The child makes vain attempts to restore relationships, and fights anxiety with various active means, such as agitation, artificial cheerfulness, insomnia or night terrors.

After hyperactivity and fearfulness have failed to return the child to the loving and caring attitude of the mother, the Ego uses a series of defenses of a different kind. This is disinvestment of the maternal object and unconscious identification with the dead mother. Affective disinvestment is the mental murder of an object, committed without hatred. It is clear that maternal sadness prohibits any occurrence of even a small amount of hatred. A child’s anger can cause damage to his mother, and he does not get angry, he stops feeling her. The mother, whose image her son or daughter keeps in her soul, seems to “disconnect” from the child’s emotional life. The only means of restoring closeness with the mother is identification (identification) with her. This allows the child to replace the impossible possession of an object: he becomes himself. Identification is obviously unconscious.

Their symptoms are organized around emptiness and have 3 goals:

a) keep the Self alive through 3 maneuvers:
1. This is the development of secondary hatred, colored by manic sadism anal positions, where we are talking about dominating an object, desecrating it, taking revenge on it, etc.

2.Another protection is auto-erotic arousal. It consists of seeking pure sensual pleasure, without tenderness, without feelings for the object (another person). There is a premature dissociation between body and soul, between sensuality and tenderness, and a blockade of love. He needs another person in order to trigger the isolated pleasure of one or several erogenous zones, and not to experience a merger in the feeling of love.

3. Finally, and most importantly, the search for lost meaning triggers premature development of imagination and intelligence. The child went through the cruel experience of being dependent on his mother’s mood swings. From now on he will devote his efforts to guessing or anticipating.

b) Revive a dead mother, interest her, entertain her, make her smile (especially in childhood). Different means are used for this: such people can be funny, or they try to study well in order to interest her. They try to entertain all the objects with which they enter into relationships: they find themselves unhappy and depressed wives and husbands. If the partner’s depression goes away, he will leave him and look for other unfortunate people.

c) Compete with the object of maternal grief in a premature false triangulation with an unknown object.

The loss of meaning experienced by a child near a sad mother pushes him to search for a scapegoat responsible for the mother’s gloomy mood. The father is appointed to this role. The unknown object of grief and the father then condense, forming an early Oedipus complex in the child. A situation associated with a loss of meaning entails the opening of a second front of defense.

These children sing lullabies to themselves, which gives impetus to the development of intelligence. Often, they are good students. This is otherwise called “coping with a traumatic situation” (obsessive imagination and thinking). This happens to all people exposed to post-traumatic stress. But this attempt at coping (sublimation) is doomed to failure. The failure is that no matter how well they study and create, they remain extremely vulnerable in their love life. Each of their loves leads to an inability to create or learn. On the other hand, creativity is possible when there is a “desert” in love (ascetic creators). Any attempt to fall in love destroys it. Relationships with another person lead to inevitable disappointment and return to familiar feelings of failure and powerlessness. This is experienced by the patient as an inability to maintain long-term object relationships, to withstand the gradual increase in deep personal involvement, and concern for another. In both careers, they encounter constant failures and they have the feeling that a curse hangs over them, which leads them to a psychoanalyst. This curse is that the mother “keeps dying” and keeping them captive. The mental pain they experience does not allow them to enjoy either love or hate. There is not even masochistic pleasure. Relationships with objects: neither love, nor hate (lack). Their I is neither inside nor outside. They cannot experience affection for a long time, it is impossible to hold an object inside for a long time, since their heart is occupied by the “dead mother” (The Snow Queen for Kai) You can only feel a feeling of powerlessness.

Working with such patients, I realized that I remained deaf to some features of their speech. Behind the eternal complaints about the mother’s malice, her lack of understanding or severity, one could clearly discern the protective meaning of these conversations against strong homosexuality, female homosexuality in both sexes, since in a boy this is how the feminine part of the personality is expressed, often in search of paternal compensation (both the boy and the girl expect from their father that tenderness and love that they did not receive from their mother - gentle touches and strokes, “love without penetration”). My deafness concerned the fact that behind the complaints about my mother's actions, the shadow of her absence loomed. The complaints related to the mother, who was self-absorbed, unavailable, unresponsive, but always sad. She remained indifferent even when she reproached the child. Her gaze, the tone of her voice, her smell, the memory of her affection - everything is buried, in the place of the mother in the inner reality of the child there is a gaping hole.

The child is identified not with the mother, but with the hole. As soon as a new object is chosen to fill this void, a hallucination suddenly appears, an affective trace of the dead mother.

Frozen love and its vicissitudes: breasts, Oedipus complex, primal scene

Another aspect of this complex is “frozen love”. This comes to mind when people complain about internal cold: coldness of body, soul. This is their own opinion about the ability to love. It seems to them that their ability to love is preserved, but there is no suitable person worthy of their love. But, during therapy, it is discovered that as soon as such a person appears who loves them, they run away from him “like the devil from incense” and find themselves unattainable. The psychoanalyst's attempts to talk about the primary object (mother) cause bewilderment in the patient, but at the same time, the analyst feels that the patient is not capable of love. During the analysis, the patient's condition may deteriorate. Protective sexualization disappears: “masturbating” becomes difficult (this corresponds to early childhood analism and other ways of obtaining sensual pregenital pleasure). “Wonderful” sexual achievements cease, a series of lovers disappears. All this no longer arouses interest and it turns out that the patient has no sex life. We are not talking about a loss of sexual appetite: he simply no longer wants anyone, and the previous stimulation of erogenous zones does not arouse interest. Abundant, scattered, varied, fleeting sex life no longer brings any satisfaction.

Stopped in their capacity to love, subjects under the dominion of the dead mother can no longer strive for anything other than autonomy. They are prohibited from sharing it with anyone. At first they fled from loneliness, and now they are looking for it. The subject is “making a nest” for himself. He becomes his own mother, but remains a prisoner of his survival strategy.

This cold core (frozen love) burns like ice and anesthetizes like ice. These are hardly just metaphors. Such patients complain that they feel cold even in hot weather. They are cold under their skin, in their bones, they feel a deadly chill piercing right through them. Outwardly, these people actually lead more or less satisfactory professional lives, get married, and have children. For a while everything seems to be okay. But over the years, professional life becomes disappointing, and marital life is accompanied by serious disturbances in the areas of love, sexuality and affective communication. At the same time, the parental function, on the contrary, is overinvested. However, children are often loved on the condition that they achieve those narcissistic goals that the parents themselves failed to achieve.

This complex does not cancel the Oedipus complex, but it is modified and more dramatic. The girl is characterized by such a fear of losing her mother's love that her father's imago remains forever uninvested. She doesn't even try to love her father. And if there is some love, then the father is painted in maternal tones and looks like a phallic mother. Often, the father actually plays the role of mother to the child when the mother is grieving. He gives what was expected from the mother. This means that he is not a real man. In the case of the boy, the imago of the phallic mother again arises, coloring the father: a weakling who could not give happiness to his mother and children. He is worthless, incapable and his dick is empty. From such an Oedipus complex there is a regression to anality, manifested in obsessions. This is often associated with anal manipulation, but this can usually only be guessed at because the patient tries to hide it.

The boy subsequently faces chaotic sexual experiences, both homosexual and heterosexual. Love for the father does not lead to positive identification with him.

Characteristic of anality is defense with the help of reality: during sessions he fills the time with a list of all the events that happened during the day, remembers all the people he met. Protection by anality allows one to escape from orality, which carries the maternal imago (always) and saves from the horror of absorption by an omnipotent object. Anality also manifests itself in an increase in interest in the life of a psychoanalyst and in the situation in his office. This increase in interest in reality is due to the fact that fantasies about a dead mother break into the subconscious and cause severe anxiety. Patients are afraid of going crazy at this time. They become psychoanalysts for everyone around them. And at the same time, such psychoanalytic interest is accompanied by disappointment in psychoanalysis. They complain about the lack of effect. Such disappointment is due to the fact that the analysis is invested by the patient narcissistically, that is, it is a luxury item or a means for personal progress. Psychoanalysis enables the patient to understand others rather than to see himself more clearly. The dead mother refuses to die a second death. Many times the psychoanalyst says to himself: “Well, this time that’s it; she’s definitely dead, this old woman; he (or she) can finally live; and I can breathe a little.” But if the most insignificant trauma happens in transference or in life, it will give the maternal imago new vitality, so to speak. She is truly a thousand-headed hydra, and every time it seems that her throat has been cut. And only one of her heads was cut off. Where is the neck of this monster?

Modern psychoanalysis, for which there is a lot of evidence, realized, however, belatedly, that if the Oedipus complex remained a necessary structural reference, the determining conditions of the Oedipus complex should not be sought in its genetic predecessors - oral, anal and phallic, viewed [moreover] from an angle realistic references (representations), since orality, anality and phallicity depend partly on real object relations, much less in generalized fantasy of their structure, like Melanie Klein, but in fantasy isomorphic to the Oedipus complex - [fantasy] of the primary scene. “I insist that the primal scene is a fantasy in order to clearly dissociate myself from Freud’s position, as stated in the case of Sergei Pankeev, where Freud seeks, for the purposes of [his] polemic with Jung, evidence of its reality. For why the first scene is so important: not because the subject was a witness to it, but precisely the opposite, namely, because it was played out in his absence.”

Only the revival of the phantasm of the first scene and its analysis (cannibalism, seduction, etc.) can melt “frozen love.” Oedipus relies on the primal scene. It doesn’t matter whether you witnessed the first scene or not, what is important is that this first scene was played out in the absence of the subject. . For the MM complex, the fantasies of the first scenes are of a capital nature, since this scene includes 2 participants. Mother, no matter how wonderful she was, could not copulate with herself. Therefore, the 3rd one appears - the father. Although all traces of the primal scene have been disinvested, repressed, they lie dormant under a bushel. Sometimes a neutral memory (the mother's attitude towards other objects) may indicate this scene. When the mother's interest in any 3rd surfaces, the psychoanalyst should always be interested in this as a projection. These projections are the revival of repressed traces of the original scene. The appearance of such objects of interest to the mother may be followed by outbursts of anger. It is important for the patient that there are objects that can bring the mother out of depression, revive her even for a moment. It doesn’t matter who, but someone who can give the mother at least a moment of pleasure and pleasure. It’s not so pleasant to find out about this (“How dare she have fun with him when I tried so hard for her!”). This is a narcissistic wound.

And there are 6 main consequences of reviving the primary scene during analysis, which can appear isolated or in groups:

1) Obsessive experience of this fantasy and hatred of objects (parental), who allowed themselves to unite and receive pleasure at the expense and to the detriment of the subject.

2) The interpretation of the first scene as sadistic, characteristic of all neurotics. The mother does not enjoy the first scene, but suffers (their mother always suffers). And if she does enjoy, it is against her will, since she is forced by her father’s violence (“They dragged me to a party and I went so as not to offend them!”).

3) Development of point 2. The mother enjoys herself and becomes a vile hypocrite, a comedian, and ceases to be like herself. Here there is already recognition of pleasure, but in an altered state of consciousness. She is blamed for this pleasure. (Typical of perverts).

4) Identification of a patient with two different imagoes - maternal (MM) and paternal. Identification with the MM, that is, the subject himself feels like this - frozen (“secret cold in the soul and fire in the blood”). Another variant of this imago is sexual arousal of a sadomasochistic nature (he himself suffers and tortures others).

Identification with the paternal imago:

A) The father is the aggressor who tortures the MM (necrophiliac who copulates with a corpse).

B) Father curing MM with sex (recovering option). This is the father-prince healing the sleeping beauty.

The patient goes through all these identifications, which provides significant psychic savings.

5) Delibidinization of the primary scene. This leads to an increase in intellectual activity, which is a consequence of the treatment of narcissism, a way of escaping from a confusing situation and a way of avoiding sexualization. The sacrifice is the lack of hope for narcissistic satisfaction. Another way of leaving is creativity. They themselves create their universe. Creation of sexual perversions (artistic creativity, scripts, etc.).

6) Rejection (denial) of the entire fantasy with a typical investment of ignorance in relation to everything related to sexual relations, while the subject combines the emptiness of a dead mother and the erasure of the [primary] scene. This ignorance is active, therefore enlightenment alone will not help here (ignorance , which actively resists). Thanks to the investment of ignorance, emptiness reigns in the subject and is established in the place of the original scene.

The fantasy of the first scene becomes the central axis of the subject's mental life and in its shadow hides the dead mother complex. This fantasy develops in two directions: forward and backward. Forward - in the direction of anticipation of the Oedipus complex (EC). But there is a danger in the case of escape to the EC that this will be a protection from the dangerous fantasies of the first scene. This is evidenced by too much hatred, homosexuality, narcissism, and the patient's reasoning will bear traces of an unprocessed primal scene.

Back - the attitude towards the breast will be the subject of a radical reinterpretation. It is in the aftereffect that the breast becomes so significant. The white grief of the dead mother refers to the chest, which in appearance seems to be loaded with destructive projections. In fact, we are talking not so much about an evil breast that is not given, but about a breast that, even when given, is an absent (and not lost) breast, consumed by longing for a relationship with the object of grief.
A breast that cannot be filled and cannot fill itself. Consequently, every reinvestment of the happy relationship with the breast that preceded the development of the dead mother complex is marked here with the sign of ephemerality, of catastrophic threat and even, dare I say it, with the sign of a false breast, carried by a false object, nursing a false baby. This happiness was a deception. “I have never been loved” becomes a new motto to which the subject clings and which he will try to confirm in his future love life (in all future love relationships). It is clear that we are dealing with impossible grief here, and that therefore the metaphorical loss of a breast becomes impossible to process psychically. Fantasies of oral cannibalism do not play a big role here, as is the case with melancholia. He is not so much afraid of being devoured as of being absorbed by the void and losing those “pathetic crumbs of the object” that remain with him.

Analysis of the transference in all these positions will allow us to find the primary happiness that preceded the appearance of the dead mother complex. This takes a lot of time, and it will be necessary to return to this complex more than once again before winning the case, that is, before white grief and its overlap with the fear of castration allow us to repeat in the transference of a happy relationship with the mother, finally alive and finally wishing for a father. This result is achieved by analyzing the narcissistic wound that the mother's grief inflicted on the child.

Transfer Features

I cannot go into too much detail about the technical implications for the analysis of those cases in which the dead mother complex can be identified in the transference. This transfer itself reveals a noticeable originality. Psychoanalysis is heavily invested in by the patient. Perhaps it should be said that psychoanalysis is more than a psychoanalyst. It's not that the latter wasn't invested at all. But this investment of the transference object, despite the apparent presence of the entire libidinal gamut, its tonality is deeply rooted in narcissistic nature. Despite expressive confessions, colored by affects, often highly dramatized, this is expressed in secret hostility. This hostility is justified by rationalizations such as: “I know that transference is a deception and that, in reality and in the name of it, nothing can happen to you, so why?” This position is accompanied by an idealization of the image of the analyst, who they want to preserve as is and seduce not so much erotically, but to arouse his interest and admiration for his abilities, etc.

Seduction takes place in the intellectual search, in the search for lost meaning, which calms intellectual narcissism and creates such an abundance of precious gifts for the psychoanalyst. Moreover, all this activity is accompanied by a wealth of psychic ideas and a remarkable gift for self-interpretation, which, in contrast, has so little influence on the patient’s life, which, if at all, changes very little, especially in the affective and sexual sphere. The analysand's language is often characterized by a narrative style. They remain as poor as they were.

