Idealization and Interpretation

APPROACHING THE CONCEPT OF idealization from an interpersonal psychoanalytic perspective we might feel that we are in inhospitable waters; this is not a concept that would come easily to the pragmatic, positivist orientation of Harry Stack Sullivan. There is much in Sullivan's work which would, in effect, be counter to this concept of idealization; for example, his emphasis on the illusion of unique individuality and the parataxic and defensive aspects of the individual's view of themself as special. This aspect of his thinking, eventuated in his comforting and egalitarian notion, that "we are all more simply human then otherwise." The thrust of so much of Sullivan's efforts was to help those who felt separate and special by virtue of their sense of inadequacy and parataxic confusion become members of the social community, able to engage in cooperative and collaborative actions. Yet, in our efforts to help the patient move from a parataxic view of the world which, infused with anxiety and primitive fears, to a less anxious, consensual and more objective view of the world, we may miss something of value which is associated with this contemporary notion of idealization.

In psychoanalytic literature, the concept of idealization seems to be used in three different ways, depending upon the individual writer's theoretical orientation. The traditional and ego psychological view is that idealization is a defensive function which is an active or enhanced form of denial. From a Kleinian perspective, idealization is attributed to the early developmental organization of perception in which splitting, the dominant organizational principle, results in a perception of objects as all good or all bad. Idealization of objects, is an aspect of the splitting mechanisms of the paranoid-schizoid position and continues until there is a moderation of aggression and the integration of good and bad objects which occurs in the depressive position. From either the ego psychological posi