Disturbance of Ego Functions of Speech and Abstract Thinking

I have suggested that disconnected speech and disturbances in abstract thinking serve many defensive needs and may have their roots in the fantasy of the mother-child single body image. The illogical speech does not permit communication, social relations, and the expression of the affective states of love and hate. The fusion fantasy facilitates a significant impairment of the ego in the operation and development of the function of secondary-process thinking by blocking the introjection of the image of mother's body. With the need to deny separation from mother, it is not possible for the child to see her, to have her become an object for identification. It also permits denial of the reality of the femaleness of mother. The psychotic or borderline mother who blandly exhibits her nakedness to her son throughout his life to maturity undoubtedly imposes upon him the need to deny what he had seen and reinforces the operation of an archaic mechanism of denial. This in turn fosters the fantasy of fusion with her. The failure to incorporate, to introject, and to identify with the mother damages the ego functions of speech and thought processes as they involve abstract thinking.