The Seba library treats Object Choice in 9 passages, across 3 authors (including Freud, Sigmund, Beebe, John, Hillman, James).
the process is diphasic, that is, that it occurs in two waves… The resultants of infantile object-choice are carried over into the later period. They either persist as such or are revived at the actual time of puberty.
Freud establishes the foundational structural claim that object-choice is diphasic, with infantile cathexes persisting as the ‘affectionate current’ that shapes all subsequent adult erotic life.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis
the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices… varying degrees of capacity for resistance, which decide the extent to which a person’s character fends off or accepts the influences of the history of his erotic object-choices.
Freud theorizes that character formation is the direct product of relinquished object-cathexes, making the ego itself the archive of prior object-choices.
, The Ego and the Id, 1923thesis
The infantile object-choice was but a feeble venture in play, as it were, but it laid down the direction for the object-choice of puberty… a son, the task consists in releasing his libidinal desires from his mother, in order to employ them in the quest of an external love-object in reality.
Freud argues that infantile object-choice sets the directional template for pubertal libido, and that psychological maturation requires detachment from original incestuous objects.
, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1917thesis
One of the tasks implicit in object-choice is that it should find its way to the opposite sex… Often enough the first impulses after puberty go astray, though without any permanent harm resulting.
Freud frames the movement toward heterosexual object-choice as a developmental task rather than a given, acknowledging that early post-pubertal impulses frequently misfire without pathological consequence.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis
Diphasic choice of object, 66 Diphasic onset of sexuality, 100
The index entry confirms the structural centrality of the diphasic schema within Freud’s Three Essays, treating object-choice as a formally indexed organizing concept of the work.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905supporting
The paper that Freud presented… drew on a typology that Freud had begun elaborating in ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’ (1908/1959) and ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’ (1910/1957).
Beebe situates Freud’s explicit papers on object-choice within a broader typological project, linking erotic object-selection to characterological and nosological classification.
, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017supporting
He had never developed any of the feeling towards women that would have been natural at his age with his attractive personality. He had been engaged to a handsome, well-connected girl, but she had broken off the engagement.
The clinical vignette illustrates a failure of heterosexual object-choice, with libido remaining fixed on a same-sex object from school-days — a case study in arrested re-direction at puberty.
, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1917supporting
‘Love maps’ are one of the ways psychology tries to account for the mysteries of being seized by love. You grow up in a parental environment where certain features bring pleasure… These characteristics form a schema that you fall for when a person crosses your path.
Hillman presents the ‘love map’ concept as a post-Freudian reformulation of object-choice, retaining the idea of a pre-formed erotic template while opening it toward archetypal and cross-cultural dimensions.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
One of the clearest indications that a child will later become neurotic is to be seen in an insatiable demand for his parents’ affection.
Freud links excessive parental attachment — the precondition for pathological object-choice — to neurotic disposition, connecting early erotic demands to later clinical outcomes.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905aside