Updike: Fiction and the Writer's Access to Contradictory Ego States

Epitomizing the work of Fairbairn (1952) and Van der Waals (1952), Kernberg (1987) observes that when weakened defense mechanisms permit once-repressed materials to become conscious, the result is not the expression of pure drives or drive derivatives, but rather the emergence of internalized object relations reflecting the influence of primitive sexual and aggressive drives. The result, as Kernberg points out, is the presence in full consciousness of extremely regressive id material of the sort that normally undergoes repression. This phenomenon is seen not only in severely disturbed patients but occurs in normal people who have temporarily suspended normative role functions. Although Kernberg identifies the mechanisms of splitting and dissociation as responsible for the surfacing of such atavistic fantasies and behaviors in normals, he attributes these mechanisms to the effects of group pressure (1987, p. 22).

Without questioning the powerful influence of groups in the dissolution of the defense mechanisms of the ego, I would like to suggest that the writing of fiction, even by writers who show no trace of borderline personality organization, much less psychosis, involves access to deep layers of the unconscious and to discordant ego states reflecting contradictory internalized object relations. In keeping with Kernberg's interpretation of borderline conditions, such writers might be expected to have full awareness of the cognitive continuity of their contradictory ego states, while possibly lacking “a sense of affective continuity and an integrated conception of the self” (Kernberg, 1987, p. 12). Similarly, such writers may be fully aware of powerful, unacceptable impulses, that is, ego states that are incompatible with the self concept and internalized superego functions. Unlike borderlines and psychotics, fiction writers are able to deliberately personify split-off self-representations by turning them into characterizations and integrating them thematically. Par