Isolation1

Rosen opened the panel by pointing out the need for further re-examination of our concepts in relation to defense mechanisms. He listed as some of the topics for the consideration of the panel the elementary or compound nature of isolation, its relationship to other defenses, its proper identification, its genetic origins and precursors, its normal functions, and the special technical problems with which it is associated. He quoted Dostoevsky's opening paragraph from "Notes from Underground" as an illustration of the humility with which the psychologist must lay claim to any new discovery in the face of artistic creation.

Marasse reviewed the historical development of the concept of isolation in psychoanalytic theory. Freud's early description of the isolation process is found in the paper on the "Defense Neuropsychoses" (1894), the posthumously published "Project, " and in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud's use of the concept in his clinical papers, notably the Rat Man, "Leonardo, " etc., and finally Freud's later formulations regarding defense mechanisms in general and isolation in particular in The Problem of Anxiety were described. In this particularly significant work the consideration of the mechanism of isolation brought Freud back to the concept of defense which in his own words he had abandoned thirty years previously.

The contributions of the last two decades, the era of ego psychology, were then reviewed. This included Fenichel's contributions, both his clinical writings on isolation and his brilliant summary of analytic thinking in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, and the more recent papers by Rapaport, Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Eissler, Rosen, and Jacobson. This led to the consideration of isolation as an intrasystemic process closely related to the other intrasystemic defenses, particularly denial and undoing. The question of the role of repression in relation to isolation, its ontogenesis and its function in normal thinking processes