Interpretative Work in Severe Pathologies

Narcissistic transference (Freud, 1914) is a defensive mode of relating with the object that is similar and uniform from individual to individual. Those who mostly recruit this defence, when they are in the therapeutic relationship, seem almost all the same — as if they have suffered a loss in, or rather, lack some development in their process of individuation. Instead, we perceive differently those who in the therapeutic relationship are characterized by the fluid, changing and profoundly individual nature of their neurotic transference. The narcissistic uniformity could derive from the consequences of an externalization of psychic structures, of parts of the Self (Modell, 1984), but I believe it would be more appropriate to view it as the effect of a lack of internalization; as a consequence, the subject remains in a psychological stage in which he has not yet had any possibility to distinguish and discriminate the object from the environment.

The narcissistic personality establishes a bond which corresponds to a state of «non-relatedness», as a defence in order to avoid entering a direct relationship and being involved in the communication of affects. Withdrawing and breaking the links to the real world obviously do not go together with an enhanced solidity of the Self. In fact, they give rise to a decrease in the capacities of the ego for synthesis and unification, along with a further weakening of the barriers between inside and outside, which highlight all the fragility of the narcissistic underpinning and the consequent loss of subjectivity. According to Modell (1990), in reality all the defences, even the intrapsychic ones, considered as resistances in the therapeutic process, always represent a protection against an interpersonal process, directed against the object relation (Modell, 1990). Freud himself, in this author's view, had to consider repression as an interpersonal defence operating against the object relation, since it could be defeated through the