[Undated] The Tropisms. Cogitations

The tropisms may be communicated. In certain circumstances they are too powerful for the modes of communication available to the personality. This, presumably, may be because the personality is too weak or ill-developed if the traumatic situation arrives prematurely. But when this situation does arise, all the future development of the personality depends on whether an object, the breast, exists into which the tropisms can be projected. If it does not, the result is disaster which ultimately takes the form of loss of contact with reality, apathy, or mania. And in this context I include in mania feelings of depression that must be distinguished from the depression of the neuroses. In extreme cases it is an agitated melancholia, but it need not be extreme; the maniacal quality may be so slight as to be recognizable as an obsessive depression, but its essential quality is aggressiveness and hate.

If such an object exists, a breast capable of tolerating projective identifications that are thrust into it (for it is to projective identification in relation to the breast that I have now returned), then the outcome may be supposed to be more favourable, or at least in suspense.

Associated with the strength of the tropisms, but probably secondary to it, is an intolerance of frustration. Psychopathologically this has not the fundamental importance of the tropisms; clinically it presents a grave problem as it jeopardizes the analytic approach since frustration is essential to it – not extrinsic.

The action appropriate to the tropisms is seeking. I have so far considered this activity as it might be thought to relate to murder, parasitism, and creation – the three tropisms. Thus, considered individually, the tropisms are seen to issue in seeking (1) an object to murder or be murdered by, (2) a parasite or a host, (3) an object to create or by which to be created. But taken as a whole, and not individually, the action appropriate to the tropisms in the patient who comes for treatme