Ambivalence
Ambivalence is a psychoanalytic concept for the coexistence of opposing feelings, wishes, or attitudes toward the same person, object, or situation. It helps describe why attachment can contain love and hostility, why a patient may seek and resist treatment at once, and why decisions can remain emotionally charged even when they appear rational. In psychoanalysis, ambivalence is not simply indecision; it is a form of conflict that may be conscious, unconscious, or expressed through symptoms, actions, and relationships.
Definition and scope
In ordinary language, ambivalence often means having mixed feelings. Psychoanalytic usage gives the term a more precise emphasis: contradictory tendencies are directed toward a common object or aim. The object may be another person, an institution, an activity, a memory, or the self. Love and hate are the most familiar pair, but dependence and resentment, admiration and envy, or the wish for closeness and the fear of intrusion can also form an ambivalent configuration.
Ambivalent feelings do not have to be equally strong or fully conscious. One tendency may be openly acknowledged while the other appears indirectly in a symptom, a sudden change of attitude, a dream, a bodily complaint, or a repeated relational pattern. The conflict may also shift over time. A person can feel affection in one moment and hostility in another while still remaining tied to the same object. Psychoanalytic interpretation asks how these positions are connected, defended against, and represented rather than treating contradiction as evidence of insincerity.
The concept is distinct from simple uncertainty. Indecision concerns difficulty choosing, whereas ambivalence concerns the conflict between opposed meanings, wishes, or affects that make a choice difficult. It is also distinct from indifference: an ambivalent relationship is usually highly invested, even when the investment is experienced as irritation, avoidance, or emotional numbness. The word therefore refers to a dynamic relation, not merely to an unpleasant feeling.
Historical formation
The modern psychological use of ambivalence is associated with the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who used the term in the early twentieth century. In his account of schizophrenia, published in 1911, ambivalence was one of the “four As” used to describe primary features of the disorder, alongside disturbances of association, affect, and autistic thinking. Bleuler’s classification gave the term a psychiatric history, but psychoanalytic writers soon used it in a broader way to describe conflict in ordinary psychic life as well as in clinical states.
Sigmund Freud adopted ambivalence as a way of naming the simultaneous operation of opposing currents. His discussions of obsessional neurosis, the transference, and mourning and melancholia connected ambivalence to the unconscious, to the persistence of attachment, and to the return of conflict in symptoms. Freud’s use did not mean that every mixed feeling indicated schizophrenia or a specific disorder. Instead, the term became part of a general psychoanalytic vocabulary for understanding how affection and hostility can remain bound to one another.
This history also explains why the concept has more than one register. In Bleuler, it belonged to a descriptive psychiatry of thought, feeling, and will. In Freud, it became part of a theory of conflict, repression, object choice, and the unconscious. Contemporary psychodynamic writing generally preserves the latter emphasis while treating ambivalence as a dimension of relationships and mental life rather than as a diagnosis by itself.
Ambivalence in Freud’s clinical theory
For Freud, a relationship may be organized by opposing investments that cannot be brought together without anxiety. In obsessional neurosis, love and hate can become especially visible as doubt, hesitation, compulsive checking, or self-reproach. The conflict is not simply a conscious argument between two opinions. It can involve wishes that have been repressed, moral demands that intensify hostility, and defensive procedures that keep one side of the conflict from being recognized.
Ambivalence is also central to the analytic relationship. A patient may want to be understood and fear what understanding could reveal; may idealize the analyst and resent dependence; or may experience interpretation as both relief and intrusion. Freud’s account of the transference treated positive and negative feelings as clinically significant currents. Either current can support resistance when it protects the patient from a painful conflict. The task is not to reward affection or suppress hostility, but to study how both are organized in the treatment.
In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud linked ambivalence to the fate of a lost love object. The loss can bring opposed feelings into sharper conflict, especially when attachment and hostility had already been intertwined. In melancholia, he proposed that love may maintain an identification with the lost object while hostile impulses turn against the ego. This formulation helped establish ambivalence as a key element in psychoanalytic accounts of guilt, self-accusation, and complicated mourning, although it should not be used as a complete explanation of every depressive experience.
Object relations and the depressive position
Later object relations theory placed ambivalence at the center of the movement from divided to more integrated experiences of an object. In the Kleinian account, early anxieties may be managed through splitting, so that the loved and hated aspects of a caregiver are experienced as belonging to separate part-objects. As the infant becomes able to recognize a whole object, love and aggression are felt as directed toward the same person. This recognition is emotionally difficult because it brings concern, guilt, sadness, and the wish to repair alongside love.
This configuration is described through the depressive position. The term does not mean a permanent mood or a psychiatric diagnosis. It refers to a psychic organization in which the subject can perceive the other as both gratifying and frustrating, and can experience responsibility for destructive wishes without reducing the object to a purely good or purely bad figure. Ambivalence is therefore not simply a failure to decide. It can mark an effort to tolerate complexity and to preserve attachment while acknowledging aggression.
Clinical relevance
In clinical work, ambivalence may appear in the patient’s account of a partner, family member, workplace, belief, or life decision. It can also appear in the patient’s relation to change itself. A person may ask for help while arranging circumstances that make help difficult, or may repeatedly approach and withdraw from an important relationship. Such patterns should not be assumed to have one meaning. They may express fear, loyalty, shame, conflict about dependence, or an expectation that closeness will lead to injury.
Within psychoanalysis, the analyst listens for shifts in language, omissions, repetitions, dreams, enactments, and changes in the transference. Interpretation can make the opposing tendencies more thinkable, but it does not require an immediate resolution. The aim is often to increase the capacity to represent a conflict without acting it out or splitting one side off. A more integrated position may allow affection and anger to be recognized together, making room for mourning, responsibility, negotiation, and repair.
Interpretive value and limits
Ambivalence is useful because it prevents relationships and symptoms from being reduced to a single motive. It can connect a person’s conscious account with less accessible wishes and show why an apparently irrational pattern may be emotionally organized. At the same time, the concept is not a license to presume that every feeling conceals its opposite. An analyst can impose ambivalence where there is ordinary uncertainty, justified caution, social pressure, or a genuine change of mind. Interpretation must remain attentive to context, history, language, and the patient’s own associations.
The psychoanalytic meaning of ambivalence also differs from uses of the term in contemporary psychology, psychiatry, and everyday speech. Those fields may measure subjective conflict, decisional difficulty, or inconsistent attitudes without assuming an unconscious object relation. A careful account therefore identifies which sense is being used. In psychoanalysis, ambivalence names a conflict of investment that can shape desire, defense, attachment, mourning, and the therapeutic relationship.
References:
- Bleuler, Eugen. Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias (1911; English translation, 1950).
- Freud, Sigmund. Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 10.
- Freud, Sigmund. The Dynamics of Transference (1912), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12.
- Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. English text at the Internet Archive.
- Klein, Melanie. A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States (1935), in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945.
Official link: Melanie Klein Trust: Depressive position, an institutional resource on the related Kleinian account of whole-object integration, love, hate, and concern for the other.
