Psychic Retreats Revisited: Binding Primitive Destructiveness, or Securing the Object? A Matter of Emphasis?

This paper argues that a potent cause of impasse in analysis/psychotherapy is the fear of annihilation by uncontained affect, and that the ‘retreat’ (Steiner 1993) to which the patient has recourse is often prompted by such anxiety rather than by paranoid-schizoid or depressive anxiety. Such retreats are marked by defensive attempts to occupy the object, to abolish separation, and to avoid emotional links that are feared will bring on the overwhelming affect related to attachment failures from the past. Thus, analysis itself is perceived unconsciously to be the disaster against which the patient is likely to implement an impasse. This approach offers an alternative to the concept of retreat as described by Steiner (Steiner 1993), but is not intended to replace it. Either model may be indicated clinically in different circumstances. The author introduces the theories of Armando Ferrari and Ignacio Matte Blanco, both consonant with Ogden's theory of the autistic-contiguous position and offering alternative explanations for the clinical phenomena. The technical implications of these considerations are then discussed in relation to some of the clinical material from Steiner's (2000) paper, ‘Containment, enactment and communication’.