Reflections on Entitlement and Idealization

THIS WEEKEND'S PRESENTATION OF papers on entitlement and on idealization offers a wide range of scholarly inquiry and of clinical experience. To provide a springboard for additions and modifications in my response, I am summarizing the thrust of these papers as follows:

Dale Ortmeyer gives an overview of the psychoanalytic thinking concerning aspects of idealization, especially in terms of transference, and includes Sullivan's often overlooked statements concerning the developmental function of pre- and adolescent idealization of peers and of projections of the person-to-be.

Dale himself presents an interpersonalist approach in two case vignettes in which he as analyst compensates for the failure of two fathers in meeting the idealization needs of a daughter and a son. This enables them to make free life-enhancing career decisions in their identity.

Harriet Field describes the idealization transference of three patients and her countertransference which reveal her compassion and supportiveness. Her position also is that her approach is interpersonalist.

Anita Tenzer uses Ibsen's play, John Gabriel Borkman, to make vivid entitlement carried to the point of grandiosity by the protagonist, and the henchman's attempt to obtain validation from Borkman for his entitlement to esteem. Anita describes the interpersonal interaction to compensate for their shame and failure.

Mark Blechner addresses entitlement with an ironic comment on present day litigiousness and proceeds to discuss Freud's austerity concerning frustrating the analysand's expression of needs, in order to have the latter become more aware of their origin. By contrast, Winnicott considers the gratification of such needs as healthy.

Mark presents his clinical experience with the analyst's responding with nurturance for schizophrenic patients, who were hardly aware of their missed entitlement. There was also a case