A Non-Foundational Therapy

Abstract

Understanding desire, wishing and love are central to therapeutic action. Freud tried to explain them. He imagined desire to be based on the initial helplessness of human beings. The hungry baby is in a state of tension, but is incapable of relieving it by itself, so needs outside help. When it gets it, the tension is relieved and it experiences satisfaction. After this, when it experiences tension, the image of the object that produced satisfaction, usually the breast, is hallucinated. So from henceforth, whenever a need arises there will be a psychical impulse that seeks to re-establish the situation of the original satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is a wish and the reappearance of the perception is its fulfilment. ‘Thus the aim of this first psychical activity was to produce a “perceptual identity” (i.e. something perceptually identical with the “experience of satisfaction”)’ (Freud 1900, pp. 565–6).