His role is to move the psychoanalyst, to involve him, to call him as a witness in the story of conflicts encountered outside (“My mother beat me and kicked me naked out of the house into the cold! My former analyst was shocked by this. What about you?”) This the style is not always boring: it can tell your life cheerfully, touchingly, tearfully…. Of course, this is not only protection from analysis, but also a way to enter therapy. Like a child who would tell his mother about his school day and the thousand little dramas he went through in order to interest her and make her part of what he learned in her absence. The analyst must show his interest in these dramas, but it is important not to fall into the trap of seduction.

One can guess that the narrative style is not very associative. It gives few associations to the analyst (“He said...I said...He did..., I did..."). This style is typical for psychosomatics. When associations arise, they turn out to be simultaneous with the secretive mental movement of withdrawal of investments, which means that everything happens as if we were talking about the analysis of another who is not present at the session (father, mother, child, friend). The subject hides, escapes, in order not to allow the affect of re-experience to take over itself more than the memory. Yielding to this repeated experience plunges the subject into open despair. This happens because there is a lot of affect, but there is nothing to connect it with, since there are no representations with which it is associated. The patient is afraid to experience the affect in a rough form, afraid of despair, which can emerge at any moment. Therefore, the narrative style: they tell it like a lawyer or a social worker. employee. They want the therapist to take sides. You can’t be completely silent, but you can’t maintain this style either. Therefore, some degree of silence is still necessary until the patient falls into extreme despair. This despair is due to the fact that the patient cannot do the work of grief. It is impossible to refuse grief, and therefore from incest with the mother(“I don’t want to give up her love!”)

Indeed, two distinctive features can be found in transference; the first is the untamedness of drives: the subject can neither refuse incest, nor, therefore, agree with maternal grief. The second feature - undoubtedly the most remarkable - is that analysis induces emptiness. That is, as soon as the analyst manages to touch upon some important element of the dead mother’s nuclear complex, the subject feels momentarily empty, white-matte, as if the plug object had suddenly been taken away from him, the guardian of a madman had been taken away (they are afraid of going crazy) . In fact, behind the complex of a dead mother, behind the mother’s white grief, one can discern an insane passion, the object of which she was and is, a passion because of which grief for her becomes impossible to survive. The main fantasy towards which the entire psychic structure of the subject is aimed becomes: to nourish the dead mother in order to keep her in constant embalming. The analysand does the same with the psychoanalyst. Although the transference is light, as if these feelings are make-believe, there is no depth - secret insensibility, but this does not interfere with caring about the “feeding” of the psychoanalyst. He feeds him psychoanalysis not in order to help himself live outside of analysis, but in order to prolong the process of psychoanalysis ad infinitum. They walk carefully and pay, they are good as victims of exploitation. The analyst is fed narrative stories, gossip, and recent events that may be of interest to the therapist. There is no talk of the end of therapy and the process can continue indefinitely. It is necessary to interpret the transference: “You want to be the hope for the analyst’s salvation, you want to be an ideal patient and an ideal child for your mother!”

For the subject wants to become a guiding star for the mother, that ideal child who will take the place of the idealized deceased - a rival, inevitably invincible, because he is not alive; for living means imperfect, limited, finite.

The connection between grief and the patient's behavior is not obvious. The secret of his soul acts as a transference to the analyst. There may be a series of love affairs and relationships with lovers without love, but with feeding and gilding.

The dead mother complex leaves the psychoanalyst with a choice between two technical attitudes. The first is the classical technique. It carries with it the danger of repeating the silent relationship with the dead mother. I am afraid that if the dead mother complex is not discovered, then psychoanalysis risks drowning in funereal boredom or in the illusion of a finally acquired libidinal life. In any case, you won’t have to wait long to fall into despair, and the disappointment will be bitter. Another attitude, the one that I prefer, is to use the framework of psychoanalysis as a transitional space, to make the psychoanalyst an object always alive, interested, attentive to his analysand and testifying to his own vitality by the associative connections that he communicates to the analysand, never without leaving neutrality. For the analysand's ability to bear disappointment will depend on the degree to which he feels himself to be a narcissistically invested psychoanalyst. It is important for such a patient to feel that the analyst is interested in working with this particular patient. So it is necessary that the psychoanalyst remain constantly attentive to the patient’s speeches, without falling into intrusive interpretations. To establish connections provided by the preconscious, connections that support tertiary processes, without bypassing them, without going straight to unconscious fantasies, is not to be intrusive. And if the patient declares such a feeling of intrusiveness of interpretations, then it is very possible to show him, and without traumatizing him beyond measure, that this feeling of his plays the role of protection from pleasure, which he experiences as frightening. The vivacity of associations should especially track the pleasures that the patient has hidden behind fears and anxiety of persecution. These patients often do not even have the vocabulary necessary to describe pleasure.

After the patient feels and recognizes his first pleasures and interests, such a phenomenon occurs as the child’s wishes to cure his mother. The child recovered, but he is not happy with his health, since his mother is suffering. He persists and tries to sacrifice pleasure in favor of his mother. In analysis, the narrative style is changed by associative richness - many dreams, associations. The "animated child" rejoices in the interpretations that the analyst gives.
The recovered child owes his health to the incomplete recovery of his eternally ill mother. And this is expressed in the fact that now the mother herself depends on the child. It seems to me that this mental movement is different from what is usually described under the name of correction. In fact, we are not talking about positive actions associated with remorse for its incomplete recovery, but simply about sacrificing this vitality on the altar of the mother, with a refusal to use new opportunities of the Self to obtain possible pleasures. The psychoanalyst should then interpret to the analysand that everything is going as if the subject’s activity had no other purpose than to provide opportunities for interpretation in psychoanalysis - and not so much for himself, but for the psychoanalyst, as if the analyst needed the analysand - in contrast to how it was before (Such interpretations will have to be made repeatedly).

How to explain this change? Behind the manifest situation lies a fantasy of inverted vampirism. The patient spends his life feeding his dead mother, as if he was the only one who could take care of her. This is the last stage of the analysis, where it is discovered that the patient has spent his life as the guardian of the mummy. Guardian of the tomb, the only holder of the key to its crypt, he secretly fulfills his function as a nursing parent. He holds his dead mother captive, she becomes his personal property. The mother became the child's child. Often, in fact, you can find the patient's mother living in the apartment. This is how he himself - the patient - will heal his narcissistic wound.

A paradox arises here: the mother is valuable because she was not available. Let only her body be with him, a shell without a soul, but let her be. The subject can take care of her, try to awaken her, revive her, cure her. But if, on the contrary, she recovers, awakens, revives and lives, the subject will once again lose her, for she will leave him to mind her own affairs and invest in other objects (she will not love him, but someone else). He will leave him physically. Likewise, the psychoanalyst must be kept and taken care of so that he does not leave for another patient. It is very difficult to feel grief, since the mother did not love when she should have loved. In addition, if she comes to life, she may also not give love, and even physically disappear. So we are dealing with a subject forced to choose between two losses: between death in the presence of the mother or life in her absence. Hence the extreme ambivalence of the desire to return the mother’s life (fear of repeated loss)

Metapsychological hypotheses: erasure of the primary object and framing structure

The modern psychoanalytic clinic has sought to describe as best as possible the characteristics of the primary maternal imago itself. The works of Melanie Klein in this regard revolutionized the theory of psychoanalysis, although she herself was more interested in the internal mental object, the internal object that she was able to imagine, both from the experience of psychoanalysis of children and from the experience of psychoanalysis of adult patients with a psychotic structure, and not taking into account the participation of the real mother in the formation of her imago. From this neglect of hers came Winnicott's work. But Klein's students, even without sharing Winnicott's views, recognized, starting with Bion, the need to begin to correct her views on this subject. In general, Melanie Klein went to extremes in attributing all the relative strength of the infant's instincts of life and death to the ensemble of innate predispositions, without taking into account, so to speak, the maternal variable. In this she is a continuator of Freud's line.

In Kleinian work, the main emphasis is on projections associated with an evil object. To a certain extent, this was justified by Freud's refusal to recognize their reliability. His concealment of the “evil mother” and his unshakable belief in the almost heavenly nature of the relationship between mother and her baby have been emphasized many times. So Melanie Klein had to correct this partial and biased picture of the mother-child relationship, and this was all the easier to do because the cases of children and adults that she analyzed - most of the manic-depressive or psychotic structure - clearly revealed such projections. It was in this way that a vast literature arose, which richly depicted this inner, omnipresent breast, which threatens the child with destruction, dismemberment and all kinds of hellish torment, a breast that is connected with the baby by mirror object relations, from which he defends himself as best he can - by projection. As soon as the schizoid-paranoid phase begins to give way to the depressive phase, this, contemporary with the combined unification of self and object, has as its main feature the progressive cessation of projective activity and the child's progressive access to taking care of his aggressive drives - his, in a sense, " acceptance of responsibility" for them, which leads him to careful handling of the maternal object, to fear for her, to the fear of her loss, with a mirror turning of his destructiveness onto himself under the influence of archaic guilt and for the purpose of maternal mood and health recovery. Therefore, here - even less than ever - the question of blaming the mother does not arise.

In the clinical picture that I have described here, there may be remnants of an evil object as a source of hatred, but I believe that the tendencies of hostility are secondary, and the primary one is the maternal imago, in which she found herself a lifeless mother in the mirror reaction of her grief-stricken child mother object. All this leads us to further development of the hypothesis that we have already proposed. When the conditions for the inevitable separation of mother and child are favorable, a decisive change takes place within the Self. The maternal object, as the primary object of fusion, is erased to leave room for the investments of the Ego itself, the investments on which its personal narcissism is based, the narcissism of the Ego, which is now able to invest its own objects, distinct from the primary object. But this erasure of mental ideas about the mother does not make her really disappear. The primary object becomes the frame structure of the Self, hiding the negative hallucination of the mother. Of course, mental ideas about the mother continue to exist and will still be projected inside this frame structure, onto the screen canvas of the mental background, woven from a negative hallucination of the primary object.

But these are no longer representations-frames, or, to make it clearer, these are no longer representations in which the mental contributions of mother and child merge. In other words, these are no longer the ideas whose corresponding affects are of a vital nature, necessary for the existence of the infant. Those primary ideas hardly deserved the name of mental ideas. It was such a mixture of barely outlined ideas, undoubtedly more hallucinatory than actual representational, such a mixture of them with affective charges that could almost be called affective hallucinations. This was as true in the expectation of expected satisfaction as in states of lack. These, if they dragged on, were accompanied by emotions of anger, rage, and then catastrophic despair.

However, the erasure of the mother object, transformed into a frame structure, is achieved in those cases where the love of the object is sufficiently reliable to play this role of [psychic] container [for] the space of representations.

This space of mental representations is no longer threatened by collapse; it can cope with anticipation and even with temporary depression, the child feels the support of the mother object, even when she is no longer here. He is not afraid of grief and love, since he can survive it under the surface. The frame ultimately offers a guarantee of maternal presence in his absence and can be filled with all kinds of fantasies, up to and including fantasies of aggressive violence, which no longer pose a threat to this container. The psychic space framed in this way, forming a receptacle for the ego, reserves, so to speak, an empty field for its subsequent occupation with erotic and aggressive investments in the form of object representations. The subject never perceives this emptiness of the psychic field, since the libido has always already invested psychic space. This mental space thus plays the role of a primordial matrix of future investments (norm)

However, if such a trauma as the mother’s white grief occurs before the child was able to create a sufficiently strong mental framework for himself, then no accessible mental space will form within the Self. The frames themselves will not be concerned with preserving the Self, but will strive to preserve the icon or mummy of the mother. Within this framework, either positive narcissism is formed, that is, investments of one’s own self, bearing traces of a satisfying relationship with the mother, thanks to which one can create one’s own narcissism, or negative narcissism is formed, which pulls the self towards zero, towards the destruction of itself, which is experienced as emptiness, because To this I, any kind of interest and excitement is disgusting. The only thing that revives him is traces of loss. The only thing he wants is for everyone to leave him alone, because if they don’t leave him alone, then the traces of loss and lack of mother come to life. Patients strive for the level of arousal to be zero. The dead object, consumed by grief, draws the young self into the desert, death. A part of the subject's Self is hidden in the mother's tomb. His libido mystically constantly flows there.

The destruction of the tomb would also mean the destruction of the subject's Self, which is why it is so difficult to separate from the MM. According to MM, grief also means skinning. Removing the skin is dangerous - you will find yourself naked. In the final period of analysis, the patient is ready to let go of the revived mother (therapist), but he is both envious and offended that the mother (therapist) has someone else.

Andre Green: searching for the origins of depression. Or about the “dead mother complex” October 13th, 2012

Originally posted by ameli39 at Andre Green: searching for the origins of depression. Or about the "dead mother complex"

One of the rather complex cases of depressive personality disorder is a situation where the patient’s persistent depression is based on the so-called “dead mother complex.” This complex was discovered by the French psychoanalyst Andre Green. You can read the original article by Andre Green (in a good, adapted presentation) here http://ameli39.livejournal.com/590974.html#cutid1
And in this post, I want to provide an explanation of Green’s concept, in which you can find answers to the following questions:
1.What happened to the mother?
2 What happens to the child of such a mother?
3. What happens to such a person in adulthood?

"The concept of the “dead mother” of the French psychoanalyst Andre Green is based on a simple postulate: A child's early relationship with his mother has a significant impact on his subsequent mental well-being. And if these relationships are devoid of emotional responsiveness, warmth, intimacy, then this can lead to the fact that in the baby’s psyche the image of the mother imprinted as cold and “dead”, despite the fact that in fact the mother is alive. Hence the name of the concept: “deadness” means mother's internal state, her mental rather than physical death.
A. Green noticed that in the history of his patients suffering from severe depression, emotional alienation in relations with their mother was quite often observed literally from the very first days of life. The mothers of such patients were unable to fully perform their functions in relation to the child.
1. What happened to the mother?

