ambivalence

(ăm-bĭv'ə-ləns)

1. The coexistence of opposing attitudes or feelings, such as love and hate, toward a person, object, or idea.
2. Uncertainty or indecisiveness as to which course to follow.

[German Ambivalenz : Latin ambi-, ambi- + Latin valentia, vigor (from valēns, valent-, present participle of valēre, to be strong).]

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Definition: equivocation
Antonyms: certainty, decisiveness

A state of experiencing two opposing emotions at the same time. It may be produced by being psychologically pulled in opposite directions by two significant others. For example, a coach may encourage an athlete to win at all costs, while a parent encourages the athlete to believe that taking part and developing good sporting behaviour is the most important consideration.

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.

For Freud the term, in its most general sense, designated the presence in a subject of a pair of opposed impulses of the same intensity; most frequently this involved the opposition between love and hate, which was often expressed in obsessional neuroses and melancholy. In 1915, in his metapsychological writings, he added that it was the loss of the love object that, through regression, caused the conflict of ambivalence to appear. In 1920 Karl Abraham emphasized the intensity of the sadistic fantasy associated with urinary and digestive functions. In 1924 he extended and transformed the Freudian schema of the evolution of the libido into a complete picture of the development of the relation to the object along two lines: the partial or total nature of the investment in the object, and ambivalence. The precocious oral stage of sucking is preambivalent, neither love nor hate are felt toward the object. There follow four ambivalent phases: the late oral stage, which is cannibalistic and seeks the total incorporation of the object, the precocious anal-sadistic stage, which seeks the expulsion and destruction of the object, the late anal-sadistic stage, which seeks its conservation and domination, and finally the precocious-phallic genital stage. The final genital phase of love towards a complete object is postambivalent.

Freud integrated Abraham's contributions in the thirty-second of his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1933a). Within the oedipal conflict ambivalence is resolved as a neurotic symptom, either through a reaction formation or through displacement (1926d). Reformulated in the second theory of instincts, ambivalence becomes part of the fundamental instinctual dualism: life instinct/death instinct.

For Melanie Klein ambivalence was key in formulating a theory of depression. The interplay of introjection and projection, the dialectic of good and bad objects, and depressive anxiety, signaling the fear of destroying the maternal object, are the apparent manifestations of the conflict of ambivalence. Together they constitute the ego and work toward resolving the oedipal conflict.

For Paul-Claude Racamier (1976), while melancholy is hyperambivalent in that it results from an intense struggle between love and hate, schizophrenia must be considered as a fundamentally antiambivalent process, where "contrary impulses . . . radically split, fuse separately in a nearly pure state, presenting themselves alternately to the same object or simultaneously to partial objects that are always distinct and divided."

Bibliography

Abraham, Karl. (1927). A short history of the development of the libido. In Selected papers of Karl Abraham (Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1924)

Bleuler, Eugen. (1952), Dementia praecox (Joseph Zinkin, Trans). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1911)

Freud, Sigmund. (1909d). Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. SE, 10: 151-318.

——. (1912-13a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1-161.

——. (1926d [1925]). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety. SE, 20: 75-172.

——. (1933a [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 22: 1-182.

Klein, Melanie. (1975). A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. In The writings of Melanie Klein. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 16 (1975), 145-174.) ——. (1975). The Oedipus complex in the light of early anxieties. In The writings of Melanie Klein. London: Hogarth Press, 1975. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 26 (1945), 11-33.)

Racamier, Paul-Claude. (1976). L'interprétation psychanalytique des schizophrénies. In Encyclopédie médico-chirurgicale. Paris: EMC.

Further Reading

Benedek, Therese. (1977). Ambivalence, passion and love. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 25, 53-80.

Eissler, Kurt R. (1971). Death drive, ambivalence, and narcissism. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 26, 25-78.

Parens, Henri. (1979). Ambivalence: drives, symbiosis—separation-individuation process. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 34, 385-420.

Schwartz, Charlotte (1989). Ambivalence: relation to narcissism and superego development. Psychoanalytic Review, 76, 511-527.

