The Process of Change in a Woman Who Idealized Men

In this paper I shall examine the process of change during the six-year analysis of a woman who formed fusional love relations with men she idealized The unfolding of her analysis is described with a view to showing how change took place. After exploring how her love relationships reflected disturbances in her early object relations and in the maturation of her ego ideal, I will offer some thoughts on how I believe psychic change came about and what enabled her to move from fusional needs and idealizing relationships to an acceptance of otherness, imperfection, and ambivalence.

The psychoanalytic exploration of narcissism as a modality of object relationship opened with Freud's (1914) conception of a narcissistic type of object choice, where the love object stood for the subject or an aspect of the subject a person may love what he himself is, was, would like to be, or someone who was once part of himself. Freud noted that the narcissistic object choice could contribute to self-esteem regulation if it represented an aspect of the subject's ego ideal. the subject “then seeks a way back to his narcissism … by choosing a sexual ideal after the narcissistic type which possesses the excellences to which he cannot attain. This is the cure by love” (1914, p. 101) A. Reich later (1953, 1960) described how some women dealt with the narcissistic trauma of castration by forming ties to men who represented their own unrealized masculine ambitions and ideals. She felt that the narcissistic object choice could constitute an archaic mode of self-esteem regulation, in those cases where there was a lack of differentiation between ego and ego ideal, and where longings for omnipotence were not outgrown. Investigating women