Such mothers, due to various circumstances (as a rule, this is associated with the loss of a significant relationship or deep disappointment in life: the death of loved ones, a previous miscarriage, a husband’s betrayal, etc.) find themselves deeply immersed in their own depression and their own grief. Unable to cope with them on their own, they become isolated in their painful experiences, which is why they cannot be responsive to the child’s needs and lose interest in him. At the same time, the mother can continue to mechanically take care and perform her functions (feed, wash, dress), but she is not capable of genuine relationships, just as she is not capable of true grief over her depression. Such mothers “do not see” their children: they can literally avoid eye and tactile contact with the child, “not hear” when the child cries, etc. Their own grief turns out to be so strong that it dominates other aspects of life.
2.What is happening to the child at this moment?
The loss of proper attention, care and love from the mother is experienced by the child as a catastrophe! This behavior of the mother, albeit forced, leads to serious changes in the child’s psyche: in attempts to somehow save the mother (after all, he needs her so much!), the child identifies with her, and he himself becomes internally cold, numb, “dead” . Those. the need for a mother, when it cannot be satisfied directly in real life, is illusorily satisfied by the child through the fact that he himself, as it were, tries to become this mother for himself. But the only mother he sees is distant, unresponsive, and emotionally cold. This is how the child himself becomes for many years to come. At the same time, he acquires the skill of not feeling anything, fearing that his anger (arising as a normal reaction to being ignored by his mother) may destroy the already “dead” object. This pattern of “indifference” is reinforced and will be reproduced in any relationship that threatens disappointment - i.e. in any close relationship. Instead of experiencing love and affection, a person with such an attitude, out of fear of losing the relationship and being “abandoned” again, will devalue its significance and the person with whom this relationship is being established.
The second important point is the fact that the cause of maternal depression remains hidden from the child. He does not understand why the closest person suddenly deprives him of love and warmth; the true meaning of his mother’s behavior turns out to be inaccessible. The process of searching for lost meaning often leads to increased development of intelligence and imagination. A child once experienced the experience of being rejected by his mother, whose mood depended on reasons incomprehensible to him. Now he will direct all his strength to predict the behavior, feelings, moods and thoughts of the people around him.
But none of the above, none of the defense mechanisms, be it “indifference” or fantasy and intellectualization, are capable of healing the deep wound that remains with a person. This wound blocks the ability to give and receive love, because such intense mental pain lurks in this area that any attempt at a close relationship leads to increased fears, disappointments, helplessness, and despair. The long-established connection (identification) with the “dead mother,” remaining hidden from consciousness, leaves a gaping hole in the soul into which all attempts to love fail.
3.What happens to such a person in adulthood?
The patients themselves are not aware of their own grief, just as their “dead” mothers were not aware of it. After all, since in fact the mothers of such patients remain alive, the true cause of their depression (identification with “deadness”) turns out to be deeply hidden in the unconscious layer of the psyche. Thus, grief remains unprocessed, unnamed, unexperienced. Therefore, the requests with which such patients come to therapy rarely relate to depressive experiences. They often hide behind complaints about problems in personal and/or work relationships, a feeling of spiritual emptiness, low self-esteem, etc.
Such people often experience dissociation between soul and body and a blockage of love. Those. in relationships, they may seek exclusively isolated satisfaction of sexual need or only platonic tenderness. It turns out to be impossible to combine these needs together, since it threatens to make a person vulnerable and dependent.
Such people believe that they are capable of giving love, that they have large reserves of this love, but in fact, all feelings remained, as it were, “in collateral with a dead mother.” Those. The person himself does not have this love; he gave all of it to his mother, who “died”, but remained unburied.
Therapy with such patients is quite difficult. Due to early negative experiences, they have difficulty establishing relationships with other people, including a psychotherapist, and once established, they project onto him the image of their depressed mother. They don't believe that a therapist can help them. Unconsciously, they expect him to reject him.
But a deep study of the patient’s personal history and experience, together with the “living”, empathic desire of the therapist and his sincere interest (as opposed to the indifference of the “dead mother”) in helping, allows us to get to the bottom of the true causes of the patient’s condition, make them conscious, allow us to live those feelings that have remained blocked and finally make room for new relationships."
original
http://psy-aletheia.ru/blog/la-mere-morte

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The “dead mother” phenomenon

PSYCHOANALYTICAL NEWSLETTER
№ 10, 2002

O. Pavlova

« The main mood of a person is depression, with the exception of holidays.”
D. Winnicott

I would like to devote this article to consideration of some, in my opinion, main features of the “dead mother” phenomenon, its theoretical and clinical aspects. The problem we have touched upon is currently acquiring particular significance in the clinic of mental illness, since it is directly related to trauma and depression, which have recently become relevant factors of mental pathology in the modern world and in particular in Russia.
The phenomenon of the “dead mother” was isolated, named and studied by the famous French psychoanalyst Andre Green relatively recently. In his work "Dead Mother", published in ] 983, and not yet translated into Russian, Green used as a paradigm for the study of mental phenomena the child's response to the traumatic destruction of the bond between child and mother in the earliest periods of an individual's life. This work raises certain fundamental theoretical questions regarding past reconstruction and the relationship between trauma in infancy and early childhood and subsequent psychopathology. The symbolic concept of “dead mother”, which he introduced into psychoanalytic use, can rightfully be called basic in relation to the study of the origin of trauma and the problems of its reconstruction. It is also very important to note that the phenomenon of the “dead mother” can be seen as illuminating some of the main points of personality psychodynamics in the paradigm of the practice and theory of psychoanalysis.
Exploring the origins of personality development in ontogenesis, Andre Green, following Karl Abraham, considers weaning to be the central moment in the psycho-emotional development of a child. But, unlike many other researchers, he says that breast loss is not always dramatic for the child. “Fear, anxiety about the loss of an object lives in each of us,” writes Andre Green, and in order to disrupt development, from his point of view, the necessary conditions must be created. He identifies maternal depression as the main pre-dispositional factor contributing to mental trauma. In this regard, it is important to immediately note that maternal affective withdrawal from an infant or small child is a relatively common, common case, while, for example, the “dead mother” syndrome, which reveals severe psychopathology, is quite rare in clinical practice. An important role in the variety of reactions of the child to the emotional absence of the mother is played by intrapsychic selective processes that work to overcome the trauma. In this regard, A. Green focuses our attention on the difference in the depressed existence of a mother, either as a chronically depressed one, or as a mother who suddenly becomes so for one day.
What can cause a mother to become depressed? A. Green identifies the following stressful life situations: deception of a husband, death of parents, termination of pregnancy, miscarriage. These moments that trigger a woman’s depression, which is of great importance in the clinic of affective disorders, can be passed down from generation to generation from mother to daughter. To describe these cases, Green uses S. Lebovisi's term “transgenerational transmission.” It is not by chance that we focus on these ideas - they have direct practical application in the psychotherapy of patients with severe depression. Drawing a parallel between maternal depression and its triggers in a patient with affective pathology leads not only to the particularly therapeutic insight that the mother was ill, but also to the awareness of identification with the mother and her disorder. The shift in focus in one of my patients from the experience of her mother as unwilling to understand her and give her what she asks for, namely positive feelings of love and affection, to the perception of her mother as unable to give them, led to serious therapeutic shifts in our work with her depressive outlook.
In therapy, patient K. was able to separate her world from the feeling of existing in a fantasy with cemeteries, coffins and dead people, that is, from the world of a mother living with the unmourned loss of her husband who suddenly passed away. And surprisingly, in therapy she was able to stretch the tragic thread of events deep into time, and “a tree of life emerged with roots immersed in the past” (Lebovisi S, 1996). As it turned out, the grandfather, the husband of my patient’s maternal grandmother, according to family legend, died very young, when my patient’s mother was still little. The essence of what happened was that he knew that he would die, and his grandmother knew this, but did not stop him. The same “accident” occurred in my patient’s family when she was 7 years old. Her father, flying on a plane on vacation, for some reason assumed that the plane would crash, and her mother also magically felt that something irreparable could happen, and yet she let him go. This family history is a kind of “transgenerational mandate” of S. Lebovisi, passed down from generation to generation, in this case from grandmother to mother and to my patient. My patient and I were able to see this repetition of the drama of the past in therapy with our own eyes when her common-law husband prepared to go to Chechnya in search of his missing friend. At that moment, my patient came to meet me with the words that she thought that her man would die and she would remain an inconsolable widow, and she knew this for sure, but she could not help but let him go. The experiences raised by the situation led us to the idea that there is a certain connection between her, mother and grandmother, which ensures a certain continuity and belonging of a child of this kind to the mother. A happy girl and a non-depressed young woman with a living husband could not be her mother's daughter. The purpose of the mandate was to convey loss and existence in depression in order to preserve the space of relationships and connection with the mother.
What do we see in this special reality, in the space of early dyadic relationships? The mother, according to A. Green, is next to the child and at the same time she is immersed in a state of depression. The child does not know what the mother cares about. A mother who emotionally rejects a child cannot understand him and, accordingly, give what the child needs. The current situation leads to serious changes in the psyche of the child, who does not know what is really happening. It is at this moment that the child loses all meaning of his relationship with his mother, which later throughout his life will be reflected in the devaluation and loss of relationships with other people. We can summarize that the feeling that is established in a child in the earliest relationship with his mother is the basic one on the basis of which his further interactions with other people are formed. Coming to therapy, patients with such difficulties in mental functioning cannot understand how the analyst can help them in their difficult life situation. They tend to have a strong fear of forming relationships. For this reason, they have difficulty establishing transference, and, if this does happen, they project the image of their depressed mother onto the therapist, see therapy as a “dead relationship” and, in accordance with these transference conditions, experience in analysis the feeling that this is all just some additional suffering to what they already have. As an example of the patient’s rejection of the therapist as a real helping object, I will give a small, but accurately reflecting the problem of “dead analysis” and “interfering analyst” we described, a fragment from the first dream brought by my patient to therapy: “I’m walking hard up the mountain, I’m I have a bicycle in my hands, which I cannot ride, and I see a woman, she walks next to me and pushes a stick into the spinning wheel of the bicycle." The spectrum of assessments of patients with the phenomenon of the "dead mother" ranges from complete ignorance of the psychotherapist and his role in the patient's fate to active rejection of the entire complex of analysis measures.
Currently, some researchers consider the phenomenon of the “dead mother” not as a single space of mental disorder, but as an area of ​​disorders that have some psychopathological division. For example, A. Modell (Kohon, 2000) proposes to introduce the following clinical categories and separate the “dead mother” syndrome from the “dead mother” complex. The term “dead mother syndrome,” from his point of view, can be used to describe an extremely malignant clinical symptom complex, which A. Green sees as a situation in which there is a primary identification with an emotionally dead mother, Ryu. While A. Mon-Dell suggests using the term “dead mother complex” to show the possibility of a whole range of individual child responses to a chronically depressed, emotionally absent mother. As an example of the “dead mother” complex, A. Mondell cites the memoirs of the famous psychoanalytic researcher Guntrip. In “My Experience of Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott,” Guntrip talks about how he reconstructed with D. Winnicott his childhood experience of a depressed and emotionally unavailable mother, despite the fact that he himself did not suffer from “dead mother” syndrome. In Guntrip's studies of himself, one can detect only some presence of a “dead mother” complex, which in his case did not lead to emotional deadness, that is, identification with a depressive mother and was expressed only in hypersensitivity to the schizoid states of withdrawal of other people. I observed a similar manifestation of the pathology of the “dead mother” complex during the first year of psychotherapy with one of my narcissistic patients. In this patient, I did not find total identification with the dead mother. But, despite the fact that he was quite emotionally filled, he reacted very sharply and aggressively to the slightest inattention towards his personality on the part of service workers. He assessed these episodes of ignorance as an unacceptable oversight on their part, for which “managers who are doing something unknown should be kicked out of work.” Such moments caused him a storm of aggressive feelings. My patient felt it was their “duty.” He emphasized with emphasis the phrase “the sacred duty” for which they receive money, to notice him standing at the information window and attend to him, or to explain to him why at the moment they cannot pay attention to him, otherwise his feelings become unbearable and seek a way out only in his partially conscious aggressive behavior. I interpreted his indignation as “baby crying”, as an attempt to attract my attention, which he did not feel due to the activation of transference experiences of the “dead mother” complex. At that moment, perhaps, he unconsciously associated me with his mother and internally felt that in order to shout to his “emotionally deaf” mother, he needed to do this immediately and with all his might.
Let us now consider some other interesting features of the “dead mother” phenomenon from a clinical point of view. According to A. Mondell, the “dead mother” complex functioning in the individual’s psyche does not develop over time into the “dead mother” syndrome. Thus, we actually have two independent components of the phenomenon, which, as we discussed earlier, are accepted by different authors, including A. Green, as two different independent mental disorders. For example, the early loss of a mental object that always satisfies, from the point of view of A. Green, can lead to two outcomes: depression or the emptiness of psychosis. A. Green calls the feeling of total emptiness experienced by an individual - blank depression, which has to do with the lack of emotional investment or decathexis. These decathected states arise from the loss of meaning in relationships, as we have already mentioned above. How is this emptiness formed? To do this, we will dwell in more detail on the description of the process of cathexis. We know that every image or object in the human psyche is necessarily cathected. This means that some energy investment occurs in its mental representation.
Thus, according to A. Green, “cathexis” is what makes a person’s life bad or good, but necessarily meaningful. An important point is also A. Green’s statement that a person discovers cathexis only when he feels that he is losing it. This loss of cathexis, which plays a key role in the formation of the “dead mother” phenomenon, occurs approximately 8-9 months of the child’s first year of life, when attachment to the mother is formed. At this same moment, the child begins to recognize the father figure as a third person participating in his relationship with his mother. But the “dead mother complex or syndrome,” according to A. Green, will manifest itself much later, already in the Oedipus situation. At this point, among other psychodynamic factors, the presence of a strong desire for the mother in the Oedipus constellation is noted. But this desire, according to A. Green, does not include the mother; it has an embedded unknown object of bereavement. At this point, the child may experience compensatory premature attachment to his father. In the case of a female infant, this relationship is highly eroticized; the girl thinks that at least the father can be emotional and “save” her. But it often happens that the father turns out to be as incapable as the mother. Describing what is happening, A. Green uses the concept of a “dead father” by analogy with the phenomenon of a “dead mother”. But still, the main factor in the formation of the “dead mother” phenomenon are the features of dyadic relationships that were established earlier, and which are characterized as having an ambivalent attachment at their core. At the physiological level, a mother can provide ideal care, but these manipulations on the part of the mother over the child have a neurotic appearance: force-feeding the child when he does not want or the breast is given “strictly” by the hour, sterile maintenance of cleanliness, endless “ironing” of diapers instead of live communication with a child, early potty training. When such a mother takes the child in her arms, we can observe a demonstration of the child’s rejection of the mother: he arches and turns away. This child does not reflect the love of the mother, who absorbs everything herself, and a “black hole” appears in the child’s psyche. Such emotional emptiness, pit, blackness is accompanied by intense feelings of anxiety. This intense anxiety is not castration anxiety related to the Oedipus complex, but rather arises from the loss of an object. In this case, we can talk about separation anxiety, caused by a mental wound, not associated with physical damage, as with the fear of castration at the phallic stage. One of my patients, who felt constant anxiety about her mother, said that all the best, all the tidbits, were and are being given not to her, but to her mother. She is firmly convinced of this, that it has always been like this, even when she was very little. It is her mother who occupies a place in the “center of warmth,” and she says about herself: “I’m always on the edge, just a little warm.” Patient K. pronounces these words with bitterness, pain and resentment.
The “hole” we described above in the individual’s psyche is a consequence of the observed destructive maternal attitude towards the child. The child loses his mother, but not a real one, but an imaginary one, and at this stage he does not develop hatred towards his mother, instead there is only wound and pain as a reaction to mental trauma. With the loss of the symbolic object of the primary caregiver, libidinal-sexual cathexis is lost, libidinal investment in the object does not occur. At this moment, the child becomes depressed and stops developing. This can be expressed in a severe slowdown in physical development, especially affecting the child’s growth. These children are often of insufficient height and weight for them. A. Green calls such a process of libidinal removal of the mother’s object from the “head” of the child decathexis or the psychic murder of the mother by the child.
At the second stage of the formation of the “dead mother” structure, unconscious identification with the dead mother and a secondary filling of the resulting “hole” with hatred occurs, which can be expressed in the mirror symmetry of the relationship between mother and child. As an example, one can cite the words of one of my depressed patients about how she and her mother exchange glances of hatred: in her mother’s eyes she sees a reflection of her hidden feelings.
Summarizing the above, we can conclude that the phenomenon of the “dead mother” is the consequence of two purposeful movements in one process of loss: first the transformation and annulment of the contribution of the primary maternal object and then identification with the incorporated object, which in fact turns out to be dead.
Another important point worth noting is that in describing the process of internalization of the “dead mother” as an object, A. Green uses the term “imago”, since it is directly related to the patient’s construction or, in other words, to the internal representation mother, which is not necessarily equivalent to the memory of the mother's real identity. The use of the term “imago” indicates to us, first of all, that identification with the “dead mother” is unconscious. But at the same time, it is still impossible to completely exclude the role of the historical mother in the formation of her internal object-representation. For this reason, it is necessary to dwell in more detail on some aspects of research related to the internalization of the mother’s image. It should be immediately noted that at the moment there are different views on some problems directly related to the “dead mother” complex and syndrome. For example, A. Mondell's point of view differs from A. Green's conclusions in one very important point. The latter argues that successful psychotherapy of patients can reveal the memory of the period of maternal emotionality that preceded her depression. The cases studied by A. Mondell confirm, in contrast to Green’s examples, a completely different life scenario. Maternal death, according to A. Mondell, is not experienced as a discrete episode with a beginning and an end. Thus, he does not find a period where the mother was emotionally alive. From the point of view of A. Mondell’s patients, the reconstruction of the mother’s image leads them to see the mother as having a permanent characterological deficit rather than as suffering from a temporarily limited depression. A. Mondell notes that some of his patients did not recognize maternal depression as such at all. Based on this consideration, in many cases the work of the psychoanalyst in reconstructing maternal emotional absence and depression has an important therapeutic effect, since some of these patients firmly believe that their mother turned away from them due to their inherent defectiveness and badness.
The "dead mother" phenomenon can also occur if the mother denies that her child has an internal individual world separate from her own. This fact may be due to her lack of experience of experiencing the sensory world of other people. The consequences of such denial by the mother of the child's inner world can be devastating. Recognition of the uniqueness of the child’s mental world by the mother will be equivalent to recognition that he is mentally alive. If this does not happen, then there is a certain fact of denial by the mother that this child of hers is a living person. The next step in this direction would be the conclusion that such sensually incapable mothers, not recognizing the mental aliveness of their children, wished that their children did not exist, that their babies were dead. Such a child is not granted permission to be an individual, to exist as having a world unique and separate from the mother's. Thus, the mother’s non-recognition of the child’s mental aliveness is felt by the child as a refusal of permission for his existence. Such refusal to the child, in turn, leads to the prohibition of all the desires of the infant. It can be formulated as follows: if someone does not have the right to exist, then that someone does not have the right to desire. The lack of desires in a child with dead mother syndrome eventually transforms into an inability to experience pleasure. It is important that such a person lacks pleasure from himself and his own existence, pleasure from “just being.” And if he somehow manages to get even a little pleasure, he develops a strong conviction that punishment must follow.
There is one more aspect of the phenomenology of the “dead mother”, indicated by A. Mondell, which must be considered here. It has to do with the processing of affects. It is generally accepted that disruption in the early mother-child relationship contributes to the child's relative inability to regulate his affective reactions. This position is based on the fact that infant homeostatic processes are regulated jointly by both the child and the mother. This disturbance in affect regulation may increase due to asynchrony in the child-mother relationship, since, according to Bion's theory, the mother is the container and initiator of the initial child anxiety. The fear of experiencing intense feelings observed in a child convinces us that his affects are in fact uncontrollable. If the mother is emotionally unavailable to the child, she is also distanced from herself and from her body, and this dissociation between soul and body is transmitted to the child. Thus, the mother proves her inability to assist the child in his emotional experience. Under these conditions, the child's self will be submerged or turned upside down.
Among many other researchers of the “dead mother” phenomenon, we can rightfully name the name of Daniil Stern. In his work “One Way to Make a Child Sick,” he admits that he wrote it under the influence of the concept of A. Green’s “dead mother.” In his observations of infants, echoing psychoanalytic studies of the first year of life of a child by R. Spitz, D. Stern saw and described infant microdepression, which is the result of unsuccessful attempts to revive the mother:
“The mother breaks eye contact and makes no attempt to restore it. To a very small extent it is responsive to the child. The mother is not enthusiastic about interacting with him. These maternal messages cause a resonance in the child’s soul: he also loses inspiration, a feeling of devastation arises, positive affects disappear, facial poverty is noted, and activity decreases. This experience can be described as microdepression.”
D. Stern notes that after all the child’s attempts to bring the mother back to life, to return her emotionality fail, the child tries to be with her in any way, namely by imitation of her or identification with her. These ideas of D. Stern are comparable to A. Green's point of view of his patients as suffering from primary identification with a dead mother. A. Green believes that a “dead mother” is, first of all, the presence of an absent mother, or he also calls this phenomenon “dead presence.” This means that such a baby shows with all his appearance: “If I cannot be loved by my mother, I myself will become her.” This primary, universal identification may be said to be the central characteristic distinguishing the dead mother syndrome from the dead mother symptom. Many patients, according to A. Mondell, happily avoid the “dead mother” syndrome, thanks to the mechanism of counter-identification. They become the opposite of their mother, and this allows them to be only partially dead, which gives them back the experience of their individuality, preserving their sense of distinction between self and object. In contrast, in the case of primary identification with the mother, the patient's individuality is completely lost, according to the patient's fantasies, as if submerged within his mother. In this case, the personality consists of internalized elements, the maternal unconscious attitudes experienced by the child. For example, a mother who appears to be “nice” may actually be experienced by her daughter as filled with hatred. Accordingly, the daughter can identify with these false aspects of the mother's personality and also be “good” like her mother, but with feelings of hatred underlying this “goodness.” The mother ignores her daughter’s inner world, and the daughter, in turn, constructs her psyche based on what she perceives as the mother’s unconscious attitudes. This mechanism is a total identification with a dead mother who is incapable of loving others or anyone at all.
In this regard, D. Stern introduced a very useful and accurate metaphor regarding the phenomenon of the “dead mother”. He called it “the scheme to be with...”. This concept quite accurately describes the state of a child facing a depressed mother. It reflects a developmental disorder and can be used as a paradigm of chronic traumatization, which is the result of an early disruption of the relationship between the child and the mother, which is confirmed repeatedly throughout life.
At present we can say with confidence that, apart from psychotic patients, the dead mother syndrome remains one of the most difficult problems that can be encountered in psychotherapeutic work with patients. The pathology of the “dead mother” phenomenon is included in severe schizoid, autistic and narcissistic disorders and, according to A. Green, manifests itself only in transferential relationships in psychoanalytic psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. Very often, patients with this pathology do not complain of depression. Rather, we hear the following narcissistic requests: I’m bored, I’m empty inside, I’m cold, I have nothing to do with myself. If we nevertheless diagnose the “dead mother” syndrome in a person seeking psychotherapy, then work with such a patient should begin with creating a safe treatment atmosphere, with the acceptance of such a personality with all its difficult experiences. And we, first of all, must ask ourselves the question of whether we can bear it, whether we feel empathy towards this person. Further tactics of work in psychotherapy should be aimed at creating an internal accepting and loving image of the mother. It is very important in this situation for a psychotherapist to be able to remain silent, without frustrating the patient, to wait patiently, trying to empathically feel and understand what he wants to say. Individuals with the “dead mother” phenomenon require more attentive attention and greater emotional investment from the psychotherapist than patients with other pathologies. It is very important in this regard for the therapist not to be intrusive, to try to feed the weak part of the self. Such patients, not receiving support, tend to quickly leave the therapist or may develop a strong eroticized or negative therapeutic transference and unconsciously manipulate the psychotherapist, demanding infliction of suffering on him in order to confirm early injuries
Thus, the presence of some base of theoretical knowledge about the “dead mother” phenomenon can be an important factor contributing to the timely recognition and correct diagnosis of the “dead mother” symptom or syndrome, which in turn will be the key to the advancement and success of the treatment of severe personality disorders.

