The co-existence of contradictory feelings or impulses toward the same object. Freud, Sigmund adapted the term from Eugen Bleuler’s groundbreaking work on schizophrenia, Dementia praecox oder der Gruppe der Schizophrenien (1911), translated as Dementia praecox or the group of schizophrenias (1950), to account for a commonly experienced problem in the transference process known as resistance. Freud noted that in some cases, the analysand’s affection for their analyst is also the reason they do not trust them and are unable to establish a proper therapeutic relationship. Ambivalence is also exhibited in those stages of sexual development when the libidinal and destructive tendencies toward an object operate side by side, as in the sadistic phases. object relations theory, especially child psychoanalyst Klein, Melanie, make extensive use of the concept to theorize the genesis of the mature ego. Klein theorizes that the child perceives every object ambivalently because this is what their experience teaches---the breast does not always produce milk, so it is at once a good object and a bad object. How the child deals with this will determine what kind of an adult they turn out to be. In Postcolonial Studies ambivalence has been used by critics like Bhabha, Homi to account for the difficult situation of the subaltern subject torn between the material benefits colonization sometimes brings (e.g., jobs in colonial administration) and the crushing weight of the loss of national sovereignty.