ABSTRACT
The following decade sees Freud continuing to wrestle with these issues. He gradually elaborates a more sophisticated internal world as he first offers a new instinct theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and then assembles his structural model of the mind in The Ego and the Id. The latter text, particularly Part III, is central to this second Freud chapter, highlighting how the mechanisms of internalization bring into being not only the post-oedipal superego but even the pre-oedipal ego itself. Freud’s only sustained theoretical treatment of identification in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (written in the gap between the two aforementioned books) is discussed, as is the last-named of the clinical concepts in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. This revision and extension of Freud’s ideas about anxiety to all the developmental stages and phases of life reinforces its genetic proximity to depression and the extent to which issues of loss and separation—that is, all situations either requiring mourning or invoking anticipatory concern—are at the heart of these discomforting mental states. This leads to a consideration of whether both depression and anxiety might be amenable to relief or alleviation by way of digestive therapeutic processes.