Literature
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2. Asanova N.K. Lectures of the course “Children's psychoanalysis”. 1996.
3. Lebovisi S. Regarding transgenerational tradition: from filiation to affiliation. // Problems of child psychoanalysis. No. 1-2. M, 1996.
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5. Psychoanalytic terms and concepts: Dictionary / Ed. Barness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine / Trans. from English A.M. Bokovikova, I.B. Grishpun, A. Filts. M.: Independent company "Class", 2000.
6. Stern D. Baby’s Diary: What your baby sees, feels and experiences. / Trans. from English M.: Genesis, 2001.
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8. Freud 3. Artist and fantasy / Transl. with him. / Ed. R.f. Dodeltseva, K.M. Dolgova. M.: Republic, 1995.
9. Encyclopedia of Depth Psychology Volume 1. Sigmund Freud: life, work, legacy./ Transl. with him. / General ed. A.M. Bokovikov. M.: ZAO MG Management, 1998.
10. The Dead Mother: The Work Of Andre Green, edited by Gregorio Kohon, published in association with the institute of psycho-analysis. London: Routledge, 2000.

Olga Sinevich, psychologist, gestalt therapist: The phenomenon of the “dead mother” was isolated, named and studied by the famous French psychoanalyst Andre Green. André Greene's article was originally presented as a talk at the Paris Psychoanalytic Society on May 20, 1980.

I want to note that the dead mother complex does not arise due to the real loss of the mother, a dead mother is a mother who remains alive, but she is mentally dead because for one reason or another she became depressed (death of a child, relative, close friend or any other object greatly loved by the mother). Or this is the so-called depression of disappointment: these can be events that occur in one’s own family or in the family of one’s parents (husband’s betrayal, experiencing a divorce, humiliation, etc.).

In his report, A. Green examines the concept of the “dead mother” complex, its role and influence in the formation and development of the child’s personality. A. Green also says that such clients are not characterized by depressive symptoms, “there is a feeling of powerlessness: powerlessness to get out of a conflict situation, powerlessness to love, take advantage of your gifts, increase your achievements or, if any, deep dissatisfaction with their results ".

My first awareness of my dead mother first came to me in therapy long before reading Andre Greene. I still remember this storm of grief, bitterness, heartbreaking pain, and soul-filled suffering, as well as the feeling of universal injustice. Then I went further and found out that what is more painful and more destructive than a dead mother is a dead killing mother (that’s what I called her). And I would like to talk about a dead killing mother. In my opinion, a dead killing mother causes more severe damage to a child than just a dead mother.

Dead killing mothers are not only mothers who showed cruelty towards their child, emotional rejection, neglect, humiliated their children in all known ways. But, these are also mothers, whose external manifestations create the impression of care and love for their child, but this so-called care and love is manifested in conniving and dominant hyperprotection, increased moral responsibility. I call such mothers sirens, they are very alluring, they just attract you to themselves, beckon, call, and then “devour”. In fact, a mother who is harsh, abusive, and rejecting may do less harm than an overprotective, overprotective, and chronically anxious mother. Because a cruel mother does not disguise her aggressive and murderous tendencies as care and love.

Moreover, dead killing mothers are also mothers who are very concerned about the health of their child. Such mothers are interested in the child’s illnesses, his failures (they are very sympathetic if something bad happens to the child, there is a lot of care and energy in this), and they always make gloomy forecasts about the future of their child. They always seem to worry about their child, so that something doesn’t happen to him. So that God forbid you don’t get sick, fall down a hill, or get hit by a car. “My daughter is growing up, I’m so afraid that she’ll be raped.” “Oh, how I’m afraid for my child, I’m scared all the time, I’m afraid that something bad will happen to him.”

Such a mother remains indifferent to favorable changes and does not react to the child’s joy, or even experiences some dissatisfaction. Children of such mothers in adulthood say that they feel genuine interest and care from their mother if something happened to them, and when everything is fine, then there is a feeling as if the mother is not very happy, and even as if she is upset that nothing happened. no bad thing happened. In the dreams of such mothers there is a lot of illness, death, blood, and corpses. In behavior, it does not cause visible damage to the child, but gradually and methodically suppresses in him the joy of life and faith in himself, in development, in life, and ultimately infects him with its mortality, the child begins to be afraid of life and reaches out to death.

Thus, the essence of a dead killing mother is not so much in her behavior, but rather in her subconscious attitude towards the child, which can manifest itself both in destructive behavior and in the form of care.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is an exchange of information between mother and baby. I assume that the exchange occurs through fusion, internalization and identification by the child of the mother.

Spiegel says that "the infant is able to empathically perceive the mother's feelings long before his development allows him to understand their meaning, and this experience has a serious impact on him. Any breakdown in communication causes anxiety and even panic." He says that by the age of five months, the child exhibits symptoms of fear directed at the mother.

From my experience as a mother, I can say that this happens much earlier; as early as a month, the child can demonstrate these symptoms. In addition, already at the age of one week, the child senses his mother's anxiety and reacts to it with strong crying, for example, when the mother takes the calm child in her arms or simply bends over and looks at him.

He further suggests that "perhaps the child receives from his mother impulses of unconscious hostility, nervous tension, thanks to empathic perception, becomes overwhelmed by her emotions of depression, anxiety and anger."

Here I can add that it is not possible that he receives, but that he definitely receives. In addition, the mother’s depression, anxiety and anger may be recognized by the mother herself, but the child still receives them. The mother's awareness of her destructiveness does not save the child from the empathic perception of her mortality. But thanks to this awareness, the child may not be subject to the mother’s unconscious aggressive impulses, in the form of “accidental” misunderstandings, such as: falling out of the crib or changing table, accidentally hitting or bumping into something (she didn’t mean to) or “oh, something like that.” twisted and fell out of his hands.”

So, the baby completely accepts and absorbs the image of the mother, including her hostility and destructiveness. This murderous impulse is integrated into the structure of the child’s personality, his growing ego. The child copes with these impulses with the help of suppression. Suppression as a response to the destructiveness of the mother and protection from her. In the behavior of children who had a murderous mother, one can see masochistic behavior that persists throughout their lives.

Bromberg says "that masochism is encouraged by mothers in whose psyche the child identifies with the parent toward whom hostility was felt. These mothers are characterized by high levels of narcissism, a strong discrepancy between their ego ideal and behavior, and an underdeveloped sense of guilt. They present themselves as sacrificial themselves, caring and kind, but underneath their claims lies a hostile attitude.They promote and impose the suppression of sexual impulses, but behave in a sexually provocative manner towards the child.

Even if they discover some kind of vice in themselves, they do not have a real feeling of guilt, but fear of what others might think. The child experiences their desire to control him. Since rejecting and hostile attitudes are obvious, the child begins to feel that he is living in a hostile world. The aspiration of his instincts is intensely stimulated, but their expression is prohibited. He is forced to exercise control over his impulses long before he acquires the ability to do so. Inevitable failure leads to punishment and loss of self-esteem. The development of the ego is hampered and the ego tends to remain weak, fearful and submissive. The child comes to believe that the most acceptable behavior for him will be one that ends in failure and suffering. Thus, suffering due to his mother is associated with the concept of love, the child eventually begins to perceive it as love." But even this mother is less traumatic than the next one.

There is a type of killing mothers that includes not only the characteristics described above, i.e. self-sacrificing, kind and caring, “caring about chastity,” but at the same time, destructive, killing impulses break through in them in the form of unpredictable outbursts of anger and rage, and cruelty towards their child. These outbursts and abuse are then “presented” as deep caring and love. “I did this to you because I love you very much and care about you, I was very scared or worried about you.” In my practice there were children of such mothers. These are deeply suffering people; they receive virtually no pleasure from life. Their inner world is filled with extreme suffering, they feel worthless, they feel despicable, worse than everyone else. It is very difficult for them to find something good in themselves. They kill themselves with toxic shame. Inside themselves they often describe some kind of devouring, killing hole, emptiness. They are always terribly ashamed to do something. There may be aversion to one's body, especially to the breasts (if it is a woman). One of my clients says that she would happily cut off her breasts, a completely useless organ, and breastfeeding is a generally disgusting process.

