Behind the Mask of the Persecutor: The Idealized Selfobject

The patient whose case will be discussed below once said: “I remember an old college professor telling us that love and hate are very close. Well, I know for sure that love can turn to hate. But I don't think, I don't know, if hate can turn to love.” In its essence, this paper is about just such a transformation.

Kohut (1971) suggested that it would be valuable to general theoretical understanding to compare and contrast “the relatively healthy elaboration of a narcissistically cathected omnipotent and omniscient, admired and idealized, emotionally sustaining parent imago in the transferences formed by patients with narcissistic personality disturbances with the all-powerful persecutor and manipulator of the self in the psychoses: the influencing machine whose omnipotence and omniscience have become cold, unempathic, and non-humanly evil” (p. 8). What follows is a much more limited, though related endeavor: to explore one particular, central, vivid experience of a patient that appears to demonstrate the rather sudden transformation of a fantasized persecutor into the sharply focused image of an