Ambivalence

Ambivalence

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...