Clients with dead-killing-mother syndrome may have a history of depression or depression, panic attacks, and stalking paranoia. They say that the whole world is hostile against them, everyone wants to harm them. This harm often involves fantasizing about severe physical or sexual violence, or saying that they will simply be killed for their phone, tablet, or just because they are surrounded by assholes. At the same time, they project their inner reality outside, then the people who surround them are “rednecks who only think about how to get drunk and get laid, or rob, beat or rape someone,” and of course they will definitely fall into this someone. Everyone envies them and only thinks about how to harm them.

For example, my client told me that I always greet her with hatred, in therapy I just tolerate her, if I didn’t hear her call on the phone, then I did it on purpose because she disgusts me and I know how she’s going through and gets angry and anxious when I don’t answer the call right away, and I do it on purpose, just to hurt her, to mock her. And when I was really angry with her, the client’s face became softer and there was a feeling as if she was feeding and enjoying the anger. After I drew attention to this, the client said that this is really so, my anger is like a manifestation of love, care for her, only then does she feel that I am not indifferent to her and experience warm feelings.

In addition, women for her are “lusty bitches” (for the most part), and men are either “alpha males” (speaks with contempt and disgust), or simply despicable creatures lying on the sofa and worthless, but also For both of them, there is only one leading organ in life - the penis. Her aggression is directed more inward, she does not create scandals at work and in the family, she methodically destroys herself. The only place in her life where she shows her displeasure, without hiding hatred, contempt, disgust for herself and others, is psychotherapy. And immediately she kills herself again for this with toxic shame, that she is abnormal, a nonentity, “I’m some kind of freak.”

My own awareness of maternal destructiveness developed in psychotherapy before my pregnancy and blossomed during it. And a completely new round began immediately after the birth of the child. This was the most difficult turn of all the previous ones. From my experience and the experience of my clients, I can say that the primary factor in a mother’s murderous hostility against her child is the conflict between the mother and her mother. This is an intergenerational conflict, and in each subsequent generation it becomes stronger and more pathogenic. Those. if the grandmother was just a dead mother, then her daughter is not just dead, but a killing dead mother, and her granddaughter is already with a more pronounced murderous impulse, and the next generation can already physically kill the child. This is when they throw newborns into trash cans, give birth in a (village) toilet, kill themselves and the child or one child because they didn’t know where to put him, she was afraid that her mother would kick him out, and the like.

I assume that such an increase in mortality in the next generation is due to the fact that the child’s fear of cruel destruction by his mother requires even stronger cruel destruction for its release. In addition, such an increase between generations is present only when the child had absolutely no place to “warm up.” Often the desire to kill one’s child is not realized. Dead killing mothers have a very difficult approach to realizing their destructiveness, they are very scared that they are going crazy, they are ashamed and repress their mortality. And only by establishing strong trusting relationships can you slowly approach their fear as a desire to harm and kill.

I was lucky, when I became pregnant, I was already in psychotherapy, but I was still afraid that I had lost my mind, and I was very ashamed to talk in therapy about what terrible thoughts I had towards my child, and the awareness of my deathly murderousness caused unbearable pain.

Analyst, symbolization and absence in the analytic setting (on changes in analytical practice and analytic experience) - in memory of D. W. Winnicott

Andre Green

Summary

In this work, the author is guided by his own considerations, but at the same time takes into account the contributions of other analysts.
The emphasis is placed on the analyst's internal changes to show that it is necessary to pay attention not only to the patient's internal changes, but also to how they are duplicated by the analyst's internal changes, thanks to the latter's ability to create, according to the principle of complementarity, in his mental functioning a figure homologous to the figure mental functioning of the patient.
The problem of indications for analysis is considered from the point of view of the gap between the analyst’s perception and the patient’s material, as well as from the point of view of assessing how the analyst’s messages have a mobilizing effect on the patient’s mental functioning, i.e. on the possibility - which manifests itself differently in each individual case and with each individual analyst - of the formation of an analytical object (symbol) through the meeting of two participants.
When describing the implicit model of a borderline state, a dominant position is given to splitting (the condition for the formation of a double) and decathexis (the desire for a state of zero), which shows us that borderline states raise the question of the limited possibilities of analysis in the face of the “delirium or death” dilemma.
Particular attention is paid to the analytical setting and mental functioning, in an attempt to structure the conditions necessary for the formation - through symbolization - of the analytical object, taking into account the intervention in the relationship of the two participants of the third element, i.e. setting.
The place of primary narcissism gives us a point of view that complements the previous one. In other words, along with the primary communications of object relations there is an encapsulated personal space, a narcissistic area, positively cathected in the silent "I" of being or negatively cathected in the desire for non-existence. The dimension of absence, essential for mental development, finds its place in the potential space between the “I” and the object.
This work does not pretend to solve the crisis facing psychoanalysis; it only reveals some of the contradictions inherent in theoretical pluralism and heterogeneous practice. We have tried first of all to create an image of psychoanalysis that reflects personal experience and gives it a conceptual form.

Tiger, oh tiger, burning bright
In the depths of the midnight thicket,
Who conceived the fire
Is your image proportionate?

W. Blake. Tiger.

An obscure ancient adventure all entails
Me. It's reckless. I'm whole
I've been looking for this tiger for days
Which is not in the poem.

H.L. Borges. Another tiger.

Every analyst knows that an important condition for the patient's decision to undergo analysis is displeasure, increasing discomfort and, ultimately, suffering experienced by the patient. What is true in this regard for individual therapy is also true for the psychoanalytic group. Despite its apparent prosperity, psychoanalysis is currently experiencing a crisis. He suffers, so to speak, from a deep malaise. This ailment has both internal and external causes. For a long time we defended ourselves against internal causes, minimizing their significance. The discomfort caused to us by external causes has reached the point where we are now forced to try to analyze these causes. Let us hope that we, as a psychoanalytic group, carry within us what we look for in our patients: the desire to change.

Any analysis of the current situation within psychoanalysis must be carried out at three levels: 1) analysis of the contradictions between psychoanalysis and the social environment; 2) analysis of the contradictions at the heart of psychoanalytic institutions (these mediators between social reality, on the one hand, and psychoanalytic theory and practice, on the other); 3) analysis of the contradictions at the heart of psychoanalysis itself (theory and practice).

We encounter difficulties regarding the internal connection of these three levels. If they are mixed, it will lead to confusion; if divided - to splitting. If we were completely satisfied with the current state of the third level alone, we would be inclined to ignore the other two. The fact that this does not always happen is undoubtedly due to factors operating at the first two levels. However, I must now abandon the ambitious task of clearly describing the three levels. We now have sufficient material to attempt to explore some of the contradictions in psychoanalytic theory and practice that have given rise to the above-mentioned malaise. Anna Freud (1969), in her clear and courageous analysis of "Difficulties in the Path of Psychoanalysis" from various sources, reminds us that psychoanalysis found its way to the knowledge of Man through the negative experience of neurosis. We now have a chance to learn about ourselves through our own negative experiences. Our current illness can give rise to elaboration and transformation.

In this work on the recent changes brought about by psychoanalytic practice and experience, I would like to explore the following three questions:

1) the role of the analyst in the context of broader ideas about countertransference, including elaboration of the analyst's imagination; 2) the function of the analytical setting and its relationship to mental functioning, as shown by the process of symbolization; 3) the role of narcissism, which opposes and complements the role of object relations, both in theory and in practice.

Changes in the field of psychoanalysis

Assessing change: objective and subjective view

Since I have chosen to confine myself to recent developments, I am unfortunately forced to forego any consideration of how psychoanalysis has continually changed and developed since its inception. This is true both in relation to the works of Freud himself (this can be seen if you re-read Freud's works in chronological order - 1904, 1905, 1910b, 1910a, 1912a, 1912b, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1919, 1937a - the sequence of articles from the "Psychoanalytic Freud's procedures" (1904) to "Finite and Infinite Analysis" (1937)), and in relation to the works of his very first colleagues. Among the latter we should, of course, give a special place to Ferenczi, who in his later works (1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1933) anticipated future trends in a pathetic, contradictory and often clumsy manner. But if changes filled with insights are continuous, then their perception, as in analysis, on the contrary, is discontinuous. Often (and of course this is the case today) ideas about change formulated by individual authors twenty years earlier become the daily reality of every analyst. Thus, a reading of psychoanalytic literature will show that already in 1949 Balint entitled one of his works “Changing therapeutic goals and techniques in psychoanalysis” (Balint, 1950), and Winnicott in his 1954 work “Metapsychological and clinical aspects of regression in the system of psychoanalysis” formulated foundations of our current understanding of the problem (Winnicott, 1955).

To a first approximation, this problem is considered from an "objective" point of view, since it forces us to study the patient "in himself" ("en soi"), and in most cases the analyst is not taken into account. Khan (1962) provides an impressive list of examples that impose new demands on the analytic situation. He introduces terms now familiar to every analyst and talks about borderline states, schizoid personalities (Fairbairn, 1940), “as if” personalities (H. Deutsch, 1942), identity disorders (Erikson, 1959), specific ego defects (Gitelson , 1958), false personality (Winnicott, 1956), and basic guilt (Balint, 1960). The list can be continued to include the achievements of French analysts: pregenital structures (Bouvet, 1956), operational thinking of psychosomatic patients (Marty & de M'Uzan, 1963) and anti-analysand (McDougall, 1972). Nowadays everyone is preoccupied with the problem of the narcissistic personality (Kernberg, 1970, 1974; Kohut, 1971). The fact that most of the descriptions rediscovered by recent diagnostic studies have been so durable leads one to wonder whether the current changes are due to nothing more than the increased frequency of such cases.

Changes recorded twenty years ago are now finally approved. And now our task is to try to detect signs of future changes. Here I will no longer consider the objective approach, but instead turn to the subjective. As a working hypothesis, I will take the idea that awareness of the changes that are beginning to occur today is awareness changes within the analyst. It is not my intention to describe how the analyst is influenced by the attitude of the Society towards him or how our methods of selection, training or communication have an effect on him. And while all these factors are certainly important, I will limit myself to the theory and practice that arise from the analytical situation: i.e. ideas about psychic reality as it is seen in the analytic situation, and the way in which the patient plays out this reality and allows the analyst to experience it. For, all things considered, changes occur only to the extent of the analyst's ability to understand and describe those changes. This does not necessarily mean that we should deny changes in the patient, but these changes are subordinate to changes in sensitivity and perception in the analyst himself. Just as the patient's picture of external reality is controlled by his view of his psychic reality, our picture of his psychic reality is controlled by our ideas about our own mental reality.

It seems to me that analysts are becoming more and more aware of the role they play - both in their assessment of the patient during the first consultations, and in the analytic situation and as the analysis develops. The patient's material is not something external to the analyst, since through the reality of the transference the analyst becomes an integral part of the patient's material. The analyst even influences the way in which the patient presents his material (Balint, 1962; Viderman, 1970; Klauber, 1972; Giovacchini, 1973). Balint (1962) said at the 1961 congress: "Because we analysts speak different analytic languages, our patients speak to us differently - that is why our languages ​​are so different from each other." A dialectical relationship is established between patient and analyst. Since the analyst strives to communicate with the patient in his language, the patient, in turn, if he wants to be understood, can only answer in the analyst's language. And the analyst, in his attempt to communicate, can only show how he understands, through his subjective experience, the effect that the patient's message has on him. He cannot claim absolute objectivity in his hearing. Someone like Winnicott (1949) could show us how, when confronted with a difficult patient, he must go through more or less critical personal experience, homologous or complementary to the patient's experience, in order to gain access to previously hidden material. Increasingly, we see analysts examining their reactions to patients' messages, using them in their interpretations along with (or preferably) an analysis of the content of the messages, since the patient is focused on the effect of his message rather than on the transmission of the content of that message. I think one of the major tensions facing the analyst today is the need (and difficulty) to reconcile a set of interpretations (derived from the work of Freud and classical analysis) with the clinical experience and theory of the last twenty years. The problem is complicated by the fact that the latter do not form a homogeneous body of ideas. Fundamental changes in modern analysis arise from the fact that the analyst hears - and perhaps cannot help but hear - what was hitherto unheard. I do not mean by this that today's analysts have more trained ears than former ones - unfortunately, the opposite can often be found; I mean they hear all sorts of things that were previously beyond their hearing range.

This hypothesis covers a much wider area than those points of view that propose to expand the concept of countertransference (P. Heimann, 1950; Racker, 1968) in its traditional sense. I agree with Neyraut (1974) that countertransference is not limited to the positive or negative affects caused by the transference, but includes the full extent of the analyst's mental functioning, which is influenced not only by the patient's material, but also by what the analyst reads and his discussions with colleagues. We can even talk about swinging from transference to countertransference - without this rocking it would be impossible to work through what the patient tells us. Since this is so, I do not think that I am overstepping the boundaries outlined by Winnicott (1960b) for countertransference, which he reduced to professional attitudes. Moreover, expanded views of countertransference do not imply expanded views of transference.

This view of things seems to me justified by the fact that the difficult cases I mentioned above are precisely those cases that both test the analyst and provoke countertransference in him in the strict sense of the word, and also require a more serious personal investment from him. Taking this view, I am glad that I speak only for myself. No analyst can claim to create a detailed picture of modern analysis in its entirety. I hope not to justify by my own example Balint's (1950) observation that the confusion of languages ​​is due to the analyst, since each analyst maintains his own analytic language. Given the variety of dialects generated by the basic language of analysis (see Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973), we try to be polyglots, but our capabilities are limited.

Discussions regarding indications for testing and risks associated with suitability for testing

For more than twenty years we have witnessed the vicissitudes of endless written and oral debates between those analysts who want to limit the limits of classical psychoanalytic technique (Eissler, 1953; Fenichel, 1941; A. Freud, 1954; Greenson, 1967; Lampl-de Groot, 1967; Loewenstein, 1958; Neyraut, 1974; Sandler et al. 1973; Zetzel, 1956), and those who advocate extension of this technique (Balint, Bion, Fairbairn, Giovacchini, Kernberg, Khan, M. Klein, Little, Milner , Modell, Rosenfeld, Searles, Segal, Stone, Winnicott). The former object to the introduction of confounding parameters and even dispute the validity of using the term transference to refer to all therapeutic responses such as those in the patients mentioned in the last section (see Sandler et al. 1973 for a discussion of this issue); or, if they accept the extended nomenclature of “transference,” they call it “intractable” (Greenson, 1967). The second group of analysts argues that it is necessary to maintain the basic methodology of psychoanalysis (refusal of active manipulation, maintaining neutrality, albeit with a tinge of benevolence, emphasis on variably interpreted transference), but at the same time adapt it to the needs of patients and open new lines of research.

