Functions of Denial Fantasy

In classical psychoanalysis, the mechanism of denial is thought of as a defensive avoidance of acknowledging some condition of external reality because of the anxiety-laden implications and subjectively anticipated dangers involved in such an acknowledgment. One external situation which is a particularly frequent source of denial processes is childhood object loss. If a child has reached a developmental phase in which he is capable of fully understanding and registering the reality of a loss, various denial operations may nevertheless occur when an appropriate model for mourning is missing and/or when the tie to the lost object has been excessively ambivalent. This essay concerns the experiences of a patient whose difficulties were largely traceable to denial fantasies elaborated in reaction to the loss of his mother when he was eight years of age.

One of the most salient presenting symptoms in this case was what the patient described as a terrible feeling of “cosmic loneliness.” This was a recurring emotional state within which he felt himself condemned to be eternally alone, as if locked inside a box floating in the vacuum of infinite space. Somehow inherent in this dreadful feeling was the notion that no relief from it was to be found through contacts with other human beings. Thus, although the patient seemed to have many close friends, his relationships with them offered only transitory distractions rather than the genuine comfort which he desired. Paradoxically coexisting with the feeling of being cosmically alone was a fantasy that an invisible “benevolent force” guarded his safety and watched over his life in a protective manner. He tended always to attribute the many positive events of his life to the interventions of the benevolent force rather than taking credit for them himself. In general, he experienced himself not as an active agent guiding the course of his own existence, but instead as the passive recipient of a kind and watchful destiny.

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