction hypothesis. For a history of the “other” sexual
theory (Eros) in Freud’s work, see Reisner (1992).
 Freud and Developmental Theory 105


Over the next few years, Freud would transform his theory
from one of sexuality as an “afterwardsness” to sexuality as a
ubiquitous phenomenon of childhood. In addition, particularly
in the opening pages of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,
Freud (1905), would attempt to compress an entire theory of
sexuality into the hydraulics of the substance of unpleasure.
But invariably and repeatedly, in different incarnations, the
spirit, if not the substance, of pleasurable sexuality would
reemerge—an “other” sexuality cropping up to complicate and
place into perspective sexual matters, a sexuality of sheer
intimate, pleasure-in-the-self-and-other, a sexuality whose aim
was the continuation or restoration of the erotized moment. In
every aspect of his theorizing, the dislocating shadow of a
psychoanalysis of sexuality erupting in relation with an other
or from the loss of an other—a psychoanalysis, that is, of object
relations, desire and subjectiv ity, undermined the scientific
authority of the psychoanalysis of drive and discharge.
This “other” sexuality, in its various incarnations and
metaphorizations, emerged again and again as a postmodern
impulse in Freud’s writings and thus subverted his overt
ambition to depict psychoanalysis as a scientific conquest. With
it, Freud frequently undermined his own premises by turning
his relentless analysis back on itself. As Møller (1991) has put
it, “[T]he ultimate consequence of Freud’s quest for the final
answer [is that] there is always one more—unsettling and
potentially disruptive—question, always one more point that
requires investigation and explanation” (p. 27).
A closer look at the Three Essays shows that, although the
theory ref lected in the traditional reading is present, Freud
simultaneously unhinges it.

The Three Essays

The Three Essays (Freud, 1905) opens, classically, with Freud’s
introduction of the concept of “drive,” its “aim” and “object”—
a scientific-sounding taxonomy of the disturbing psychosexual
force. He asserts, too, that the “germs of the sexual impulses
are already present in the new-born child” (p. 176). Almost
immediately, however, he proceeds to deconstruct this concept
of drive, or, to use Freud’s language, to “trace back [the sexual
drive] to a number of ‘component instincts’ which . . . are
106 Steven Reisner


susceptible to further analysis” (p. 168). He continues, “We can

distinguish in them . . . an instinct not in itself sexual . . .
and a contribution from an organ capable of receiving stimuli.
. . . An organ of this kind will be described in this connection
as an ‘erotogenic zone’—as being the organ whose excitation
lends the instinct a sexual character” (p. 168n). Freud is saying
that, for a germ of an impulse to become sexuality, an interaction
at the site of an erotogenic zone is required and that, further,
“the skin . . . [is] the erotogenic zone par excellence” (p. 169).
In other words, a sensual interaction with the mother or
caretaker is required to turn preparedness for sexuality into an
experience of sexuality.
Freud presents another example, in his discussion of the
development of the autoerotic behavior he termed “sensual
sucking.” He described this evolution, too, as beginning in an
interactional scene: “His sucking at his mother’s breast . . .
must have familiarized him with this pleasure” (p. 181). Freud
however, obser ves, that the infant’s sexua l and sensual
satisfaction resulted not in tension reduction, but in continued
self-stimulation at the site of object contact. He is challenging
the premise that sexuality is a drive for reduced tension and,
more important, that, far from being the origination point of
infantile sexuality, autoerotism is a secondary elaboration,
following an object-relational interaction.
T his claim required a more sophist icated model of
development than the premises of the drive-discharge model
permitted. In pursuing this deeper inquiry, Freud deconstructed
the components of sexuality such that an enriched model of
development emerged. As Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) have
noted,

Freud offers a solution that is more complex than is

generally claimed . . . insofar as sexuality functions in
anaclisis with the [self-preservative] instincts, it too must
be said to have a relationship to objects; only after detaching
itself does sexuality become auto-erotic [p. 31].8

8
Laplanche (1970) argued that it is only as a result of this unfolding interplay
of relationship and loss that sexuality, in the expanded Freudian sense, comes
into existence at all. He argues further—and this is closer to the case I am
making here—that Freud’s use of a scientistic construct is a starting point to
 Freud and Developmental Theory 107


In his elaboration of this point, Freud added a dimension to

his developmental schema, which took it even further from the
drive–discharge model and closer to the “longing” model he
had earlier communicated to Fliess:

At a time when the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction

are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual
instinct has a sexual object outside the infant’s own body
in the shape of his mother’s breast. It is only later that he
loses it, just at the time, perhaps, when he is able to form a
total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving
him satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual drive then
becomes auto-erotic [p. 222]

Here Freud has interpolated a new category of development

and an “other” motivation for autoeroticism, derived from the
infant’s unfolding subjective experience. The part-object is lost
just when the infant is capable of recognizing that the breast
belongs not to it but to the mother. Autoerotism in this light
can be seen as an attempt to maintain the experience of intimate
pleasure just as an awareness of the separateness of the other is
forming—a way of preserving pleasure and tolerating desire in
the face of its absence or loss.
Freud, by concluding this passage with the now famous
dictum, “There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at its
mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of
love. The finding of the object is in fact a refinding of it,” was
compressing an enormously complex model of development into
a deceptively simple image. What has been lost is not only the
object that provides satisfaction but the object in the presence


be subverted and redrawn and that this process itself uniquely ref lects the
psychoanalytic endeavor: “The notion of a stimulus and the ‘pattern of a
ref lex arc’ . . . [do] not stand up for a moment in the physiology of Freud’s
day, not to mention modern physiology. And Freud must have known that
. . . The model borrowed from ‘biology’, or from psychophysiology is a false
model. It is as though it sig naled a twofold heterogeneity; not only is
psychoanalysis unlike the other sciences in that it does not develop in the
same way that they develop; its relationship with the other sciences may not
be comparable to the mutual relations between the other sciences” (Laplanche,
1989, pp. 6–7).
108 Steven Reisner


of which there is a pleasure and completeness. The loss of this

object, concomitant with the growing awareness that there is a
whole and separate object, sets in motion a longing for the object
obscured by and simultaneously indicated by the (only partially
satisfying) experience of autoerotism.9
Although Freud tried again and again to depict development
according to a scientif ic-seeming schematic of inev itable
psychosexual maturation and conf lict, this progression was
invariably undermined and fractured into a theory of manifold
layers and aspects. Development, like psychoanalytic theory
itself, ref lects no straightforward unfolding, but rather a
multiplicity of maturational vectors of sexuality, thought,
lang uage, structure, and subjectiv ity. Freud’s progressive
analyses of these concepts and their implications invoked
alternative discourses of development—in this case a discourse
of desire and subjectivity—which invariably arose as subverting
forces.