—VICTOR SOUFFIR

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Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous, conflicting feelings toward a person or thing.^[1] Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having thoughts and/or emotions of both positive and negative valence toward someone or something. A common example of ambivalence is the feeling of both love and hate for a person. The term also refers to situations where "mixed feelings" of a more general sort are experienced, or where a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness concerning something. The expressions "cold feet" and "sitting on the fence" are often used to describe the feeling of ambivalence.

Ambivalence is experienced as psychologically unpleasant when the positive and negative aspects of a subject are both present in a person's mind at the same time. This state can lead to avoidance or procrastination, or to deliberate attempts to resolve the ambivalence. When the situation does not require a decision to be made, people experience less discomfort even when feeling ambivalent.^[2]

Contents 1 In psychoanalysis 2 See also 3 References 4 External links

In psychoanalysis

In psychoanalysis, the concept of ambivalence (introduced by Bleuler in 1911) refers to an underlying emotional attitude in which the co-existing contradictory impulses (usually love and hate) derive from a common source and are thus held to be interdependent. Moreover, when the term is used in this psychoanalytic sense, it would not usually be expected that the person embodying ambivalence would actually feel both of the two contradictory emotions as such. With the exception of cases of obsessional neurosis, one or other of the conflicting sides is usually repressed. Thus, for example, an analysand's love for his father might be quite consciously experienced and openly expressed – while his 'hate' for the same object might be heavily repressed and only indirectly expressed, and thus only revealed in analysis.

Another relevant distinction is that whereas the psychoanalytic notion of 'ambivalence' sees it as engendered by all neurotic conflict, a person's everyday 'mixed feelings' may easily be based on a quite realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the thing being considered.

See also

• Approach-avoidance conflict
• Cognitive dissonance

References

1. ^ Webster's New World Collegiate Dictionary, 3rd Edition.
2. ^ Van Harreveld, F., van der Pligt, J., & de Liver, Y. (2009). The agony of ambivalence and ways to resolve it: Introducing the MAID model. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13, 45-61.

External links

Look up ambivalence in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Ambivalence and Psychology

v d e Emotions (list) Emotions Adoration · Affection · Agony · Awe · Amusement · Anger · Anguish · Annoyance · Anxiety · Arousal · Attraction · Caring · Compassion · Contempt · Contentment · Defeat · Dejection · Depression · Desire · Despair · Disappointment · Disgust · Ecstasy · Embarrassment · Empathy · Enthrallment · Enthusiasm · Envy · Euphoria · Excitement · Fear · Frustration · Grief · Guilt · Happiness · Hatred · Homesickness · Hope · Horror · Hostility · Humiliation · Hysteria · Infatuation · Insecurity · Insult · Irritation · Isolation · Jealousy · Loneliness · Longing · Love · Lust · Melancholy · Neglect · Optimism · Panic · Passion · Pity · Pleasure · Pride · Rage · Regret · Rejection · Remorse · Resentment · Sadness · Sentimentality · Shame · Shock · Sorrow · Spite · Suffering · Surprise · Sympathy · Tenseness · Thrill · Revenge · Worry · Zeal · Zest Worldviews Compatibilism · Existentialism · Fatalism · Incompatibilism · Metaphysics · Nihilism · Optimism · Pessimism · Reclusion · Social justice · Weltschmerz Source: Parrott, W. (2001), Emotions in Social Psychology, Psychology Press, Philadelphia.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - ambivalens, splittethed

Nederlands (Dutch)
ambivalentie

Français (French)
n. - ambivalence

Deutsch (German)
n. - Ambivalenz

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - αμφιθυμία, αμφισημία

Italiano (Italian)
ambivalenza, indecisione

Português (Portuguese)
n. - ambivalência (f) (Psicol.)

Русский (Russian)
амбивалентность, двойственность

Español (Spanish)
n. - ambivalencia

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - ambivalens

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
矛盾心理, 举棋不定, 犹豫

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 矛盾心理, 舉棋不定, 猶豫

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 반대 감정 양립

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 両面価値

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) تكافؤ الطرفين‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮דו-ערכיות, קיום רגשות מנוגדים, אמביוואלנטיות‬

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