IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

Back to Table of Contents

mobilisation of an internal defensive operation quarantined the unacceptable thought. These women were both capable of representing the forbidden wish and equally - albeit briefly - able to recognize it as an unacceptable part of themselves. Moreover, their defence of repression did not destroy this representation. The case of Lucy R. is exemplary: she acknowledged under Freud’s questioning that she knew she was in love with her employer but “I didn’t know--or rather I didn’t want to know. I wanted to drive it out of my head and not think of it again; and I believe latterly that I have successed” (p 117). When Freud offered his interpretations, Lucy R. was able to accept them as reasonable accounts of an internal conflict and to distinguish fantasy or wish-fulfillment from external reality. The “third model” describes a very different state of affairs in the pre-history of the individual before his psychic apparatus reaches the sophistication of the Freudian mind as depicted in the “Interpretation of Dreams” (Freud 1900). According to the third model, the mind is not always capable of functioning within its own circle of representations and able to judge them as such. To begin with, it is dependent upon the nebenmensch (Freud, (1950 [1895]), the other-near-by, to ensure that the psyche is not overwhelmed by internal and external excitations and furthermore dependent upon the caretaker’s reliability, reverie, and tempered response to gradually learn to distinguish fantasy from reality. The caretaker’s modulation of stimulation, taking on the function of stimulus barrier, allows the baby to eventually recognize libidinal and aggressive impulses as non traumatic parts of himself. Thus the third model describes a time in the life of each individual before the development of the other two. The third model was discovered last theoretically but describes a situation which is first in the life of the individual. “The Wolf-Man” (Freud, (1918) reveals a quite different kind of mental functioning from Lucy R.’s subjective sensations of “burnt pudding.” In the hallucination of the loss of his finger, the Wolf-man does not recognize the impulse as his own and has projected it outside of himself. His hallucination is not qualified as “subjective.” His later episode of psychosis further demonstrates that he had not reached the “neurotic” one- person level of functioning. Freud’s interpretation along the lines of castration anxiety, linking cutting the finger to cutting the tree had no impact: the Wolfman had not reached the level of a psychic apparatus capable of appreciating the displacing richness of metaphor when referring to drive. From the point of view of the unconscious subject, persons in the neurotic-normal range can be said to have an “internal” life while borderlines and psychotics do not experience either their drives or their fantasies as “internal” (though from the point of view of an outsider they come from inside). In order to move from primary process thinking where wishes are perceived as fulfilled to where wishes can be experienced in a transitional space of truth and untruth, one needs the intervention of a good-enough parent as temporary prosthesis and container. In this model, each human being begins life in a situation of two-person psychic processing where together the baby and the environment are an operative unit and it is only over time with considerable (usually unconscious) psychic work on the part of both parties that a relative one- person intra-psychic autonomy is established. The latter is viewed as an ideal universal development not accomplished by all persons, usually because of deficiencies in the primal

594

Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online