Two Principles
Freud’s (1911a) “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental
Functioning” can be seen as his first significant attempt at
codifying the developmental principles of psychoanalysis into
a consistent set of scientific axioms. As Strachey (1953) described
it, “It is as though Freud were bringing up for his own inspection,
as it were, the fundamental hypotheses of an earlier period,
and preparing them to serve as a basis for the major theoretical
discussions which lay ahead in the immediate future” (p. 216).
Yet, even here, as he is extolling the place of psychoanalysis
among the sciences, the self-subverting process creeps in at the
margins.


9
Laplanche (1970) has offered a reading of this passage that ingeniously
integrates its self-subverting sexualities: “[T]he object to be rediscovered is
not the lost object, but its substitute by displacement; the lost object is the
object of self-preservation, of hunger, and the object one seeks to refind in
sexuality is an object displaced in relation to that first object. From this, of
course, arises the impossibility of ultimately ever rediscovering the object,
since the object which has been lost is not the same as that which is to be
rediscovered. Therein lies the key to the eternal ‘duplicity’ situated at the
very beginning of the sexual quest” (p. 20).
 Freud and Developmental Theory 109


In the Two Principles, Freud (1911a) charged himself with “the

task of investigating the development of the relation of neurotics
and of mankind in general to reality” (p. 218). He emphasized
what he saw as inevitable individual and cultural developmental
processes, precipitated by the dictates of necessity and
experience, in which the primal pleasure principle gives way to
the rationalist reality principle. Freud described how the mental
apparatus originally functions according to the demands of the
primary process, a cognitive counterpart to autoerotism. In this
early phase of mentation, Freud explained, the infant has no
need of a gratifying object, because, when “the state of psychical
rest was originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of
internal needs . . . whatever was thought of (wished for) was
simply presented in a hallucinatory manner” (p. 219). Primary
process, under the sway of the pleasure principle, is abandoned
only because hallucination does not bring satisfaction and the
ensuing experience of disappointment requires a psychic
alteration: “[T]he psychical apparatus had to decide to form a
conception of the real circumstances in the external world and
to endeavor to make a real alteration of them” (p. 219), forcing
the establishment of the reality principle, as well as abilities for
thought, action, judgment, memory, and language.10
But in a footnote we discover a counterargument that radically
undermines the tenor and tone of the text in which it is
embedded. 11 Just at the point where Freud asserted the psyche’s
inevitable transformation from pleasure principle to reality
principle, using his keenest scientific rhetoric (“A new principle
of mental functioning was thus introduced”), his footnote
provided a subversive counterpoint, altering his argument rather
significantly:


10
In the wake of this psychic transformation from pleasure to reality, Freud
(1911) posited an analogous cultural transformation from the illusor y
gratif ications of religion to the practical satisfactions of science: “Religions
. . . have not by this means achieved a conquest of the pleasure-principle. It is
science which comes nearest to succeeding in that conquest” (p. 223).
11
As Dimen (1999) recently put it, “[T]o read Freud’s footnotes is to discover
a suboceanic world that puts in question the self-evidence and stability of the
textual terra firma” (p. 424).
110 Steven Reisner


It will rightly be objected that an organization which is a

slave to the pleasure-principle and neglects the reality of
the outer world could not maintain itself alive for the
shortest time, so that it cannot have come into being at all.
The use of a fiction of this kind is, however, vindicated by
the consideration that the infant, if one only includes the
maternal care, does almost realize such a state of mental
life. Probably, it hallucinates the fulfillment of its needs
. . . and then experiences the hallucinated satisfaction
[Freud, 1911b, pp. 14–15n, italics added].12

In his footnote, Freud has adroitly shifted the discourse from

the scientistic lang uage of psychic “principles” to one of
metaphor and subjectivity. It is no longer the impact of reality
on the psychic apparatus that is formative, but the evolving
subjective “state” of the infant in the context of maternal care.
The “fiction” that is Freud’s referent is not only the metaphoric
nature of psychoana ly tic metapsychology, but a lso t he
subjectivity of the infantile construction of reality. Bleeding back
into the text, Freud’s footnote offers a subjective corrective to
the rationalist tenor of the text. In doing so, Freud paved the
way for Winnicott and the British Object Relations school.13
The same case could easily be made in tracing other aspects
of development in Freud’s theory. Freud’s attempt to present
psychosexual development as a seamless progression from
autoeroticism to object love was undermined repeatedly, not
only by his introduction of the infant’s subjective state in the
context of maternal care, but by a variety of theoretical
reconceptualizations that followed, such as the concept of
narcissism and its elevation to drive status (Freud, 1914), love
and hate as alternative motivational dynamics (Freud, 1915a),
the reformulated dual-drive model of Eros and death (Freud,


12
I find Riviere’s (Freud, 1911b) translation of this passage superior to
Strachey’s (Freud, 1911a).
13
Winnicott (1965) acknowledged Freud in a footnote of his own: “I once
said, ‘There is no such thing as an infant’, meaning, of course, that whenever
one finds an infant one f inds maternal care, and without maternal care there
would be no infant. Was I inf luenced, without knowing it, by this footnote of
Freud’s?” (p. 39n).
 Freud and Developmental Theory 111


