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The term '[[ambivalence]]' is used in [[psychoanalysis]] to describe the simultaneous existence of contradictory feelings towards a single [[object]].
In his discussion of the '[[Rat Man]]' case, [[Freud]] speaks of a battle between [[love]] and [[hate]].
The same person is the [[object]] of both emotions.
For [[Freud]], [[ambivalence]] stems from the basic [[bisexuality]] of human beings and from the structures of the [[oedipus complex]], which means that the [[child]] can simultaneously [[love]] and [[hate]] its parents.
Ambivalence is the simultaneous presence of conflicting feelings and tendencies with respect to an object. During the winter meeting of Swiss psychiatrists in Berne on November 26-27, 1910, Paul Eugen Bleuler described, with respect to schizophrenia, the simultaneous existence of contradictory feelings toward an object or person and, with respect to actions, the insoluble concurrence of two tendencies, such as eating and not eating. In "The Rat Man" (1909d) Freud had already indicated that the opposition between love and hate for the object could explain the particular features of obsessive thought (doubt, compulsion). In Totem and Taboo (1912-13a) he adopted the term "ambivalence" proposed by Bleuler in the text of his conference published in 1911 in the Zentralblatt.
