Notes on the Psychoanalytic Management of Archaic Transferences

ONE OF THE MAIN AREAS OF RECENT EXPANSION in the scope of psychoanalysis has been in the direction of the systematic therapeutic handling of personality disturbances that have their genesis prior to the establishment of an infantile neurosis in the oedipal phase of development (cf. Kohut, 1971); (Kernberg, 1975); (Settlage, in preparation). In spite of general agreement about the capacity of such patients to experience intense archaic object relations within the analytic transference—experiences that presumably involve the repetition of certain crucial infantile transactions with the original caretakers—these syndromes have continued to be referred to by Freud's terminology of 1914, as "narcissistic." It seems clear, however, that in current usage the latter word has lost its original meaning—that of turning sexual cathexis away from others and onto oneself—without arriving at a consensus about what it refers to in phrases such as "narcissistic personality disturbance."

Although an exhaustive survey of the various points of view on this matter would take us too far afield from the limited aims of this clinical paper (but see Moore, 1975); (Stolorow, 1975);