1920), the structural model (Freud, 1923) and the reformulated

theory of anxiety (Freud, 1926).14
In “On Narcissism,” Freud (1914) presented an alternative
mode of object seeking derived from ego aims, which he
distinguished from the mode of object seeking derived from
“anaclitic” aims.15 He described narcissism as an incorporative
sexual drive, rather than one geared toward discharge or tension
reduction: “the aim and the satisfaction in a narcissistic object-
choice is to be loved” (p. 98). It was seen to reemerge at every
developmental stage, each of which provided a new bodily and
interpersonal ground on which the conf lict between narcissism
and object love would play itself out. For example, Freud (1924)
viewed the oedipal conf lict as a conf lict between narcissistic
and object strivings, which “normally” is decided in favor of
narcissism:

If the satisfaction of love in the f ield of the Oedipus

complex is to cost the child his penis, a conf lict is bound
to arise between his narcissistic interest in that part of the
body and the libidinal cathexis of the parental objects. In
this conf lict the first of these forces normally triumphs:
the child’s ego turns away from the Oedipus-complex. . . .
T he object cathexes are g iven up and replaced by
identifications [p. 176].

And, most important (and, significantly, minimized in the

work of Freud’s followers), narcissism was seen to undergo its
own development, alongside that of the sexual drive. Thus the
ego was seen to develop in dual fashion, libidinally striving for
object satisfaction (to love) and narcissistically striving to fulfill
its ideal (to be loved).
Although Freud attempted again and again to reify the notion
that autoerotism advances to object love, narcissism (among
other concepts) returned to undermine that neat progression:


14
For a detailed exposition of each, see Reisner (1989).
15
“Anaclitic” [leaning] because they leaned on the somatically determined
self-preservative drives, not, as often misrepresented, because they leaned on
the mother.
112 Steven Reisner


Thus in our view the individual advances from narcissism

to object-love. But we do not believe that the whole of the
libido ever passes over from the ego to objects. A certain
quantity of libido is always retained in the ego; even when
object-love is highly developed, a certain amount of
narcissism persists” [Freud, 1917a, p. 139].

Freud’s adherence to a concept of universal bisexuality, too,

unraveled the orderly progression of sexual development from
narcissism to object love, just as it had in his original, two-
substance developmental theory: “the masculine type of object-
love . . . can exist alongside the feminine one proper, derived
from narcissism” (Freud, 1917b, p. 129).
In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” love as a developmental
force was distinguished from the traditional sexual drive.
Simultaneously, development was described, not in terms of the
progressive interaction of drive and body (“The case of love
and hate . . . refuses to be f itted into our schema of the
instincts” [Freud, 1915a, p. 133], but in terms of the emergent
structuring of the ego, constituted in response to object
relations. Freud asserted that, through introjection and
projection, the ego and the relation to the object unfold in
tandem: “When the purely narcissistic stage has given place to
the object-stage, pleasure and unpleasure signify relations of
the ego to the object.” And, further, “The attitudes of love and
hate cannot be made use of for the relations of instincts to their
objects, but are reserved for the relations of the total ego to
objects” (p. 137). “On Narcissism” (Freud, 1914) and “Instincts
and Their Vicissitudes” (Freud, 1915a) began the passage toward
structural development and object relations alongside drive
development. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud, 1917c)
this transition was taken a step further; the ego-ideal was given
a critical cast, presaging the superego, and development was
seen as the result of the “shadow of the object” falling upon
and splitting the ego. 16

16
In his “Papers on Metapsychology,” Freud (1915c) realigned his schemas
of the development of the psyche to include economic, dynamic, and structural
aspects. In these papers, the structuralization of the ego in response to the
v icissitudes of object relations was still regarded as a “regression” to
narcissism; in “The Ego and the Id” (Freud, 1922), it becomes normalized.
 Freud and Developmental Theory 113


In Freud’s (1920) f inal dual-drive theory, introduced in

“Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” the aim of discharge and
reduced tension no longer applied to sexuality in its essence.
Rather than being an instinct aimed at tension reduction, Eros
was a force for increased relatedness: “[The] ‘Eros’ of the
philosopher Plato coincides exactly with the love-force, the libido
of psychoanalysis” (Freud, 1921, p. 91). It has its manifestations
in “sexual love with sexual union as its aim . . . self-love . . .
love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity
(1921, p. 90). It s “pur pose is to combine single human
individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and
nations into one great unity, the unity of mankind (1930,
p. 122).
In “The Ego and the Id,” Freud’s (1923) multiple develop-
mental schemas are all in evidence, from the most classically
scientistic, according to which the ego develops to “conquer”
the id, to the most object relational, where “the character of
the ego” develops as “a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes
and that it contains a history of those object-choices” (p. 29).
Bisexuality, Eros, internalized object relations, multiple
identificatory processes, all subverted the neat developmental
progression from autoerotism to object love, now recast again
as the structural development of superego and ego out of the
undifferentiated id. But lest one fall into believing that this,
too, ref lects a neat scientific victory, Freud (1933) points out
that “[w]e cannot do justice to the characteristics of the mind
[in representing them] by linear outlines . . . but rather by
areas of color melting into one another as they are presented
by modern artists” (p. 79).
Another developmental schema and realm of discourse is
offered in “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (Freud, 1926),
displacing yet again the concept that development plots the
progressive path traveled by sexuality seeking discharge. In that
work, development is described from the point of view of
progressive changes in the tenor and safety of the child’s
relationship with others and environmental surround and is
measured according to phases of susceptibility to certain
interpersonal anxieties, rather than by a biological sexual
unfolding. From this perspective, anxiety itself is seen as the
result of the initial infant–mother separation: “the earliest
anxiety of all—the ‘primal anxiety’ of birth is brought about on
114 Steven Reisner


the occasion of a separation from the mother” (p. 137). And

further,

the danger of psychical helplessness fits the stage of the

ego’s earliest maturity; the danger of loss of an object (or
loss of love) fits the lack of self-sufficiency in the first years
of childhood; the danger of being castrated fits the phallic
phase; and finally, fear of the super-ego, which assumes a
special position, fits the period of latency [Freud, 1933,
p. 88].

