Diegophrenia and Genius

The infant looks to its mother for love. When maternal love is given freely, the infant develops normally. When he is severely denied love, as by maternal psychosis, he suppresses the perceptions of his own ego and functions with the distorted perceptions of his mother. Her hallucinations and delusions become the reality for him, instead of his own views and judgment. Her unreal world becomes incorporated and superimposed as an oppressive negative ego, while his own becomes largely suppressed in an attempt to win or retain the mother's love and approval or to avoid her anger. He operates then with two egos: one, his suppressed ego and the other, the ego of the introjected mother. He suffers from a split ego, and his predominant symptom is ambivalence. And he is ambivalent about everything. He ambivalates between being good and bad. He submits and rebels. He says yes and no. He is heterosexual and homosexual. He alternates between neurosis and psychosis. He is clear and unclear. He is reasonable and unreasonable, rational and irrational. He is diegophrenic. Because the diegophrenogenic mother is persecutory from birth on, the most serious damage is done by two years of age. Therefore, associated with the split ego character, we find oral, anal, sadomasochistic, homosexual, and paranoid psychopathology. If the mother is absent or dies in childbirth, the father, an older sibling, an uncle or aunt—any other who assumes the caretaking role—becomes the surrogate for the mother and plays the wholesome and diegophrenogenic roles. When the mother is merely neurotic, her distortions of reality less imposing, the infant is less victimized, does not become so diegophrenically disturbed, and exhibits only split ego maneuvers. He is still subject to ambivalence, but demonstrates that more ego resources are available to him than in the case of the diegophrenic.

I have found it to be useful in treatment to deal first with this split ego problem before attempting to analyze any other