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.
THE CONFUSION, DUE TO PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION (Klein, 1955), between the mother's breasts and a little girl's buttocks (Meltzer, 1967) can, under certain circumstances, become such a satisfactory solution to a multiplicity of infantile, and later, social anxieties that it may constitute the mainspring of character formation, the leading quality of which may be a charming, but compulsive, generosity. The economic problem of managing to be giving-to-others without completely depleting oneself tends, however, in such people, to promote a certain fragility in their adaptation which may break down in various ways. In several patients, over a number of years, I have recognized this configuration to play a role in such diverse symptoms as depressive breakdown, anorexia, diarrhoea, manic or hypomanic reactions, examination anxiety, pseudo-nymphomania, suicidal rumination and others. In this paper I wish to focus on the character structure and the means of its fragile maintenance. To this end I will try to describe the analytic experience with a young woman in the fourth year of whose analysis we came across most convincing evidence of the deep and lasting effect upon her of her mother having developed a transient breast abscess in the first month of feeding which was incised and drained and left a small round scar.
Mrs G. had been the beautiful child of a beautiful mother who had "the best legs in the village" and a magnificent head of hair, but the feeding of four children had ruined her breasts, which seemed to my patient quite totally collapsed compared to her own. She herself had been unable to breast feed her children, to her great surprise as she had looked forward to this experience with great expectation and confidence that had crumbled into overwhelming anxiety and doubt the moment her first baby was