Even the fear of the superego, in this schema, Freud describes

in terms of internalized object relations: “The torments caused
by the reproaches of conscience correspond precisely to the
child’s fear of loss of love, a fear the place of which has been
taken by the moral agency.” (Freud, 1940, p. 206).
Thus, Freud, in alternating processes of scientistic axiomatic
postulation and concurrent autodeconstruction, elaborated a
complex and enriched series of discourses on development,
including narratives of biological forces, expanding subjectivity,
the progressions of object relationships, the vicissitudes of
identification, and the management of anxiety. Not to mention
hypotheses on the unfolding of gender identity, hierarchies of
moral and ethical thought and behavior, language development,
the genesis of consciousness, and undoubtedly others.

FREUD’S FOLLOWERS AND THE RESTORATION

OF THE GRAND NARRATIVE

While Freud’s theories came f lying out of windows and off the
roof, like cartoon characters in a burning building, his followers
attempted to catch them in a coherent and internally consistent
net. Freud had long since given up the attempt and constructed,
deconstructed, discarded, and resurrected theories as he needed
them. As he put it in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1915, “I
am of course an analyst, and believe that synthesis offers no
obstacles once analysis has been achieved” (Freud, 1915b,
p. 32).
But his disciples, maintaining Freud’s aspiration more than
his practice, continued to pull the net this way and that in their
attempts to catch and integrate Freud’s array of developmental
 Freud and Developmental Theory 115


theories. As Abraham (1920) put it, “It is forty years since the
basic discoveries were made on which psycho-analysis is founded.
During this period, a growing number of collaborators have
helped in building, stone by stone, until a great and organically
integrated structure has been erected” (p. 116).
Thus, we f ind that it was Freud’s followers, even more
thoroughly than Freud himself, who wedded the psychoanalytic
theory of development to the scientific Weltanschauung of the
early 20th century. In so doing, they narrowed Freud’s thought
in two significant ways: first, they strove to transform Freud’s
relentless analytic searchings into a series of analytic discoveries,
ref lecting the 20th century Zeitgeist that observation, in the mode
of the empirical sciences, would make possible access to a
unified, integrated truth; and, second, they privileged those
“truths” which ref lected the principles of turn-of-the-century
science, with its aim of explicative forces and energies, as well
as principles of linear and logical development.
Abraham’s (1924) was the first attempt to synthesize the
various Freudian epigenetic models into a single, unif ied
systemat ic present at ion, which ha s become k now n a s
“Abraham’s table.” In his table, Abraham combined two of
Freud’s developmental presentations: he explicitly aligned the
evolution of Freud’s psychosexual stages with the maturation
of the sexual drive as it ostensibly progressed from autoerotism
to object love. Thus, for Abraham, the earliest oral stage, without
the temptations of an object, was “preambivalent” and aligned
with the phase of autoerotism; the anal stage was designated as
the stage of ambivalence between narcissism and object love;
and the genital stages were defined as “postambivalent” and
aligned only with object love. Implied was that all psycho-
pathology could be understood according to fixations at the
different developmental levels.
Fenichel (1945) continued the effort that Abraham had left
unfinished owing to his early death in 1925. He reproduced
Abraham’s table and added a leaf, making overt the psycho-
pathological association with each successive developmental
stage, ranging from “certain types of schizophrenia (stupor)”
(p. 101), associated with autoeroticism and early oral fixations,
to normality, associated with object love and the final genital
stage. Implied in Fenichel’s table was that another of Freud’s
developmental presentations, that of psychic structuralization
116 Steven Reisner


(the development of id, ego, and superego), could be aligned

in a similarly sequential progression.
Robert Fliess (1948) expanded the table still further by making
overt the association with structural development and further
subdividing the table into developments of the ego, the libido,
and the “sense of reality.”
Aspects of Freud’s developmental theorizing that did not fit
neatly into the organization of ideas were handled in one of
two ways. Those which manifestly contradicted the increasingly
elaborated progression from autoerotism to object love were
allowed to fall outside the net, as it were. Particularly after
Freud’s death, his codifiers became more unabashed in their
assertion of what was and was not proper psychoanalytic theory.
Among the aspects of Freud’s thinking that were minimized or
ignored by his disciples were the side-by-side unfolding of
narcissism and object love, the evolving subjectivity of the
infant’s self-concept, and the complex nature of gender evolution
and bisexual identifications. Subject to outright rejection were
the dual-drive theory of Eros and death, which Fenichel (1945)
declared “would not be compatible with the approved biological
concept of instinct” (p. 60) and the pervasive, ongoing nature
of narcissism, which Rapaport (1960) described as “distract[ing]
attention from the theory itself” (p. 869).
An alternative strategy to outright rejection for certain of
Freud’s developmental conceptualizations was to slip them in
as early, pathological manifestations of development. (Mitchell,
1984, has referred to this tendency as the “developmental tilt.”)
T hus, in obeisance to t he cla ssica l represent at ion of
development, object-relational aspects and narcissistic aspects
found a place, but only as part of an expanded theory of the
pregenital phase. As a result, descriptions of earliest childhood,
such as those found in Anna Freud’s (1965), Jacobson’s (1964)
and Mahler’s (1968) writings, can be seen as further elaborated
versions of Abraham’s progression, stretching the net in a
temporal dimension, as it were. Thus, Anna Freud’s concept of
the “prototypical” developmental line of childhood brought the
theory of development full circle, back to Freud’s (1905) Three
Essays, but without the benefit of Freud’s own deconstruction
of the allied concepts:
This is the sequence which leads from the newborn’s utter
dependence on materna l care to the young adult’s
 Freud and Developmental Theory 117


emotional and material self-reliance—a sequence for which

the successive stages of libido development (oral, anal,
phal lic) merely form the inborn, maturational base
[A. Freud, 1965, pp. 64–65].