The rift between them is more illusory than it seems. We can no longer confidently contrast cases firmly rooted in classical analysis with cases in which analysts must wade through uncharted swamps. For today, even well-known areas can be fraught with many surprises: the discovery of a masked psychotic core, unexpected regressions, difficulties in mobilizing certain deep layers and rigid characterological defenses. The consequence of all these features is often more or less endless analysis. Limentani's (1972) recent work touches on a sore point: our predictions are shaky, both for our patients and for our candidates. Clinical material from the analysis of candidates is presented in the work as often as material from the analysis of patients. “Analyzable does not mean analyzable.” This reinforces the skepticism of those who believe that assessment before establishing the analytical situation is a fiction. Even the best of us fall into traps. The definition of objective criteria, suitability for analysis (Nacht & Lebovici, 1955) and prediction, for example, in borderline cases (see Kernberg, 1971) are interesting but of limited value. Limentani makes the observation that if the judgment of suitability for analysis is made by another person, the final decision depends largely on the theoretical views, inclinations, and interaction of the second analyst with the patient. It seems difficult to establish objective and general boundaries of analytic suitability that do not take into account the analyst's experience, special qualities, or theoretical orientation. Any boundaries will be overcome by the interest that has arisen in the patient: perhaps this is an interest “by agreement”, but it is fueled by the desire to go on a new adventure. Moreover, in the work of a proponent of limiting the scope of psychoanalysis one can often see case material that contradicts the principles proclaimed by the author. Instead of talking about what we should and shouldn't do, it would be much more useful to clarify what we are actually doing. Because it may happen, as Winnicott (1955) said, that we no longer have a choice. Personally, I do not believe that all patients can be tested, but I prefer to think that a patient about whom I have doubts cannot be tested. I have. I recognize that our results do not match our ambitions and that failure is more common than we might hope. However, we cannot be satisfied, as in medicine or psychiatry, with an objective attitude towards failure when the situation can change thanks to the patience of the analyst or in the course of further analysis. We must also ask ourselves about its subjective significance for the patient. Winnicott has shown us that there is a need to repeat the failures experienced in the external world, and we know that the patient experiences the triumph of omnipotence, whether he feels better at the end of the analysis or no change occurs. Perhaps the only failure for which we are responsible is our failure to bring the patient into contact with his psychic reality. The limitations of suitability for analysis can only be those of the analyst, the patient's alter ego. In conclusion, I would like to say that the real problem associated with indications for analysis is the analyst's assessment of the gap between his ability to understand and the material provided by a given patient, and also the determination of the possible consequences of what he - through this cleft - may, in his turn, inform the patient (something that can mobilize the patient’s mental functioning in the sense of working through it within the analytical situation). For the analyst, his misconceptions about his own abilities have no less serious consequences than misconceptions about the patient's abilities. Thus, in the family of analysts there is a place for everyone, regardless of whether he devotes himself to classical analysis or expanding its limits - or is busy (which happens more often) with both.

Revision of the neurosis model and the implicit model of borderline states

Has neurosis, the heart of classical analysis, remained intact? You can try to answer this question. I am not going to find out the reasons why neurosis has become less and less common - this phenomenon, which has been discussed many times, would require extensive research. Neurosis, previously generally considered to be the realm of the irrational, is now seen as a sequential triad consisting of infantile neurosis, adult neurosis and transference neurosis. In neurosis, transference analysis predominates. Through the analysis of resistance, the knots of neurosis are untied almost by themselves. The analysis of countertransference may be limited by awareness of those elements of conflict within the analyst that are not conducive to the development of the transference. In the limit, the role of the analyst as an object is anonymous: another analyst could take his place. Of all the elements of the drive, its object is easiest to replace; in the theory and practice of analysis, the role of the object also remains unclear. The resulting metapsychology considers the individual capable of development without outside help - no doubt with some help from the object on which he relies, but without dissolving into the object and without losing the object.

Freud's implicit model of neurosis is based on perversion (neurosis is the negative of perversion). Today we may doubt whether psychoanalysis still holds this view. The implicit model of neurosis and perversion today is based on psychosis. This evolution is outlined in the last part of Freud's work. As a result, today's analysts are more sensitive to the psychosis hiding behind the neurosis than to perversion. This does not mean that all neuroses are “engraved” on an underlying psychosis, but that the perverse fantasies of neurotics interest us less than the psychotic defense mechanisms that we find here in a weak form. In fact, we are required to listen to a double code. That's why I said above that today we hear completely different things - those that were previously inaccessible to hearing. And it is for this reason that some analysts (Bouvet, 1960) write that the analysis of neurosis cannot be considered complete until we have reached, albeit superficially, the psychotic level. Today the presence of a psychotic core within a neurosis (provided it seems accessible) frightens the analyst less than obsessive and rigid defenses. This forces us to scrutinize the authenticity of such patients, even if they are purely neurotic and have visible mobility and variability. When we eventually reach the psychotic core, we discover what may be called the patient's "private madness"; and this may be one of the reasons why analysts' interest is currently shifting towards borderline states.

From now on, I will use the term “borderline states” not to designate specific clinical phenomena in contrast to other phenomena (eg, false self, identity problems, or basic guilt), but as a general clinical concept that can be subdivided into many aspects. It would probably be better to call them “borderline states of analyzability.” Perhaps in modern clinical practice, borderline states play the same role that “actual neurosis” played in Freud’s theory, with the difference that borderline states are durable organizations that can develop in different ways. We know that such a clinical picture lacks structure and organization - not only in comparison with neuroses, but also in comparison with psychoses. In contrast to the neuroses, one can observe here the absence of infantile neurosis, the polymorphic character of the so-called adult “neurosis” and the vagueness of the transference neurosis.

Modern analysis balances between two extremes. At one extreme lies social “normality”, which McDougall (1972) gave an impressive clinical description of by introducing the concept of “anti-analysant”. It describes the failure of an attempt to begin the analytic process, although an analytic situation has been created. The transference turns out to be stillborn, despite all the efforts of the analyst to help “at birth” or even provoke its birth. The analyst feels caught in a web of mummified objects of the patient, paralyzed in his actions and unable to arouse in the patient any curiosity about himself. The analyst is in a “object exclusion” situation. His attempts to interpret are perceived by the patient as madness, which soon leads to the analyst decathecting his patient and falling into a state of inertia characterized by echoic reactions. At the other pole there are states united by the desire for regression, fusion and dependence on the object. There are many varieties of such regression, from bliss to horror, from omnipotence to complete helplessness. Their intensity varies from open manifestations to weak signs of the presence of such a condition. It can be found, for example, in extremely free association, vagueness of thinking, untimely somatic manifestations on the couch, as if the patient was trying to communicate using body language; or even simpler: when the analytical atmosphere becomes heavy and oppressive. The presence (Nacht, 1963) and assistance of the object are very important here. In this case, what is required of the analyst is not only his capacity for affect and empathy. His mental functions are necessary here, since the patient’s structures of meaning are inactive. This is where countertransference takes on its broadest meaning. The technique of analyzing neuroses is deductive, the technique of analyzing borderline states is inductive, hence all the risk associated with it. The works of authors who write about borderline states - no matter how differently they describe them, what reasons they put forward and what techniques they use - are built on three facts: 1) The experience of primary fusion testifies to the indistinction between subject and object, when the boundaries of the “I” become blurry. 2) A special way of symbolization follows from the dual organization “patient-analyst”. 3) There is a need for structural integration through the object.

Between these two extremes (“normality” and regression to fusion), there are many defense mechanisms against regression. I'll categorize them into four main categories. The first two are psychotic short-circuit mechanisms, and the last two are basic psychic mechanisms.

Somatic exclusion . Somatic defenses are the polar opposite of conversion. Regression removes the conflict from the mental sphere, tying it to the soma - body (and not to the libidinal body), separating the psyche and soma, psyche and body. This leads to asymbolic formation, through the transformation of libidinal energy into neutralized energy (I give this term a different meaning, unlike Hartmann), i.e. purely somatic energy, which sometimes puts the patient’s life at risk. I will refer here to the works of Marty, de M'Uzan & David (1963) and M. Fain (1966). The ego defends itself against possible disintegration due to an imaginary collision that might destroy both the ego and the object, by means of an exclusion resembling a reactance, but now directed at the non-libidinal body ego.

Pushing through action . Reaction, “action outward,” is the external analogue of the psychosomatic “action inward.” It also helps to get rid of psychic reality. The function of transforming reality and the function of communication contained in the action are eclipsed by its (action's) expulsive goal. It is important to note that this act is performed in anticipation of a type of relationship in which ego and object are alternately absorbed.

A notable consequence of these two mechanisms is mental blindness. The patient blinds himself, becomes insensitive to his psychic reality - both to the somatic sources of his drive, and to the point of entry of this drive into external reality - avoiding the intermediate process of elaboration and clarification. In both cases the analyst has the impression that he is out of touch with the patient's psychic reality. He has to create an imaginary construction of this reality, focusing on somatic manifestations or on the interconnection of social actions that are so over-cathected that they obscure the inner world.

Split . The mechanism of the so-called splitting resides in the mental sphere. All other defenses described by Kleinian authors (of which projective and introjective identification, denial, idealization, omnipotence, manic defense, etc. have become generally accepted) are secondary to it. The manifestations of splitting range from guarding a secret no-contact zone where the patient is completely alone (Fairbairn, 1940; Balint, 1968) and where his true self is safe (Winnicott, 1960a, 1963a), or where part of his bisexuality is hidden (Winnicott , 1971), to attacks on coherent thought (Bion, 1957, 1959, 1970; Donnet & Green, 1973), projection of the bad part of self and object (M. Klein, 1946), and significant denial of reality. When these mechanisms are in motion, the analyst is in contact with psychic reality, but he either feels cut off from an inaccessible part of this reality, or sees his interventions falling apart before his eyes and is perceived as persecuting and intruding.

Decathexis . Here I will consider primary depression, almost in the physical sense of the word, created by radical decathexis on the part of the patient who wants to achieve a state of emptiness and strives for nothingness and nothingness. The point here is a mechanism that, in my opinion, is on the same level with splitting, but differs from secondary depression, the purpose of which, according to Kleinian authors, is reparation. The analyst feels identified with a space devoid of objects, or finds himself outside this space.

The presence of these last two mechanisms suggests that the patient's fundamental dilemma, hidden behind all defensive maneuvers, can be formulated as follows: delirium or death.

The implicit model of neurosis has in the past brought us back to castration anxiety. The implicit model of borderline states returns us to the contradiction created by the duality: separation anxiety/invasion anxiety. Hence the importance of the concept of distance (Bouvet, 1956, 1958). The result of this double anxiety, which sometimes becomes painful, has, it seems to me, not to do with the problem of desire (as in neurosis), but with the formation of thinking (Bion, 1957). In collaboration with Donnet & Green, I described what we called pure psychosis (psychose blanche), i.e. what we believe to be the fundamental psychotic core. Its characteristics are: blocking of thinking processes, inhibition of representational functions and “bi-triangulation”, where the difference between the sexes separating two objects masks the splitting of one object, good or bad. The patient is thus distressed by both the haunting intruding object and the depression over the loss of the object.

The presence of basic mechanisms along the lines of psychosis and their derivatives is not enough to characterize borderline states. In fact, analysis shows us that these mechanisms and their derivatives are layered on top of the defense mechanisms described by Anna Freud (1936). Many authors, using different terminology, point to the coexistence of psychotic and neurotic parts of the personality (Bion, 1957; Gressot, 1960; Bergeret, 1970; Kernberg, 1972; Little & Flarsheim, 1972). The coexistence of these parts can be determined by the insoluble impasse into which the relationship between the principle of reality and sexual libido, on the one hand, and the principle of pleasure and aggressive libido, on the other, has reached. Everything that for the “I” is associated with receiving pleasure, and any reaction of the “I” to reality - all this is imbued with aggressive components. And vice versa: since the destruction is accompanied by a kind of object recathexis, libidinal in its most primitive form, the two aspects of the libido (sexual and aggressive) are not very well distinguished in this case. Such patients demonstrate hypersensitivity to loss; but they are also able to reconstruct the object using a fragile and dangerous substitute object (Green, 1973). This attitude manifests itself in mental functioning through alternating processes of connection and separation. As a result, the function of the analyst as an object, as well as the degree of development of the analytical process, is constantly overestimated or underestimated.

Now I will try to analyze in more detail our observations regarding pure psychosis . The object relations that the patient demonstrates to us in this psychotic core without visible psychosis are not dyadic, but triadic, i.e. in the oedipal structure there is both a mother and a father. However, the underlying difference between these objects is neither gender nor function. Differentiation is carried out according to two criteria: good and bad object, on the one hand; nothingness (or loss) and a dominant presence, on the other. On the one hand, the good object is inaccessible, as if it were out of reach, or is never present long enough. On the other hand, the bad object intrudes all the time and never disappears, except perhaps for a very short time. Thus we are dealing with a triangle based on the relationship between the patient and two symmetrically opposed objects, which in reality are one. Hence the term "bi-triangulation". We usually describe this kind of relationship only in terms of a love-hate relationship. This won't do. It is necessary to take into account the significance of these relationships for thinking processes. In reality, the intruding presence awakens delusional feelings of influence and inaccessibility to depression. In both cases, this affects thinking. Why? Because in both cases it is impossible to establish (constitute) absence. The always intrusively present object, constantly occupying personal psychic space, mobilizes a constant decathexis to resist this breakthrough; this depletes the ego's resources or encourages it to rid itself of its burdens through expulsive projection. Never absent, this object cannot be thought. And vice versa: an inaccessible object cannot be introduced into personal space (at least for a long enough period of time). Thus, it cannot be based on a model of imaginary or metaphorical presence. Even if it were possible for a moment, the bad object would eliminate the imaginary presence. And if the bad object gave in, then the psychic space, which can only be occupied for a moment by a good object, would turn out to be completely objectless. This conflict leads to a divine idealization that imagines an unavailable good object (resentment and resentment at its unavailability is actively denied), and to ideas of diabolical persecution by a bad object (the attachment implied by such a situation is likewise denied). The result of such a situation in the cases in question is not overt psychosis, in which the mechanisms of projection work over a wide area, nor overt depression, in which the work of grief may take place. The end result is paralysis of thinking, expressed in negative hypochondria, especially in the head area, i.e. a feeling of emptiness in the head or a hole in mental activity, inability to concentrate, remember, etc. Fighting such sensations can trigger an artificial thought process: mental chewing gum, a type of pseudo-obsessive-compulsive thinking, quasi-delusional rambling speech, etc. (Segal, 1972). There is a temptation to consider all this the result of repression. But that's not true. When a neurotic complains of such phenomena, we have good reason to conclude, if the context allows, that he is struggling with superego-censored wish representations. When we deal with a psychotic, we assume that there are hidden fantasies underlying everything. In my opinion, these fantasies are located not “behind” empty space, as in neurotics, but “after” it, i.e. this is a form of recathexis. I mean that poorly processed primitive drives again tend to break through into empty space. The analyst's position in the face of these phenomena is influenced by the patient's structure. The analyst will react to the empty space with an intense mental effort to try to think what the patient cannot think, and which will find expression in an attempt on the analyst's part to achieve an imaginary representation so as not to succumb to psychic death. Conversely, when faced with a secondary projection of madness, he may feel confused, even amazed. The empty space must be filled, and the excess must subside and go away. It's difficult to find balance here. Filling the void prematurely through interpretation is tantamount to reinvading the bad object. On the other hand, if the emptiness is left as is, it will be tantamount to the inaccessibility of a good object. If the analyst experiences confusion or amazement, he is no longer in a position to contain the flood that begins to expand without limit. Finally, if the analyst reacts to this flow with verbal hyperactivity, then, even with the best intentions, his reaction turns into interpretative retribution. The only solution is to give the patient an image of working through, placing what he gives us in a space that is neither empty nor flooded: the ventilated space is not the space of “this means nothing” or “this means that...”, but space “this could mean that...”. This is the space of potential, the space of absence, since (Freud was the first to notice this) it is in the absence of an object that its representation, the source of thinking, is created. And I should add that language imposes restrictions on us here, since the "striving for meaning" is not simply about the use of words with content: it indicates that the patient is looking for how to convey a message in the most elementary form; it is hope directed at an object, where the goal is completely uncertain. This perhaps justifies Bion's (1970) recommendation that the analyst should try to achieve a state devoid of memories and desires, no doubt in order to allow the patient's state to penetrate as fully as possible. The goal to strive for is that work with the patient should be carried out in two directions: to create a container for containing the patient and content for his container, however, always keeping in mind (at least in the mind of the analyst) the flexibility of boundaries and the polyvalence of meanings.

