We explain what something ambivalent is, the origin of the term and how psychoanalysis understands it. Also, examples in sentences.
What is something ambivalent?
When we say that something is ambivalent, or that there is ambivalence, we are referring to a situation, an element or an idea regarding which there are two interpretations, two values or two tendencies, normally opposed to each other, at the same time.
For example, we can have ambivalent feelings about a person, if we feel that we love and hate them at the same time, without either of the two feelings dominating the other in the long run.
The word ambivalence comes from Latin both ("Both") and courage ("Courage" or "strength"). It was coined at the beginning of the 20th century by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuer (1857-1939), who proposed it to describe the complex relationships in which two opposing and irreconcilable emotional tendencies appear at the same time with respect to the same object.
This term was welcomed by psychoanalysis, and praised by Sigmund Freud himself. In the field of psychoanalysis, however, it is understood that in these situations of affective ambivalence (also called ambithymia), the two emotions are not usually presented in the same way, but one of the two is more manifest while the other is repressed.
However, we can use the term ambivalent in many other fields of life, different from the psychological one. Always, of course, with the sense of the simultaneous presence of two different values at the same time, that is, as more or less synonymous of ambiguity, doubt, indeterminacy or confusion. Their antonyms they are univalent, univocal, explicit, unidirectional.
Examples of sentences with "ambivalent"
Here are some examples of the use of this word, to be able to appreciate it in its possible contexts:
- "The results of the consumer survey are ambivalent."
- "Candidate, so much political ambivalence will make you look suspicious."
- "That dismissal letter left him in an ambivalent situation: he felt a great relief and at the same time a deep fear."
- "I don't know if Lorena likes me, because she always sends me ambivalent signals."