Lost in many of the developmental conceptualizations of

Freud’s followers is any sense of Freud’s radical endeavor, which
treated theories no differently than it did any other object of
psychoanalytic investigation.17 The stages, like most of Freud’s
concepts, served as formative ideas to be taken apart, the end
result looking quite different from the beginning, as evidenced
by his final description of the oral, anal and phallic stages
presented in “An Outline of Psychoanalysis”: “It would be a
mistake to suppose that these three phases succeed one another
in a clear-cut fashion. One may appear in addition to another;
they may overlap one another, may be present alongside of one
another. In the early phases, the component instincts set about
their pursuit of pleasure independently of one another” (Freud,
1940, p. 155).

THE ALTERNATIVE THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT

Succeeding generations of psychoanalysts attempted to offer

alternative, “post-Freudian” views of sexuality, object relations,
drive, and development. Where Freud’s followers worked to
perfect his modernist vision of locating psychoanalysis among
the empirical sciences by piggybacking psychoanalysis on
evolutionary theory, physics, biology, and hydraulics with their
scientized narratives of forces pulsing and inev itabilities
unfolding, the rebels within psychoanalysis chose to apply less
mechanistic language in their discourse on development.
Physical and biological metaphors were eschewed in favor of a
discourse of selves and object relationships.
However, as much as their forebears, these theorists remained
wedded to the 20th-century Zeitgeist of a single unified truth about


17
Freud tended to limit his followers from just such radical play with the
ideas of psychoanalysis, keeping that domain almost exclusively for himself
(Reisner, 1999). In addition, his immediate followers (with the exception of
Ferenczi) tended to take Freud’s idealized psychoanalysis-as-science vision
more seriously than Freud himself did (see also Reisner, 1991).
118 Steven Reisner


the development of human beings, which psychoanalytic theory,

given the proper observational tools, whether in the consulting
room or in the nursery, was mandated to supply. Fairbairn
(1944), for example, as if he had distilled the essence of human
motivation in a test-tube, declared, “[T]he libido is primarily
object-seeking, rather than pleasure seeking” (p. 82).
Each t heor ist of t he major a lte r native schools of
psychoana lysis posited it s own basis for psychoana lytic
knowledge and concomitantly a schema of child development
that ostensibly supported the tenets of that theory. Thus, Klein
(1935) (just about the only radical reformer of psychoanalysis
who did not see her work as a replacement for Freud’s) posited
a developmental table somewhat different from Abraham’s; hers
focused on the unfolding of particular relational positions,
paranoid and depressive, vis-à-vis the mother. Fairbairn’s (1941)
model, also recasting Abraham’s table, plotted the unfolding
in terms of dependence on the object, from “infantile
dependence,” to “quasi-independent,” to “mature dependence”
(p. 41). Winnicott (1982), depicting development also in terms
of object relationship, focused on the mother’s ability to provide
an environment in which the infant developed in phases marked
by transitions in the capacity to experience, use, and play with
its mother as object.
Erikson (1950), Sullivan (1953), Kohut (1971) each posited
different unfoldings, emphasizing the social, relational, and self-
developmental experiences respectively. Each of these theorists
claimed his position to be closer to the truth of some essentially
human characteristic; these less mechanized theories were
argued to be “experience near,” ostensibly representations of
development closer to what is actually observed in the nursery
and infant research and as it is subjectively reexperienced in
treatment, which, in turn, wa s v iewed increasingly as a
recapitulation of development.
Interestingly, much of the alternative theory and, more
important, many of the alternative modes of discourse each of
these theorists elaborated can be found in Freud’s speculative
writing, but was deemphasized both because of his desire to
present psychoanalysis as a science and because of his tendency
to analogize from physical sciences. The scientistic emphasis
was extended and made literal by his followers in their
 Freud and Developmental Theory 119


codification of psychoanalysis into “a great and organically

integrated structure.”18
Klein’s (1935) discourses on subjectivity within a domain of
destructive impulses, projections and identifications, and part
and whole objects can all be found in Freud’s writings, as she
would be the first to acknowledge. Fairbairn’s object-relational
recasting was a recasting only if we accept Freud’s followers’
narrowing of the developmental schema instead of reading
Freud himself. Thus when Fairbairn (1941) corrected Freud’s
(1905) representation of thumbsucking as autoerotic by
replacing it with the idea that “thumbsucking is a technique for
dealing with an unsatisfactory object relationship” (Fairbairn,
1941, p. 33), he replaced a simplified representation of Freud’s
view with another, equally simplistic idea, which had already
found a place in Freud’s elaborate deconstruction of this, the
Urszene of relational psychoanalysis. And Kohut’s (1971)
reorientation of narcissism from a single developmental line to
dual developmental lines was prefigured in Freud’s own writings
on narcissism, which had been transformed and scientized by
Freud’s followers who were often more ‘Freudian’ than Freud
himself.
Although there is no doubt that the alternative schools of
psychoanalytic thought since Freud have added enormously to
our knowledge, much of the form of that exploration ref lected
the same problematic ambition as that of Freud and his
fol lowers. As a result dif ferent, r at her than additional,
psychoanalyses were posited, as if one held a monopoly on
psychoanalytic truth. At least Freud, in a manner anticipating
the contemporary Zeitgeist, corrected this position through the
autodeconstruction that was his mode of theorizing, and he did
this only in his most speculative work.
Freud knew that there were no truly objective observations,
but only preconceptions awaiting more rigorous analysis and
clearer observation, and that every apparent validation yielded
a further hypothesis derived from that interaction. He wrote,

