ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to trace S. Freud’s thoughts on dependence both because they are extensive and because the context in which they appear is germane to, indeed forms the nucleus of, the concepts. It aims to explore two factors inherent in the genetic point of view: that the earliest differentiations of the psychic organization determine later ones; and that later differentiations contain within them the former ones from which they arose, i.e., present and past differentiations coexist. In psychic representational terms, the archaic object representations that go into super-ego formation are also the ones externalized into deity image formations. Freud’s observations suggest that civilization plays a large part in psychic structure differentiation. Freud described the framework for the concept that an actual, highly-cathected object can be given up only by internalizing the object relation, whereupon “the shadow of the object” falls upon the ego.
