You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I was interested to hear that Prof. Renata Gaddini has found intermediate states between projection and projective identification and that she thinks these represent a variety of clinical conditions which may be placed between borderline and psychotic. It would be of great value if she published the clinical characteristics of these intermediate states.
I am not sure whether Gaddini is making a statement or asking a question when she speaks of fantasies "in" the body which have a defensive nature and appear much earlier than the capacity for symbolization. Fantasying is, in my view, a mental operation that requires the capacity for evoking representations outside the contexts in which they emerged originally. That, it seems to me, clearly implies having the capacity to differentiate one subjective state from another state, represented by the fantasy. This process can, I believe, be called a primitive form of symbolic thinking. In addition, projective identification, as I mentioned in my paper, implies having the capacity to differentiate self from nonself, at least in the area of interaction where projective identification operates.
I believe that there may be very primitive defensive functions that do not require symbolic thinking. For example, a mother's disapproving facial expression when the infant is experiencing pleasurable bodily sensations may compromise the integration of a basic pleasurable affect patter, even though a sophisticated cognitive elaboration of the "meaning" of mother's facial expression is absent. Direct "wiring" of inborn affect dispositions and their associative integration may become distorted, and only later on, in an object-relations matrix, acquire defensive functions.