Messianic Projects and Early Object-Relations

AN interesting clinical problem is posed by a type of patient whose relationships are dominated by a repetitive need to act out dramatic object-rescuing messianic projects. Intrinsic to this type of character formation (which we believe cuts across diagnostic categories) is that the messianic project must inevitably come to grief. What follows are some speculations as to the origins of this characterological pattern in the vicissitudes of early object-relations.

We have found in the childhood history of such patients a profound disappointment by a love object with whom there had been a strong positive tie. Such a disappointment may be occasioned by any circumstance which signifies to the child a radical and permanent disruption of the original positive relationship (e.g., a loved parent dies or deserts the child, or abruptly assumes rejective attitudes toward the child, etc.). In the face of such a traumatic disappointment the child attempts to preserve the lost positive tie in fantasy, by splitting off and repressing the disappointing aspects of the object and maintaining an internalized relationship with the now idealized object. Despairing over his loss, the child experiences the idealized object of his fantasy as his only salvation and hence the object becomes endowed with rescuing qualities. A fantasy relationship of this kind however is an unstable structure