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of caretaking-as necessarily of a book
ABSTRACT
As I have elaborated in greater detail elsewhere (Schmidt-Hellerau, 2001; 2002; 2003; 2005), it is quite an amazing fact that self-preservation, man's struggle to survive, has been kept offs hore in psychoanalysis for more than a hundred years.4 In particular, because Freud changed his
drive theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), sexuality and aggression were viewed as the two basic motivating factors in mentaliife, whereas any notion of self-preservation was mingled with and then eclipsed by the sexual drives. However, we all are literally driven to survive. In the first months of life, we might think of the infant's self-preservative strivings as simply related to all the issues of physical weIl-being. Yet from the beginning, these basic needs to be taken care of (to be nursed, warm, dry and clean; to be able to breathe, digest and defecate; to feel free of pain and protected against any assault) necessarily include an object that does the caretaking. Thus the strivings of a self-preservative drive lead to building up structures in the infant's mind, representations of the caretaking dyad, within which physical and relational pleasures and meanings are combined (the pleasure of need-relief with the pleasure of the accompanying playful interactions between mother and child).
