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“I so desperately want you to like me that I am willing to do anything … I will sacrifice myself in any way I can … to have you like me is my deepest dream … but I am sure if I express to you who I really am you will never want me again.”
I have seen this patient for several years now in twice-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He typifies a group of patients in whom dependency, masochism, and certain narcissistic character traits seem to group together to produce a particular transference profile. I am calling these patients the “forgotten heroes,” as an attempt to capture the inner experience of individuals who feel themselves to be important martyrs who have been undeservedly passed over.
During the early years of life, an infant must slowly integrate a sense of well-being, calm, and simple mastery. Initiative and autonomy are budding aspects of the self (Erikson, 1950) that evolve within an impressionable grouping of early mind and body experiences. Appropriate reflective responses from the primary object and the opportunity for idealization of the object are but a few of the relational precursors to internalization and integration of important ego functions. Projective identification is the most basic method with which the infant communicates and begins to construct early object relationships, which in turn form psychic structures. These developmental pathways include what Kohut has termed the “mirroring self-objects” that sustain the self's wishful fantasies by accepting and confirming the grandness, goodness, and wholeness of the self (Kohut, 1971; Moore and Fine, 1990). Successfully achieved and collectively grouped, these are all the elements of an ample and healthy internal self representation.
Inherent in normal parenting functions are subtle, but dynamically important ingredients to the human developmental cycle. I am speaking of the basic functions of soothing, containing, organizing, stimulating, understanding, inviting, holding, and calming of the infa