18
The narrowing and demetaphorization of Freud’s theory was carried out
not only in the theoretical exegesis of his followers, but in the very language
and style of Freud’s words as they were translated into the Standard Edition:
“Freud’s is a way of thinking about mental processes . . . Strachey’s is an
attempt to capture things and processes themselves” (Ornston, 1985, p. 398).
120 Steven Reisner


“[B]asic concepts of science . . . must at first necessarily

possess some degree of indefiniteness. . . . we come to an
understanding about their meaning by making repeated
references to the material of observation from which they
appear to have been derived, but upon which, in fact, they
have been imposed. Thus, strictly speaking, they are in the
nature of conventions [Freud, 1915a, p. 117].
Freud (1933) chose his language carefully when he asserted
the “fiction” of a primary process and when he referred to the
drives as “our mythology.” It is in keeping with Freud’s description
of these aspects of his theory as fictions and mythologies if we
view each theory of childhood development in similar fashion.
Each developmental theory is, in a sense, a psychoanalytic
origin myth—a depiction of events of an archaic time, selected
and codif ied to support the belief system, meanings, and
customs immanent in the theory it purports to validate.

DEVELOPMENT AS ORIGIN MY TH

Each school of psychoanalytic thought, from Freud to the current

day, has constructed a conceptualization of child development
as a kind of origin myth. Each school demonstrates the validity
of its theoretical claims by aligning them with inev itable,
universal, maturational processes, which include biological,
social, cultural, and relational aspects. Each takes a portion of
the psychic world and the potential discourses about that world
and “validates” it by aligning it with observed processes in infant
development that are deemed evidentiary but that are actually
metaphoric and, ultimately, as Chodorow (1996) and Barratt
(1996) have noted, self-referential. As Chodorow (1996) has said,
“Case descriptions and theoretical discussions frequently
describe a past whose contours are shaped by childhood
experience read in terms of the specific developmental theory
that the analyst holds” (p. 39).19 And Barratt (1996) adds, “[T]o
pick just one example—the self psychological infant is found to
be an immature version of the self psychological adult, the self

19
Chodorow (1996) persuasively critiques the psychoanalytic tendency to
privilege the authority of childhood experiences over contemporary material,
and universal theories of childhood over the report of the individual subject:
“[W]e should be wary of clinical explanations in terms of objectivized universal
childhood stages or psychobiological drives that determine or predict later
psychological experience. . . . And we should be wary of developmental
 Freud and Developmental Theory 121


psychological adult is found to be a mature version of the self

psychological infant” (p. 396).20
Each origin myth is ref lective of a condensed psychoanalytic
culture within which it appears as truth. Within its own culture,
such a description may well be “experience near.” Its universality
weakens, however, as the theory is stretched to account for the
experience and modes of discourse of subjects outside its own
culture. Freud’s (1923) description of being “‘lived’ by unknown
and uncontrollable forces” (p. 23) outside of awareness was as
“experience near” for Freud’s middle-European culture on the
cusp of Romanticism and empiricism, as “psychology of the self”
was for Kohut’s (1977) mid-20 th-century American culture.
“Experience-near’” is a construction ref lective of the distance
between a discourse and the culture in which it is articulated,
not a discourse and some essential human experience.21, 22

theories that promote such interpretation and explanation. . . . We must . . .
look for evidence not from a universal childhood or psyche but from a
particular subjective childhood and the unique ev idence of indiv idual
transferences” (pp. 48–49).
20
Along similar lines, Green (1997) argues that infant research purporting
to capture and describe the subjective experience of the infant is not science
but ‘science f iction’. . . . The method of observ ing the facts is, I trust,
respectful of scientif ic methodology. But the inferences . . . are fictions”
(p. 12).
21
Fajardo (1998) gives a contemporary example of the process of taking
the culturally familiar for the “experience-near” and of f inding the cultural
construct of the moment in both the consulting room and the nursery:
“Central questions for a here-and-now, experience-near view of psychoanalysis,
that of the social-constructivist, concern how analyst–analysand synchrony
occurs, what makes it change, and what experiences can then evolve within
the analysand. . . . Parallel questions are addressed by the new developmental
researcher studying [dyadic synchrony in] the child-caretaker/environment
dyad. The two types of dyad . . . have specifiable commonalities such that in
a given case understandings about either can extend the analyst’s sensitivity
to the organizational processes of the other” (p. 204).
22
Harris (1996) has deconstructed a hitherto unexamined developmental
construct, that of constitution. She finds the infant’s body and psyche to be
susceptible receptor sites for familial and cultural projections: “The body
and psyche of the child operate as projection sites, material body forms made
meaningful within t he parents’ psychic meaning system and a lready
interpreted through the meaning systems and narrative threads in parent, in
family, and in the wider culture. . . . Constitutional features, both given and
made in the relational matrix, come to be among those features which later
in development become postdated, to use Butler’s term” (p. 367). Harris’s and
Butler’s term postdated takes us full circle to Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, giving
it its fullest psychoanalytic meaning.
122 Steven Reisner


In psychoanalysis, the cultures implicated in our theoretical

discourse are complex and overlapping, and, when teased apart
into its components, the universality of any single psychoanalytic
theor y is quickly undermined. There are many cultur al
organizers at play in any theory or school of thought. Some of
these are obvious, as when national borders or philosophical
differences define a style of psychoanalysis; others are less
obvious, as when universal theories are generalized from the
characterological organization with which the main proponent
of the theory or school is most familiar.
If, for example, we map the psychoanalytic terrain taking
diagnostic/organizational models as a cultural div ide, we
discover rapidly the cultural relativ ity of many ostensibly
universal developmental theories. Fairbairn (1941, 1944), in
these terms, was speaking the language of the schizoid and
articulating quite well a model history from which such a psychic
structure emerges; Kohut (1971, 1977) did the same for the
narcissistic character; Winnicott (1965), the borderline. Each
construed and universalized an origin myth of developmental
milestones, idealized parent–infant interactions, intrapsychic
and interpersonal deviations and therapeutic interventions and
technique based on retrospective reconstruction and selectively
attentive child observation. While each theory adds to our
knowledge of possible developmental narratives, each as well
reveals as much about the particular interest and bias of the
theorist who created it.
Different psychoanalyses (classical, object relations, feminist,
self, social constructivist) have (re)constructed different variants
of this origin myth, privileging different aspects and cross-
sections of psychoanalytic culture as the preferred frames of
reference and realms of discourse. Too often, the ostensibly
scientific nature of developmental theory and infant observation
research becomes the justification for reifying the unexamined
prescriptives for normative development and behavior that are
embedded in one psychoanalytic culture or another. As Dimen
(1996) has written, “Developmentalism as regulatory practice—
that linear sequence of stages in which health and normality
cohere . . . inclining us to fill in the blanks of the Enlighten-
ment metanarrative with ontology” (p. 389).23

