Contribution to the Metapsychology of Psychotic Identifications

In manic-depressives the regressive processes do not proceed as far and do not result in "total identifications." They result in fusions of bad or good love-object images with the self-image and with the superego and eventually lead to a severe pathological conflict—or harmony—between the self and the superego. In schizophrenics the ego and superego systems deteriorate to a much more dangerous extent. The conflict between self and superego becomes retransformed into struggles between the self and magic, threatening love-object figures, and the pathological identifications are the expression of alternating introjective and projective processes leading to more or less total fusions between these self- and object images within the deteriorating ego-id. In so far as powerful, lasting object images are reconstituted and reattached to the outside world, the ego-superego conflicts change into homosexual paranoid conflicts, with impulses to kill and fears of being persecuted and destroyed by outside representatives of these terrifying figures.

If I stated in the beginning that the manic-depressive treats himself as if he were the love object, whereas the schizophrenic behaves as if he were or believes himself to be the object, the meaning of this difference has now become clearer. It points to the tendency and effort of the manic-depressive to submit to or to reconcile with, but in any case to keep alive and to cling to, the love object. In contradistinction to this position, the schizophrenic tends either to destroy and replace the object by the self or to let the self be annihilated and replaced by the object. This difference is reflected in the fact that in the preschizophrenic, mechanisms of imitation of the love object play such a paramount role, whereas all the manic-depressive needs and wants is punishment leading to forgiveness, love and gratification from his superego or his love object, respectively.