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I am writing these comments with thanks to the author who has submitted a most interesting article on her work and her thinking with her female patient. It seems fairly obvious that the therapist is a woman. When I read her first sentence, I found myself, as a Middle Group/Relational psychotherapist, thinking about Mervyn Glasser's core complex (1985), citing the difficulties in finding the right space in
relationships - and also about Balint's concepts of ocnophils and philobats (Balint, 1959). These ideas are borne out in her subsequent material.
Glasser postulates that within a relationship an infant has ‘intense longing for a condition of satiety and security achieved through fusion with the mother, a state which is expressed by the adult as a longing for ‘union’, ‘merging’, ‘at-one-ness’ (p. 408), but this fusion can lead to fears of complete annihilation. Then flight occurs and with it a sense of isolation and abandonment. The move in and out is repeated and a vicious circle occurs.
Balint (1959) makes a division between ocnophils, those who cling in relationships, and philobats who seek wide open spaces (Gerrard, 1994). In brief, the philobat is a person who relies on himself, who finds objects a nuisance or even a threat. In contrast, the ocnophil needs objects, cannot live without them and when in danger will cling to a firm and protective object, although alongside this is the constant fear that the object will let him down. It may drop him or even abandon him. His clinging is an expression of fear and also a defence against it. The ocnophil denies the independence of the object by clinging. He and the object are one - inseparable. His problem is, however, that by clinging he is not satisfying his original need - which was, in fact, to be held safely. Both ocnophils and philobats have reacted to the traumatic discovery of the separate existence of objects.
Maria is seen by the therapist as ‘totally psychically merged with her mother’ and then later ‘an inte