23
This tendency is equally at play in contemporary psychoanalytic theory
as it was in classical theory. See, for example, Coates (1997), who, in asserting
 Freud and Developmental Theory 123


And each developmental psychoanalysis can be deconstructed,

such that the intersect of cultures at which it finds it center can
be charted. Interesting studies in this direction have been
undertaken by Kurzweil (1989), who has found a different Freud
in the psychoanalyses of different nations, and Kirschner (1990),
who has argued that

the ascendance of “ego” and “self” theories in North

American and British psychoanalysis is a testament to our
hyperindividualism, which in turn is traceable to our radical
Protestant heritage and its secular offshoots. . . . [This]
preoccupat i o n . . . i s a b s e nt from t he French
psychoanalytic attitude . . . [as exemplified by] Lacan, for
whom the self or subject is . . . itself the problem
[pp. 854–855].

Freud (1940), at his best, eschewed psychoanalysis as a

normative practice: “We have seen that it is not scientifically
feasible to draw a line of demarcation between what is psychically
normal and abnormal; so that that distinction, in spite of its
practical importance, possesses only a conventional value”
(p. 195). Alone among psychoanalytic theorists, Freud was able
to construct a variety of developmental schemas, according to
the aspect of psychoanalytic theory that he was elaborating at
the time. Although Freud, too, turned psychoanalytic origin
myths into schemas of universal development, he simultaneously
supplied essential correctives to the tendency to reify psycho-
analytic metaphor; he applied psychoanalytic principles to
psychoanalysis itself, opening up the space for what was left
out of any theoretical construct and providing access to what
might be termed the “theoretical unconscious.”

that “it is time to put the concept of ‘developmental lines’ to rest,” not only
critiques classical developmental theor y as “simultaneously linear and
implicitly normative” but also arg ues that too often in contemporar y
developmental theory these linear and normative presuppositions remain in
place (pp. 42–43). Dimen (1996) argues that, while object relations theory
has expanded psychoanalytic conceptions of development to include its
relational context, in contemporary psychoanalytic culture the comforting
imagery of maternalism may conceal and justify cultural regulatory practices.
See also Flax (1990): “the concept of the good enough mother, although meant
to capture and validate what women do as child rearers, also ref lects deeply
ingrained social fantasies about women” (p. 125).
124 Steven Reisner


In applying this perspective, today, we may find a useful place

for developmental theory, freed from its scientistic baggage,
within a humbler framework of psychoanalytic tools and
constructions. I propose we borrow a page from Clifford (1986),
an anthropologist and ethnographic historian, who, like Freud,
refers to the conceptualizations of his trade as “fictions”:

To call ethnographies fictions may raise empiricist hackles.

But the word, as commonly used in recent textual theory
has lost its connotation of falsehood, of something merely
opposed to truth. It suggests the partiality of cultural and
historical truths, the way they are systematic and exclusive.
Ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions in
the sense of “something made or fashioned,” the principle
burden of its Latin root, fingere. But it is important to
preserve the meaning not merely of making, but also of
making up, of inventing things not actually real [p. 6].

Developmental histories are fictions; developmental theories

are myths. They provide us with organizing cultural meeting
points within which and between which we face our patients
and their histories. Like the postmodern ethnologist, the
postmodern psychoanalyst must be conversant with many
developmental theories, many fictions and mythologies, aware
that any one variant is necessarily partial and constructed.
But the postmodern analyst goes further. Inheriting from
Freud the mandate to attend precisely to what is left out of the
discourse, in the organizational structure, in the mythology, the
analyst and analysand develop a unique developmental theory
of the history of that person retrospectively and anew, an imprint
struck on the negative space of analysis.

REFERENCES

Abraham, K. (1920), The cultural significance of psychoanalysis. In:

Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books,
1955, pp. 116–136.
 (1924), A short study of the development of the libido, viewed
in the light of the menta l disorders. In: Selected Papers on
Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, 1960, pp. 418–502.
Barratt, B. (1993), Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse: Knowing
and Being since Freud’s Psychology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
 Freud and Developmental Theory 125


