ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud made use of the category "preliminary stages" quite often. He used it to indicate that love, hate, and ambivalence did not exist from the very beginning; that they were developmental achievements that became possible as the child approached the oedipal stage. Freud, ever so slightly, accommodated Karl Abraham and others, without giving up his position: to concede that sadistic impulses occurred in isolation does not challenge the "supremacy" of sadism in the anal phase which Freud held on to in An Outline. In "The Pregenital Phase", Abraham had described oral destructive impulses. But he did so with less determination and conviction than Starcke, and he did not emphasise quite as vigorously as Starcke did the impulses were part of normal development.
