View source for Fixation (psychology)

'''Fixation''': 'concept originated by [[Sigmund Freud]] (1905a) to denote the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits'<ref>Salman Akhtar, ''Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis'' (London 2009) p. 112</ref>. Subsequently '"Fixation" acquired a broader connotation. With the development of theory of libidinal stages...the term came to mean a persistent attachment, not only to the specific instinctual aims of a particular era, but, instead, to the entire complex of self and object relation'<ref>Akhtar, p. 112</ref> at that time.

More generally, it is the state in which an individual becomes obsessed with an attachment to another person, being or object (in human [[psychology]]): 'A strong attachment to a person or thing, especially such an attachment formed in childhood or infancy and manifested in immature or neurotic behavior that persists throughout life'<ref>[http://www.answers.com/topic/fixation Fixation]</ref>.

==Freud and Fixation==

In ''Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality''(1905a), Freud distinguished 'fixations of preliminary sexual aims...as in the case of ''voyeurs'' from the 'after-effects of infantile object-choice...an incestuous fixation of his [or her] libido'<ref>Sigmund Freud, ''On Sexuality'' (Penguin Freud Library 7) p. 68-70 and p. 151</ref>. 

Sigmund Freud theorized that some humans may develop psychological fixation due to:
#A lack of proper gratification during one of the [[Psychosexual development|psychosexual stages of development]], or
#Receiving a strong impression from one of these stages, in which case the person's personality would reflect that stage throughout adult life. He also assumed that 'these early impressions of sexual life are characterized by an increased ''pertinacity'' or ''susceptibilty to fixation'' in persons who are later to become neurotics or perverts'<ref>Freud, ''Sexuality'' p. 167</ref>.
#'An excessively strong manifestation of these instincts at a very early age [which] leads to a kind of partial ''fixation'', which then constitutes a weak point in the structure of the sexual function'<ref>Sigmund Freud, ''Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis'' (Penguin 1995) p. 73</ref>.

Whether a particularly obsessive attachment is a fixation or a defensible expression of [[love]] is at times debatable. Fixation to intangibles (i.e., ideas, ideologies, etc.) can also occur. The obsessive factor is also found in symptoms pertaining to [[obsessive compulsive disorder]], which psychoanalysts linked to 'pregenital fixations' whether caused by 'an alternation of unusual gratifications and unusual frustrations...[or] a concurrence of instinctual gratifications with security gratifications'<ref>Otto Fenichel, ''The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis'' (London 1946) p. 305</ref>.

As Freud's thought developed, so too did 'the notion of a succession of possible "fixation points"' during development, and of 'the relation between this succession of fixation points and the choice of neurosis'<ref>Angela Richards, "Editor's Note", Sigmund Freud, ''On Psychopathology'' (Penguin Freud Library 10) p. 132</ref>. However he continued to view fixation as 'the manifestation of very early linkages - linkages which it is hard to resolve - between instincts and impressions and the objects involved in those impressions'<ref>Freud, ''Psychopathology'' p. 137-8</ref>.

Fixation has been compared to the way 'if you walk in front of a little chick at a certain time in the chick's life he'll follow you...there's a particular time when he gets "set"'<ref>Janet Malcolm, ''Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession'' (London 1988) p. 158</ref>. Such 'filial imprinting...at a particular stage early in life...a "sensitive period" in development'<ref>Richard L. Gregory ed, ''The Oxford Companion to the Mind'' (Oxford 1987) p. 356</ref> might seem a ready explanation for the human phenomenon of fixation. Freud, however, 'wanted to loosen, not tighten, the link between libido and its objects'<ref>Stephen A. Mitchell, ''Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis'' (1988) p. 78</ref>, and always looked for more specific causes for any given (perverse or neurotic) fixation.

==Post-Freudians and Fixation==

'For [[Melanie Klein]], the fixing of the libido at a given stage is already an ''effect'' of the pathological process'<ref>C. Geissmann-Chambon/P. Geissmann, ''A History of Child Psychoanalysis'' (Routledge 1998) p. 129</ref>. She considered that 'a fixation that leads to a symptom was already on the way to [[sublimation]] but was cut off from it by [[repression]]'<ref>Lyndsey Stonebridge/John Phillips, ''Reading Melanie Klein'' (1998) p. 243n</ref>.

[[Erik H. Erikson]] distinguished two variants in stage-fixation - that of "zone" and of "mode". Thus at the oral stage there may be 'a ''zone'' fixation, i.e., the individual holds on to ''oral '' pleasures', or there may be 'a ''mode'' fixation...he always wants to ''get'' whether by mouth and senses, or by other apertures, receptors, or behaviours. This kind of fixation will later be carried over to other zones'<ref>Erik H. Erikson, ''Childhood and Society'' (Penguin 1973) p. 72</ref>. He instanced the man who 'may eagerly absorb the "milk of wisdom" where he once desired more tangible fluids from more sensuous containers'<ref>Erikson, p. 57</ref>. His analysand, [[Eric Berne]] developed his insight further as part of [[Transactional analysis]], suggesting that 'particular games and scripts, and their accompanying physical symptoms, are based in appropriate zones and modes'<ref>Erik Berne, ''What Do You Say After You Say Hello?'' (Corgi 1975) p. 161</ref>.

[[Heinz Kohut]] in his exploration of 'the grandiose self...regards it as a fixation upon a normal structure of childhood'<ref>Akhtar, p. 124</ref>.

'The basic idea that people can become fixated in their development has had an important influence on many post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories of criminality, sexual deviancy and aggression'<ref>Jo Brunas-Wagstaff, ''Personality: A Cognitive Approach'' (1998) p. 34</ref>.

==Fixation, Transference and Cure==

In the course of analysis, 'a new fixation is thereby established...The original fixation has become a transference fixation'<ref>Bruce Fink, ''A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis'' (harvard 1999) p. 53</ref>; but the two fixations may be very different in nature. 'Suppose we succeeded in bringing a case to a favourable conclusion by setting up and then resolving a strong father-transference to the doctor. It would not be correct to conclude that the patient had suffered previously from a similar unconscious attachment of his libido to his father'<ref>Sigmund Freud, ''Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis'' (Penguin Freud Library 1) p. 509</ref>: the original fixation may have been quite different from a [[Father complex|father-complex]], and 'the patient's libido was directed to it from other positions'<ref>Freud, ''Introductory Lectures'' p. 509</ref>.

==Cultural examples==

[[Tennyson]] has been claimed to have a '[[Romanticism|romantic]] fixation..."a psychic fixation upon the days that are no more"'<ref>Kathryn Ledbetter, ''Tennyson and Victorian Periodicals'' (2007) p. 52</ref>.

[[Harold Bloom]] states that ' ''[[Christabel (poem)|Christabel]]''...uses witchcraft as a metaphor for psychological fixation'<ref>Harold Bloom, ''Samuel Taylor Coleridge'' (2010) p. 189</ref>.

''[[The Robbers]]'' is driven by a 'psychic fixation on an all too powerful father figure'<ref>W. Hortmann/M. Hamburger, ''Shakespeare on the German Stage'' (1998) p. 269</ref>.

==References==
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