 (1996), Commentary on Peter Wolff’s “Infant observation and

psychoanalysis.” J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 44:396–404.
Breuer, J. & Freud, S. (1895), Studies on Hysteria. Standard Edition, 2.
London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
Casey, E. S. (1990), The subdominance of the pleasure principle. In:
Pleasure Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. R. A. Glick & S. Bone. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 239–258.
Chodorow, N. (1996), Ref lections on the authority of the past in
psychoanalytic thinking. Psychoanal. Quart., 65:32–51.
Clifford, J. (1986), Introduction: Partial truths. In: Writing Culture,
ed. J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Coates, S. (1997), Is it time to jettison the concept of developmental
lines? Commentary on de Marneffe’s paper, “Bodies and Words.”
Gender & Psychoanalysis, 2:35–53.
Dimen, M. (1996), Bodytalk. Gender & Psychoanalysis, 1:385–401.
 (1999), Between lust and libido: Sex, psychoanalysis, and the
moment before. Psychoanal. Dial., 9:415–440.
Erikson, E. (1950), Childhood and Society. New York: Norton.
Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1941), A revised psychopathology of the psychoses
and the psychoneuroses. In: Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality.
London: Tavistock, 1952, pp. 28–58.
 (1944), Endopsychic structure considered in terms of object-
relationship. In: Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London:
Tavistock, 1952, pp. 82–132.
Fajardo, B. (1998), A new v iew of developmental research for
psychoanalysts. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 46:185–207.
Fenichel, O. (1945), The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Neurosis. New York:
Norton.
Flax, J. (1990), Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and
Postmodernism in the Contemporar y West. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
 (1993), Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and
Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
Fliess, R., ed. (1948), The Psychoanalytic Reader, Vol. 1. New York:
International Universities Press.
Freud, A. (1965), Normality and Pathology in Childhood. New York:
International Universities Press.
Freud, S. (1895), Project for a scientific psychology. Standard Edition,
1:281–397. London: Horgarth Press, 1966.
 (1905), Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Standard Edition,
7:125–248. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
 (1911a), Formulations regarding the two principles of mental
functioning. Standard Edition, 12:218–226. London: Hogarth Press,
1958.
126 Steven Reisner


 (1911b), Formulations on the two principles of mental

functioning. Collected Papers, 4:13–21. London: Hogarth Press, 1925.
 (1913), The claims of psycho-analysis to scientific interest.
Standard Edition, 13:165–190. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
 (1914), On narcissism: An introduction. Standard Edition, 14:67–
102. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
 (1915a), Instincts and their vicissitudes. Standard Edition, 14:67–
102. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
 (1915b), Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, July 7, 1915. In:
Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé Letters, ed. E. Pfeiffer. New
York: Norton, 1966.
 (1915c), Papers on metapsychology. Standard Edition, 14:105–
333. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
 (1917a), A difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis. Standard
Edition, 17:137–144. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
 (1917b), On transformations of instinct as exemplified in anal
erotism. Standard Edition, 17:127–144. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
 (1917c), Mourning and melancholia. Standard Edition, 14:243–
258. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
 (1920), Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition, 18:1–
144. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
 (1921), Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. Standard
Edition, 18:65–143. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
 (1923), The ego and the id. Standard Edition, 19:13–64. London:
Hogarth Press, 1961.
 (1924), The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. Standard
Edition, 19:173–179. London: Hogarth Press, 1961.
 (1926), Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. Standard Edition,
20:77–178. London: Hogarth Press, 1959.
 (1930), Civilization and its discontents. Standard Edition, 21:57–
157. London: Hogarth Press, 1961.
 (1933), New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Standard
Edition, 22:5–182. London: Hogarth Press, 1963.
 (1940), An outline of psycho-analysis. Standard Edition, 23:139–
207. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
 (1954), The Origins of Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.
Green, A. (1997), Science and science f iction in infant research.
Unpublished manuscript.
Greenberg, J. R. & Mitchell, S. A. (1983), Object Relations in
Psychoanalytic Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Habermas, J. (1972), Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press.
 Freud and Developmental Theory 127


Harris, A. (1996), Animated conversation: Embodying and gendering.

Gender & Psychoanalysis, 1:361–383.
Jacobson, E. (1964), The Self and the Object World. New York:
International Universities Press.
Kirschner, S. (1990), The assenting ego: Anglo-American values in
contemporary psychoanalytic developmental psychology. Soc. Res.,
57:821–856.
Klein, M. (1935), A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-
depressive states. In: Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works
1921–1945. New York: Free Press, 1975, pp. 262–290.
Kohut, H. (1971), The Analysis of the Self. New York: International
Universities Press.
 (1977), The Restoration of the Self. New York: International
Universities Press.
Kurzweil, E. (1989), The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Lacan, J. (1977), Écrits, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton.
Laplanche, J. (1970), Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
 (1989), New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Basil
Blackwell.
 (1992), Notes on afterwardsness. In: Jean Laplanche: Seduction,
Translation, Drives, ed. J. Fletcher & M. Stanton. London: Institute
of Contemporary Arts.
 & Pontalis, J.-B. (1967), The Language of Psycho-analysis. New
York: Norton, 1973.
Mahler, M. S. (1968), On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of
Individuation. New York: International Universities Press.
Masson, J., ed. (1985), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess, 1887–1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mitchell, S. (1984), Object relations theories and the developmental
tilt. Contemp. Psychoanal., 7:473–499.
 (1988), Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Møller, L. (1991), The Freudian Reading: Analytical and Fictional
Constructions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Nelson, B., ed. (1957), Freud and the Twentieth Century. New York:
Meridian Books.
Ornston, D. (1985), Freud’s conception is different from Strachey’s.
J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 33:379–410.
Phillips, A. (1995), Terrors and Experts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
128 Steven Reisner


Rapaport, D. (1960), On the psychoanalytic theory of motivation. In:

The Collected Papers of David Rapaport. New York: Basics Books, 1967,
pp. 853–915.
Reisner, S. (1989), From Freud to “Freudian”: Classical Revisionism
and the Psychoanalytic Theory of Motivation. Ph.D. dissertation,
Columbia University.
 (1991), Reclaiming the metapsychology: Classical revisionism,
seduction and the self in Freudian psychoanalysis. Psychoanal.
Psychol., 8:439–462.
 (1992), Eros reclaimed: Recovering Freud’s relational theory.
In: Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, ed. N. Skolnick & S.
Warshaw. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, pp. 281–312.
 (1999), Freud and psychoanalysis: Into the 21st century. J. Amer.
Psychoanal. Assn., 47:1037–1060.
Strachey, J. (1953), Editor’s note to “Formulations regarding the two
principles of mental functioning.” Standard Edition, 12:215–217.
London: Hogarth Press, 1958.
Sullivan, H. (1953), The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York:
Norton.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965), In: The Maturational Processes and the
Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press.
 (1982), Playing and Reality. New York: Tavistock.

31 West 11th Street, #6C

New York, NY 10011
e-mail: sreisner@psychoanalysis.net