Chapter 1. Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915) of Papers on Metapsychology - Study Guide by Sigmund Freud

example of ambivalence of feeling. Freud discusses this further by looking at the three polarities that govern our mental life:

1) Subject (ego) - Object (external world)
2) Pleasure - Unpleasure
3) Active - Passive

These three polarities are connected in various highly significant ways - for example in a primal psychical situation of narcissism. From this Freud discusses the genesis of love and hate, namely that love is derived from the capacity of the ego to satisfy some of its instinctual impulses auto-erotically by obtaining organ pleasure - i.e. is originally narcissistic, then passes over to objects. Love in this preliminary form is hardly distinguishable from hate in its attitude towards the object - not until the genital organisation is established does love become the opposite of hate.

Hate as a relation to objects is older than love - deriving from the narcissistic ego's repudiation of the external world and its stimuli. This history of love and hate makes its manifestation as 'ambivalent' easier to understand.

In sum, the essential feature in the vicissitudes undergone by instincts lies in the subjection of the instinctual impulses to the influences of the three great polarities that dominate mental life. Of there three polarities, 'activity-passivity' is biological, 'ego- external world' is real, and that of 'pleasure-unpleasure' is the economic polarity. In his next paper, Freud discusses the instinctual vicissitude of repression.