Since analysis was born out of the experience of neurosis, it took as its starting point the idea (thought) of desire. Today we can assert that there are desires only because there are thoughts; we use this term in a broad sense (including its most primitive forms). It is doubtful whether the attention paid to thought and thinking today stems from intellectualization. For the originality of psychoanalytic theory, starting with the first works of Freud, lies in the connection of thoughts and drives. One can even go further and say that attraction is a rudimentary form of thinking. Between drive and thinking there is a whole series of various intermediate chains, uniquely conceptualized by Bion. But it will not be enough to simply imagine the hierarchy of these chains. Drives, affects, object and verbal representations communicate with each other; one structure is influenced by another. The unconscious is formed in the same way. But psychic space is constrained by boundaries. The tension within these boundaries remains bearable, and the satisfaction of the most irrational desires is the merit of the psychic apparatus. Seeing a dream while a wish is being fulfilled is an achievement of the psychic apparatus, not only because the dream fulfills a wish, but also because the dream itself is the fulfillment of the desire to see a dream. An analytical session is often compared to a dream. If this comparison is justified, it is only because, just as sleep is contained within certain limits (the abolition of the opposite poles of perception and motor activity), the session is constrained by the conditions of analytical formalities. It is this inhibition that contributes to the specific functioning of various elements of psychic reality. But all this is true when applied to the classical analysis of neuroses and is subject to revision in difficult cases.

Current problems arising from the parallel development of theory and practice

Mental functioning and analytical setting

In the parallel development of psychoanalytic theory and practice, three trends can be distinguished. Due to lack of space I am forced to give only a general sketch; like all sketches, it is characterized by very rough accuracy, since reality, being much more complex, defies arbitrary restrictions and various streams flow into one another.

First tendency: analytic theory was tied to the historical reality of the patient. She revealed conflict, the unconscious, fixations, etc. It developed in the direction of the study of the ego and defense mechanisms (Anna Freud, 1936), and was expanded by psychoanalytic studies of ego psychology (Hartmann, 1951). In practice, it finds itself in the study of transference (Lagache, 1952) and resistance; in this case, empirically established psychoanalytic rules are applied and no technical innovations are introduced.

The second trend: interest has shifted towards object relations, understood in very different ways (e.g. Balint, 1950; Melanie Klein, 1940, 1946; Fairbairn, 1952; Bouvet, 1956; Modell, 1969; Spitz, 1956, 1958; Jacobson, 1964). In a parallel movement, the idea of ​​transference neurosis was gradually replaced by the concept of the psychoanalytic process. This process was seen as a form of organizing, during analysis, the internal development of the patient's mental processes, or as an exchange between patient and analyst (Bouvet, 1954; Meltzer, 1967; Sauget, 1969; Diatkine & Simon, 1972; Sandler et al., 1973) .

The third trend: here we can note the focus on the mental functioning of the patient (Bion and the Parisian psychosomatic school), and in clinical practice questions are raised about the function of the analytical setting (Winnicott, 1955; Little, 1958; Milner, 1968; Khan, 1962, 1969; Stone, 1961; Lewin, 1954; Bleger, 1967; Donnet, 1973; Giovacchini, 1972a). These questions relate to whether the setting (system) is a precondition defining the analytic object and change (the purpose of the specific application of the analytic setting). This is a problem both epistemological and practical.

To be clear, we can say that the analytic situation is the totality of elements that make up the analytic relationship: at the very heart of this relationship we can, over time, observe a process whose knots are tied through transference and countertransference through the establishment of the analytic setting and the limitations it imposes. (This definition complements that of Bleger, 1967).

Let's be more specific. In classical analysis, the patient, having experienced surprise at the beginning, ends up internalizing all those elements of the situation that allow the analysis to move forward (regular meetings, fixed length of sessions, position on the couch and chair, limiting communication to the verbal level, free association, ending the session , regular breaks, pay value, etc.). Absorbed by the strange thing that happens within him, he forgets the setting and soon allows the transference to develop in order to attribute this strange thing to the object. Elements of the setting provide material for interpretation only when there are occasional changes. As Bleger (1967) and others have observed, networking creates a silent, mute foundation, a constant, which gives the changing process room to run wild. It is a not-self (Milner, 1952) that finds its existence only in absence. This might be compared to the silent health of the body, if Winnicott had not suggested an even better comparison - a nurturing environment.

Our experience has been enriched by the analysis of patients who are unable to use the setting as a caring environment. They not only failed to use it: it was as if somewhere inside themselves they had left it untouched in their non-use (Donnet, 1973). Thus, from content analysis we move on to analysis of the container, analysis of the setting itself. You can find analogues at other levels. By Winnicott's “holding” we mean the concern of an external object, by Bion’s “container” we mean the internal psychic reality. But for the study of object relations, even if we consider analysis “bipersonal psychology,” this is not enough. We must also explore the space in which this relationship develops, its boundaries and its breaks, and also study the development of these relationships over time, continuity and interruptions over time.

Two situations can be established. The first has already been discussed above: in it the silent setting is subject to oblivion, as if it were absent. It is at this level that analysis occurs between people: it allows us to penetrate into their substructures and intrapsychic conflicts between processes (Rangell, 1969) and even makes it possible to analyze the partial object relations contained in the functional whole, to the extent that the atmosphere of the session remains fluid , and the processes are relatively clear. Interpretation has the luxury of sophistication. The interaction of people pushes the relationship with the setting into the background.

The second situation is one in which the presence of the setting becomes palpable. There is a feeling that something is happening that is counteracting the setting. This sensation may arise in the patient, but it is primarily present in the analyst. The analyst feels the effect of tension, internal pressure: this makes him aware of the need to act through and within the analytic setting, as if in order to protect him from a threat. This tension forces him to enter a world that he sees only briefly and which requires his imagination. This is the case when analysis develops not between people, but between objects, as if people had lost their reality and given way to an indefinite field of objects. Some representations, due to their vividness, can suddenly take shape, emerging from the fog, but within the limits of the imagination. It often happens that the analyst has even more vague impressions, which are not clothed in either images or memories associated with the early phases of the analysis. These impressions seem to reproduce certain instinctual trajectories through internal movement in the analyst and evoke sensations of enfolding and unfolding. At the stage of these movements, intensive work takes place by which these movements are ultimately transmitted to the consciousness of the analyst before he transforms them through internal transformations into a sequence of words that will be used at the right moment to convey a message to the patient by verbal means. When the analyst achieves a kind of internal order, often before verbalization, the affective confusion turns into a feeling of satisfaction at having arrived at a coherent explanation that plays the role of a theoretical construct (in the sense in which Freud used this expression in his description of infantile sexual theories). . At this point, it does not matter whether the theory is correct or false - there will always be time to correct it later in the light of further experience. What matters is only the fact that it was possible to fix the embryo and give it shape. Everything happens as if it were the analyst who managed to achieve a state analogous to the hallucinatory representation of desire, as in a child or a neurotic. People often talk about the feeling of omnipotence that accompanies the realization of a hallucinatory desire. But this feeling arises earlier. It is associated with successful transformation - consolidation of the rudiment in a meaningful form: it can be used as a model for deciphering a future situation. However, the analyst must devote himself to the task of elaboration, since the patient himself is only able to approach the structure to a minimal extent; this structure lacks coherence to have meaning, but it is coherent enough to mobilize all the analyst's thought patterns - from the most elementary to the most complex, and to influence, at least tentatively, the symbolization that is always beginning and never ending.

The description I have given can be applied either to certain critical moments in classical analysis (after reaching the deeper layers), or more generally to the general atmosphere of the analysis of difficult cases, in contrast to cases of classical analysis. But it must be remembered that such work is possible only in the conditions of the analytical setting and the guarantees provided by its constancy and immutability, which convey the importance of the presence of the analyst as a person. This is necessary in order to maintain the isolation of the analytical situation, the impossibility of discharge, close contact limited to the psychic sphere, and the confidence that crazy thoughts will not go beyond the walls of the consultation room. This is a guarantee that language - the vehicle of thoughts - remains metaphorical; that the session will end; that it will be followed by another session and that its weighty truth, truer than reality, will dissipate as soon as the door closes behind the patient. Thus, rather than saying that the establishment of a setting reproduces object relations, I think it more appropriate to say that the establishment of a setting allows object relations to come into being and develop. I have made the focus of my description on mental functioning, rather than on the expression of drives and defenses underlying that functioning, because much has already been said about drives and defenses, while mental functioning still remains vast unexplored territory within the analytic setting.

When object relations theory was in its infancy, we first began to describe the interaction of self and object in terms of internal processes. No one noticed that in the phrase “object relations” the word “relationship” was more significant. Our interest should have focused on what lies between these action-related concepts or between the results of different actions. In other words, the study of relationships is rather a study of connections, links connecting these concepts, rather than a study of the concepts themselves. It is the nature of the connection, which gives the material a truly psychic character, that is responsible for intellectual development. This work was delayed until Bion explored the connections between internal processes and Winnicott studied the interaction of internal and external.

Let us first consider the last case. We only know what is going on inside the patient through what he tells us. We lack knowledge about the source of the message and what unfolds within these two limits. But we can overcome our ignorance of inner space by observing the effect that the message has on us, and what occurs between our affective (or rather, even bodily) impressions and our mental functioning. Of course, we cannot say that this is exactly what is happening inside the patient: we can only say whether what is happening to us is homologous or similar to what is happening to the patient. And we move the knowledge of what is happening in our own internal space into the space between us and the patient. The patient's message - different from what he lives and feels - is located in the transitional space between him and us, just like our interpretation that the message entails. Thanks to Winnicott, we know the function of transitional space - the potential space that connects and separates mother and child, creating a new category of objects. Language, in my opinion, is the heir of the first transitional objects.

I mentioned above the work of symbolization and now I would like to explain why the internal processes of the analyst have as their goal the creation of symbolization. I use the concept of symbol here in a sense that goes beyond the meaning given to this concept in psychoanalysis, but is very closely related to the original definition. The symbol is “an object broken into two parts: a conventional sign with the help of which the owners of the halves recognized each other by connecting them together” ( Dictionary Robert ). Isn't this what happens in the analytical setting? Nothing in this definition implies that the halves must be the same. Thus, even if the work of analysis forces the analyst to make considerable efforts to create a mental picture of the patient's mental functioning, he supplies what the patient lacks. I said that he replaces the missing part in order to understand the relationship between the sources of the message and its formation by observing homologous processes in himself. But in the end the real analytic object is neither on the side of the patient nor on the side of the analyst: it is where the two messages meet in the potential space that lies between them, limited by the framework of the setting, which is interrupted with each separation and restored with each new meeting. If we assume that each of the participants, patient and analyst, represents a union of two parts (what they live and what they communicate), one of which is a duplicate of the other (I use the word "double" in the sense of broad homology connections and at the same time admit the existence of differences), we can see that the analytical object consists of two takes - one take of the patient, and the other of the analyst. You just have to listen to patients to understand that they mean it all the time. An essential condition for the formation of an analytical object will be the establishment of homologous and complementary relationships between the patient and the analyst. The formulation of our interpretations is not determined by how we evaluate what we understand or feel. Whether formulated or rejected, interpretation is always based on the distance between what the analyst wants to communicate and what the patient is able to assimilate to create the analytic object (I call this the useful distance and the effective difference). From this point of view, the analyst not only reveals hidden meaning. It constructs meaning that was never created before the analytic relationship began (Viderman, 1970). I would say that the analyst creates missing meaning (Green, 1974). Hope in analysis rests on the notion of potential meaning (Khan, 1974b), which will allow present and absent meanings to meet in the analytic object. But this design is never free. If it cannot claim objectivity, it can claim a homologous connection with that which has eluded our understanding in the present or past. She is her own double.

This concept, which introduces the concept of doubles (Green, 1970), will help us disentangle ourselves from the “talk of the deaf” between those who believe that regression in treatment in its extreme forms is a reproduction of the initial infantile state and that interpretation is a quasi-objective reproduction of the past (whether it is aimed at it is on events or on internal processes), and by those who are skeptical about the possibility of achieving such states or the possibility of objective reconstructions. In reality, regression in treatment is always metaphorical. It is a miniature modified model of the infant state, but it is related to that state by relations of similarity - as well as an interpretation that clarifies its meaning, but would remain ineffective if there were no correspondence relations. It seems to me that the main function of all these repeatedly condemned variants of classical analysis was only to, by experimenting with the analytical setting and making it more flexible, seek and preserve the minimum conditions of symbolization. Each work on symbolization in psychotic or prepsychotic structures says the same thing, but in different terms. The patient equalizes, but does not create symbols (symbolic equation - H. Segal, 1967). He creates an idea of ​​another in the image of himself (projective duplication - Marty et al., 1963). This is also reminiscent of Kohut's (1971) description of mirror transference. The analyst does not represent his mother for the patient, he and there is his mother (Winnicott, 1955). There is no concept of “as if” (Little, 1958). One can also recall the concept of “direct response” (de M'Uzan, 1968). From this we can conclude that it’s all about the innate pattern of dual relationships. On the other hand, we must not forget about the emphasis that is placed on insufficient differentiation between one's own self and the object, on the blurring of boundaries to the point of narcissistic fusion. The paradox is that such a situation only rarely leads to an absolutely chaotic and disorganized state and that the figures of the dual scheme very quickly arise from an undifferentiated whole. To the dual relationship of exchange with the object can be added what I call the dual relationship within the self itself - the mechanisms of double reversion (turn against self, reversion) that Freud said were present before repression (Green, 1967b). Thus, with the idea of ​​a mirror in exchange with a representative of an external object, the idea of ​​an internal mirroring of the self can be combined. All this shows that the ability to reflect is a fundamental human property. This can explain the need for an object as an image of “similar” (see Winnicott’s article on the “mirroring role of the mother”, 1967). For the most part, symbolic structures appear to be innate. However, research in animal communication, as well as psychological or psychoanalytic research, shows that these structures require the intervention of the object in order to move from potential to actual at a given time.

Without disputing the truth of clinical descriptions, we must now consider duality in its context. Even completely disorganized verbalization creates a distance between the self and the object. But we can already assume that from the moment of the emergence of what Winnicott calls the subjective object, a very primitive triangulation between the self and the object is outlined. If we refer to the object, i.e. mother, we must assume that a third person is also present. When Winnicott tells us that “there is no such thing as a baby,” meaning a couple consisting of an infant and maternal care, I am tempted to say that there is no such thing as a “mother and baby” without a father. A child is a sign of the union between mother and father. The whole problem stems from the fact that, even in the most daring imaginary constructions, we seek, through contact with reality, to understand what is happening in the patient's mind when he is alone (i.e. with his mother), without thinking about what is happening between them. And between them we find the father, who is always present somewhere in the unconscious of the mother (Lacan, 1966), even if he is hated or exiled. Yes, the father is absent from this relationship. But to say that he is absent is to say that he is neither present nor non-existent - i.e. that he has a potential presence. Absence is an intermediate position between presence (up to invasion) and loss (up to annihilation). Analysts are increasingly inclined to think that when they verbalize an experience through a message, they are not simply clarifying the message, but reintroducing the potential presence of the father into that moment - not through an explicit reference to him, but through the introduction of a third element in the communicative duality.

