The Seba library treats Libidinal Ego in 6 passages, across 3 authors (including Flores, Philip J, Kalsched, Donald, Freud, Sigmund).
a repressed libidinal ego (good self) attached to the exciting libidinal object (good object), and (C) a repressed antilibidinal ego (bad self) attached to the rejecting antilibidinal ego (bad object).
This passage provides the most explicit structural definition of the libidinal ego within Fairbairn’s tripartite schema, identifying it as the repressed ‘good self’ bound to the exciting object.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis
it is to the realm of these bad objects, rather than to the realm of the super-ego that the ultimate origin of all psychopathological developments is to be traced; for if a True Mass is being celebrated in the chancel, a Black Mass is being celebrated in the crypt.
Kalsched cites Fairbairn’s argument that internalized bad objects — the structural partners of the libidinal ego — are the foundational source of psychopathology, superseding the superego in etiological primacy.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting
Narcissistic or ego-libido seems to be the great reservoir from which the object-cathexes are sent out and into which they are withdrawn once more; the narcissistic libidinal cathexis of the ego is the original state of things.
Freud’s formulation of ego-libido as the primary reservoir of libidinal energy provides the pre-Fairbairnian theoretical ground from which the concept of a specifically ‘libidinal ego’ would later be differentiated.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905supporting
the ego, having gained control over the libido by means of identification, is punished for doing so by the super-ego through the instrumentality of the aggressiveness which was mixed with the libido.
Freud’s account of the ego’s embattled relationship with libidinal energy and the superego’s punitive function anticipates the structural tensions that Fairbairn would later recast through the libidinal ego construct.
, The Ego and the Id, 1923supporting
there existed in the mind—whether in the ego or in the id—a displaceable energy, which, neutral in itself, can
Freud’s notion of displaceable, neutralizable libidinal energy within the ego establishes the energic framework that Fairbairn’s object-relational account would fundamentally revise in positing the libidinal ego.
, The Ego and the Id, 1923aside
A cardinal point in this advance was the introduction of the concept of narcissism, i.e. the idea that libido cathect
Freud identifies narcissism as pivotal to understanding the ego’s libidinal cathexis, a theoretical moment that contextualizes the subsequent object-relational reformulations in which the libidinal ego is embedded.
, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930aside