Fixation (psychology)
Fixation (German: Fixierung)[1] is a concept (in human psychology) that was originated by Sigmund Freud (1905) to denote the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits.[2][3] The term subsequently came to denote object relationships with attachments to people or things in general persisting from childhood into adult life.[3]
Freud
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud distinguished the fixations of the libido on an incestuous object from a fixation upon a specific, partial aim, such as voyeurism.[4]
Freud theorized that some humans may develop psychological fixation due to one or more of the following:
- A lack of proper gratification during one of the psychosexual stages of development.
- Receiving a strong impression from one of these stages, in which case the person's personality would reflect that stage throughout adult life.[5]
- "An excessively strong manifestation of these instincts at a very early age [which] leads to a kind of partial fixation, which then constitutes a weak point in the structure of the sexual function".[6]
As Freud's thought developed, so did the range of possible 'fixation points' he saw as significant in producing particular neuroses.[7] However, he continued to view fixation as "the manifestation of very early linkages — linkages which it is hard to resolve — between instincts and impressions and the objects involved in those impressions".[8]
Psychoanalytic therapy involved producing a new transference fixation in place of the old one.[9] The new fixation — for example a father-transference onto the analyst — may be very different from the old, but will absorb its energies and enable them eventually to be released for non-fixated purposes.[10]
Objections
- Whether a particularly obsessive attachment is a fixation or a defensible expression of obsessive compulsive disorder, which psychoanalysts linked to a mix of early (pregenital) frustrations and gratifications.[11]
- Fixation has been compared to psychological imprinting[12] at an early and sensitive period of development.[13] others object that Freud was attempting to stress the looseness of the ties between libido and object, and the need to find a specific cause any given (perverse or neurotic) fixation.[14]
Post-Freudians
In popular culture
- Coleridge's Christabel has been seen as using witchcraft as a vehicle to explore psychological fixation.[21]
See also
References
- ISBN 978-0-946-43949-2.
- ISBN 978-1-317-67042-1.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-78049-303-9.
- ^ Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality (Penguin Freud Library 7) pp. 68–70 and p. 151
- ^ Freud, Sexuality p. 167
- ^ Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Penguin 1995) p. 73
- ^ Angela Richards, "Editor's Note", Sigmund Freud, On Psychopathology (Penguin Freud Library 10) p. 132
- ^ Freud, Psychopathology pp. 137–8
- ^ Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Harvard 1999) p. 53
- ^ Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Penguin Freud Library 1) p. 509
- ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 305
- ^ Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (London 1988) p. 158
- ^ Richard L. Gregory ed, The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford 1987) p. 356
- ^ Stephen A. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (1988) p. 78
- ^ C. Geissmann-Chambon/P. Geissmann, A History of Child Psychoanalysis (Routledge 1998) p. 129
- ^ Lyndsey Stonebridge/John Phillips, Reading Melanie Klein (1998) p. 243n
- ^ Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (Penguin 1973) p. 72 and p. 57
- ^ Erik Berne, What Do You Say After You Say Hello? (Corgi 1975) p. 161
- ^ Akhtar, p. 124
- ^ Jo Brunas-Wagstaff, Personality: A Cognitive Approach (1998) p. 34
- ^ Harold Bloom, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2010) p. 189
- ^ Kathryn Ledbetter, Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals (2007) p. 52