When we use the metaphor of a mirror (Freud was the first to use it) - I admit that it may be a distorting mirror - we always forget that the formation of an image-object pair depends on the presence of a third object, i.e. the mirror itself. Similarly, when we talk about dual relations in analysis, we forget about the third element represented by the setting, its homologue. The setting is said to represent holding and mothering. But the “work of the mirror” itself, so obvious in the analysis of difficult cases, turns out to be neglected. One could say that the physical activity of maternal care can only be replaced - metaphorically - by the mental double of this activity, which is reduced by the setting to silence. Only in this way can the situation develop in the direction of symbolization. The psychic functioning of the analyst is comparable to the fantasy activity of maternal reverie (Bion, 1962), which is undoubtedly an integral part of holding and maternal care. Faced with the patient's diffuse discharge expanding and occupying space, the analyst reacts using the capacity for empathy, using the mechanism of elaboration, which involves inhibiting the goal of the drive. Reducing goal inhibition in the patient prevents the experience from being retained in memory; this retention is necessary for the formation of memory traces on which the activity of memorization depends. This is all the more true because détente is imbued with destructive elements that oppose the creation of connections; their attacks are aimed at thought processes. Everything happens as if the analyst were moving towards recording an experience that might not have happened. The idea that emerges from this is that these patients find themselves more tightly caught up in current conflicts (Giovacchini, 1973). The countertransference reaction is what the target might have had.

Drives strive for satisfaction with the help of an object, but where this is impossible due to the inhibition of the goal created by the setting, the path of elaboration and verbalization remains. Why does the patient experience this lack of clarification, elaboration, why should the analyst introduce it? During normal mental functioning, each of the components used by the mental apparatus has a special function and direction (from drive to verbalization), due to which corresponding relationships are formed between various functions (for example, between the identity of perception and the identity of thinking). All mental functioning is built on a series of connections that connect one element to another. The simplest example is the relationship between dreams and fantasy. More complex connections lead to comparisons of primary and secondary processes. These processes are connected by relations not only of opposition, but also of cooperation, because otherwise we would not be able to move from one system to another and transfer, for example, explicit content into latent content. But we know that this becomes possible only through intensive work. The dream work mirrors the work of dream analysis. All this implies that these connections can be established on the basis of a functional distinction: sleep should be considered sleep, thinking - thinking, etc. But at the same time, a dream is not just a dream, thinking is not just thinking, etc. We again discover the dual nature of connection—reunion and/or separation. This is what is called the internal connections of symbolization. They connect different elements of the same structure (in dreams, fantasies, thoughts, etc.) and structures, while simultaneously providing coherence and discontinuity in mental life. In analytic work this implies, on the part of the patient, that he accepts the analyst for what he is and at the same time for what he is not, but is able to maintain this distinction. Conversely, it implies that the analyst can take the same position in relation to the patient.

In the structures we are talking about, it is very difficult to establish internal connections of symbolization because different types are used as “things” (Bion, 1962, 1963). Dreams, without forming an object of psychic reality, are attached to the body (Pontalis, 1974); delineating the boundaries of internal personal space (Khan, 1972c), they have an evacuating function. Fantasies represent compulsive activity to fill a void (Winnicott, 1971) or are taken to be real facts (Bion, 1963). Affects have a representational function (Green, 1973), and actions no longer have the power to change reality. At best, they provide a communicative function, but more often they serve to free the psyche from an unbearably large number of stimuli. Mental functioning as a whole is subject to a model of action that arose as a result of the inability to reduce a huge number of affects; there was either no mental elaboration that could influence them at all, or it was a pitiful semblance of it, a caricature (Segal, 1972). Bion (1963) made great progress in the study of internal mental functioning. The economic point of view is very important here, provided that we do not limit ourselves to quantitative relationships and include the role of the object in the ability to transform. The function of the setting is also to transfer and reduce extreme tension through the analyst’s psychic apparatus in order to ultimately approach objects of thought that can occupy potential space.

Narcissism and object relations

We are now faced with a third topographical model, developed in analytical space in terms of self and object. But while the concept of object belongs to the oldest psychoanalytic tradition, the term self is of recent origin and remains an imprecise concept that is used in a variety of senses (Hartmann, 1950; Jacoson, 1964; Winnicott, 1960a; Lichtenstein, 1965) . The revival of interest in narcissism, which fell into the background when object relations began to be studied, shows how difficult it is to engage in serious research of this kind unless one feels the need for a complementary point of view. This is how the concept of selfhood emerged. However, any serious discussion on this topic must address the problem of primary narcissism. Balen completely refutes it in favor of primary love; this refutation, despite convincing arguments, did not prevent other authors from defending its autonomy (Grunberger, 1971; Kohut, 1971; Lichtenstein, 1964). Rosenfeld (1971b) associated it with the death instinct, but subordinated it to object relations.

The vagueness of ideas about this subject goes back to Freud, who, having introduced the concept of narcissism into his theory, quickly lost interest in it and switched to the death instinct - an idea that, as we know, caused resistance among some analysts. The Kleinian school, which adopted Freud's point of view, seems to me to have increased the confusion by confusing the death instinct with aggression, which was originally projected onto the object. Even if the object is internal, aggression is directed centrifugally.

The revival of the concept of narcissism is not limited to open references to it. There is an ever-increasing tendency to desexualize the analytical field, as if we were continually returning, on the sly, to a limited concept of sexuality. On the other hand, ideas associated with a central non-libidinal ego (Fairbairn, 1952) or a state in which all instinctual properties are denied (Winnicott and his disciples) developed. In my opinion, the whole point is only in the problem of primary narcissism - Winnicott nevertheless noticed this (1971), but did not elaborate. Primary narcissism is the subject of conflicting definitions in Freud's works. In some cases, by this he means the unification of autoerotic drives that contribute to a feeling of personal unity; in others it implies the original cathexis of the undifferentiated ego, where unity is no longer discussed. Other authors rely either on the first definition or on the second. Unlike Kohut, I believe that the primitive narcissistic nature is, of course, indicated by the direction of the cathexis, and the quality of the cathexis (the grandiose self, the mirror transference and the idealization of the object), which ultimately encloses the object in the form of a “self-object”, is secondary . These aspects relate to "unification" narcissism rather than to primary narcissism in the strict sense.

Lewin (1954) reminds us that the desire to fall asleep, i.e. to achieve as complete a state of narcissistic regression as possible dominates the analytic situation, just as the achievement of this state is the ultimate desire in dreams. Dream narcissism is different from dream narcissism. It is significant that the oral triad described by Lewin consists of dual relationships (eg, eating - being eaten) and tends to zero (falling asleep). Winnicott, describing the false self (which can also be considered a double, since it is associated with the formation on the periphery of the self of a self-image that adapts to the desires of the mother), comes to the conclusion in his remarkable article that the true self is silent and isolated in a constant state of non- communications. This is implied by the very title of the article, “Communicating and Non-Communicating Leading to the Study of Certain Opposites” (1936a). Here again the construction of oppositions seems to be associated with a state of non-communication. For Winnicott, this lack of communication is in no way pathological, since it serves to protect what is most essential in the self - that which cannot be communicated, and which the analyst must learn to respect. But it seems that at the end of the work Winnicott goes even further, beyond the protective space where subjective objects take refuge (see his 1971 appendix to the article on transitional objects; Winnicott, 1974), formulating the problem in an even more radical way - recognizing the role and meaning of emptiness. For example: “Emptiness is the precondition of gathering” and “it may be said that existence can only begin from non-existence” (Winnicott, 1974). All this forces us to reconsider Freud's metapsychological hypothesis primary absolute narcissism: It's more about the desire to get as close as possible to the zero degree of arousal, and not about the idea of ​​unity. Clinical practice increasingly convinces us of this, and from a technical point of view, an author like Bion - who is nevertheless a Kleinian - recommends that the analyst strive for a state devoid of memories or desires, a state of the unknowable, which is at the same time the point of departure for every knowledge (1970). This concept of narcissism, although held by a minority of analysts, has always been the object of fruitful reflection, but has focused mainly on the positive aspects of narcissism, taking as its model the state of satiation that accompanies satisfaction and which restores a state of peace. Its negative counterpart has always met with great resistance when it comes to theoretical formulations. However, most authors recognize that the defensive maneuvers of patients with borderline states and psychoses are mainly aimed at combating not only the fears of primary narcissism and the associated threat of annihilation, but also against confrontation with emptiness, which is perhaps the most intolerable condition that causes Patients are afraid: the scars they leave cause a state of eternal dissatisfaction.

In my experience, relapses, outbursts of aggression and periodic collapses after progress indicate the need to maintain a relationship with a bad internal object at all costs. When a bad object loses its power, the only way out seems to be to try to evoke it again, to resurrect it in the form of another bad object: they are like brothers to the first, and the patient can identify with this second object. The point here is not so much the ineradicability of the bad object, or the desire to be sure that you have control over it in this way, but rather the fear that the disappearance of the bad object will force the patient to face the horrors of emptiness, with no possibility of ever replacing it with a good one. object, even if the latter is within reach. The object is bad, but it is good because it exists, even if it does not exist as a good object. The cycle of destruction and re-emergence resembles a multi-headed hydra and seems to follow the model of the theory (as the term was previously used) of object creation, which Freud said can be recognized in hatred. But this compulsive repetition occurs because here the emptiness can only be cathected negatively. Rejection of the object does not lead to a cathexis of personal space, but to a painful longing for nothingness, which drags the patient into a bottomless pit and ultimately leads him to negative hallucinations about himself. The desire for nothingness is something much more than aggression, which is only one of its consequences. This is the true meaning of the death instinct. The absence of his mother serves him, but does it create him? One might ask why we need so much care to prevent its occurrence. Since the object has not provided something, there is only one thing left - a flight into nothingness, as if the state of peace and tranquility that accompanies satisfaction is achieved through something opposite to satisfaction - the non-existence of any hope of satisfaction. It is here that we find a way out of despair, when the struggle stops. Even those authors who especially emphasize the prevalence of aggression have been forced to admit its existence (Stone, 1971). We find traces of it in the psychotic core (pure psychosis) and also in what has recently been called the “pure self” (Giovacchini, 1972b).

Thus we must combine the two consequences of primary narcissism: the positive result of regression after satisfaction and the negative result of creating a death-like peace out of emptiness and nothingness.

In another paper I theorized primary narcissism (Green, 1967b) as a structure, not just a state, in which, along with the positive aspect of object relations (visibility and audibility), whether they are good or bad, a negative aspect (invisibility, silence) also appears. . The negative aspect is created by introjection, which arises at the same time that maternal care creates object relations. It relates to the caregiving structure through negative hallucinations of the mother during her absence. This is the front side of the one whose back side is the hallucinatory realization of desire. The space that thus borders the space of object relations is a neutral space, which can be partly saturated with the space of object relations, but differs from it. It creates the basis for identification, and the relationship maintains the continuity of the sense of existence (forming a personal secret space). On the other hand, it can become empty through the desire for non-existence, through the expression of an ideal, self-sufficiency, which gradually reduces to self-annihilation (Green, 1967b, 1969a). But we should not limit ourselves to terms of space. Radical cathexis also affects time, suspending experience (which is very far from repression) and creating “dead time” in which there can be no symbolization (see “foreclosure” in Lacan, 1966).

The clinical application of this theory can be seen during analysis, and this is what most stimulates the analyst's imagination, since an excess of projections often has a shocking effect. But something of this remains even in the most classical analysis. This forces us to reconsider the issue of silence in treatment. It is not enough to say that, in addition to communicating something, the patient also maintains a silent zone within himself. It must be added that the analysis develops as if the patient delegates this silent function to the analyst, to his silence. However, as we know, in some borderline states ( situation limits) silence can be experienced as the silence of death. This confronts us with technical difficulties - what to choose? At one extreme is the technique proposed by Balint: to try to organize (structure) the experience as little as possible, so that it develops under the benevolent auspices of the analyst with his sensitive ear, in order to encourage the “newbie.” At the other pole is the Kleinian technique: on the contrary, to organize (structure) experience as much as possible through interpretive verbalization. But is there not a contradiction in this: to assert that object relations in the psychotic part of the personality have undergone premature formation, and at the same time to react to this with interpretations that threaten to reproduce this prematureness? Isn't it dangerous to overcrowd the psychic space instead of helping to form a positive cathexis of the empty space? What is structured in this way? The skeleton of the experience or its flesh, which the patient needs to live? With all these reservations, I must admit that the complexity of the cases that Kleinians take on is respectful. Between the two extremes is Winnicott's technique, which gives the setting its proper place, recommends accepting these unformed states and adopting a position of non-intrusion. Through verbalization it supplies the lack of maternal care to encourage the emergence of relationships with the ego and with the object, until the moment comes when the analyst can become a transitional object and the analytic space a potential space of play and a field of illusion. Winnicott's technique is very close to me, I strive for it, although I am not able to master it - all this happens because, despite the risk of fostering dependence, this technique, it seems to me, is the only one that gives the concept of absence its rightful place. A dilemma that contrasts an obsessive presence - leading to delusion ( dйlire) - the emptiness of negative narcissism leading to mental death, is modified by turning delirium into a game, and death into absence, through the creation of a game background of potential space. This forces us to take into account the concept of distance (Bouvet, 1958). Absence is a potential presence, a condition of possibility not only of transitional objects, but also of potential objects necessary for the formation of thinking (see “non-breast” by Bion, 1963, 1970). These objects are not present, they are intangible - they are relational objects. Perhaps the only purpose of analysis is the patient's ability to be alone (but in the presence of the analyst), but in a solitude filled with play (Winnicott, 1958). To believe that the whole point is the transformation of primary narcissism into secondary means showing either excessive rigidity or excessive idealism. It would be more accurate to say that it is a matter of initiating a play between primary and secondary processes, through processes that I propose to call tertiary (Green, 1972): they exist only as relational processes.

Concluding remarks

To conclude is not to close the work, but to open the discussion and give the floor to others. The solution to the crisis in which psychoanalysis finds itself does not lie solely within psychoanalysis itself. But analysis has at its disposal some cards, the layout of which will determine its fate. His future depends on how he can preserve Freud's legacy and integrate it with more recent achievements. For Freud there was no problem of prior knowledge. Undoubtedly, his creative genius was necessary for the invention of psychoanalysis. Freud's works have become the basis of our knowledge. But the analyst cannot practice psychoanalysis and keep it alive if he does not increase knowledge. He must try to be creative within the limits of his abilities. Perhaps this is why some of us push the boundaries of what can be analyzed. It is noteworthy that attempts to analyze these states have culminated in the flourishing of theories of imagination - for some this is too much, i.e. many theories and too much imagination. All these theories try to construct a backstory where there is no hint of history. First of all, it shows that we cannot do without a mythical origin, just as a child creates theories, and even novels, about his birth and infancy. Surely our role is not to imagine, but to explain and transform. However, Freud found the courage to write: “without metapsychological speculation and theorizing—I almost said fantasizing—we cannot take another step forward” (1973a, p. 225). We cannot agree that our theories are fantasies. The best solution would be to agree that they are not an expression of scientific truth, but an approximation to it, its analogue. Then there is no harm in constructing an origin myth, provided we know it is just a myth.

Over the past twenty years, psychoanalytic theory has witnessed significant developments in the genetic perspective (see Lebovici & Soul, 1970, for a discussion of it). I am not going to criticize our psychoanalytic concepts of development, many of which, in my opinion, have adopted the non-psychoanalytic concept of time, but it seems to me that the time has come to pay more attention to the problems of communication, not limiting it to verbal communication, but also taking into account its embryonic forms. This leads me to emphasize the role of symbolization - the object, the analytical setting, as well as non-communication. Perhaps this will allow us to also address the issue of communication between analysts. Lay people are often amazed that people whose job it is to listen to patients are so bad at listening to each other. I hope that this work, which shows that we all face similar problems, will contribute to the ability to listen to others.