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DURING THE PAST DECADE, THERE seems to be a growing consensus in the literature that the major function of primitive defense systems in severely regressed individuals is to maintain some organization in a psyche where there is a lack of integration, unity, and harmony (Guntrip, 1969). In the case of borderline patients, this adaptation has been characterized in terms of a fixation at a pre-oedipal level of identification of the ego with an object. Fairbairn, 1954; Kernberg, 1975; and Jacobsen, 1954, among others tend to view recurrent indications of splitting, dispersal of diffuse affects and paralyzing emptiness, that have been observed in these individuals, as an outgrowth of insoluble emotional dilemmas created by panic attacks occurring within the matrix of early object-attachments. These preverbal events have been conceptualized in terms of the grim choice the offspring of the not-good-enough mother faces, namely, experiencing overwhelming, threatening affects as a separate entity (which results in feelings of aloneness and isolation) versus becoming over-identified and merging with the need system and mood states of the significant other for the sake of protection against disorganizing ego experiences.
Current psychoanalytic thinking formulates this fundamental conflict as follows: The fear of loss of a unified sense of identity coupled with anticipated withdrawal of attachments by internalized and real love objects leads to a profound struggle between the wish for fusion of the ego with the object and the opposing wish for separation of the ego from object (Guntrip, 1969). To put this in somewhat different terms, the ego, rather than being an orphan, acts "crazy" in the name of the parent, renounces its own phenomenological world, blends into the parent's attitudes, and even accommodates, when necessary, by becoming a hate