The Infanticidal Attachment in Schizophrenia and Dissociative Identity Disorder

Why do some individuals become schizophrenic? Why do others develop depression? Why do others, still, become anorexic or bulimic? How do certain people become alcoholic or drug-addicted? And why do some commit arson, rape, paedophilia, murder, and other violent crimes?

Although biopsychiatrically-inclined colleagues have attempted to identify a genetic basis for all of the aforementioned clinical manifestations, they have not yet succeeded in doing so. But, do those of us with a more psychogenic persuasion have a better answer?

Few psychological workers have devoted as much thought and care to the question of the choice of symptom or the choice of neurosis than Professor Sigmund Freud. Throughout his long and productive career as a psychoanalytical researcher and clinical writer, Freud strove constantly to understand what he could about the origins of the neurotic and psychotic illnesses with which his patients presented in his consulting room. His early letters to the Berlin otorhinolaryngoloist Dr Wilhelm Fliess attempt to establish different aetiological-developmental pathways for a whole host of traditional psychiatric conditions ranging from the anxiety neuroses to paranoia (e.g., Freud, 1896b). During the course of Freud's medical career, he would, from time to time, link the onset of a particular symptom cluster to sexual trauma (e.g., Freud, 1895, 1896a), or, he might postulate that specific symptoms result from transformations of instinctual urges, or from excitations of erotogenic bodily zones. For instance, in his landmark essay on ‘Charakter und Analerotik’, better known in English as ‘Character and anal erotism’, Freud (1908b, p. 175) concluded his essay thus:

We ought in general to consider whether other character-complexes, too, do not exhibit a connection with the excitations of particular erotogenic zones. At present I only know of the intense ‘burning’ ambition of people who earlier suffered from

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enuresis. We can at any rate lay down a formula for t