Abstract
Separation, separation anxiety and separation-individuation are often used words of psychoanalytic vocabulary. Most often, they evoke associations with Margaret Mahler's well-known theory of psychological birth, which was formulated in the early 1970s (Mahler, Pine and Bergmann, 1975), but the topic of separation is much older in psychoanalysis.
Even before the end of the 19th century, Freud was aware of the importance of the child's early relations with the mother for the release of instinctive tension, as well as the child's helplessness, if the child was to obtain satisfaction without the mother's help. Certain references in this regard are in the letters to Fliess and also in his Project of Scientific Psychology (1895).
According to him, the loss of an object or separation from it is at the birth of a wish. The idea of a lost object is re-cast in its mental representation and allows for halurinatory satisfaction of desires.
In Negation in 1925, Freud notes that searching for a new object also involves rediscovering the original lost object.