On Survival

In dictionaries, survival is defined as “the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances,” and as “an object or practice that has continued to exist from an earlier time” (Oxford Languages, 2022). In psychoanalysis survival cannot be easily defined, as it seems to correspond to a spectrum of meanings, both clinical and metapsychological. The more or less perilous aftermath of severe psychic trauma, often consisting of a predominance of mechanisms of omnipotent avoidance of psychic reality, could be identified as a common denominator in most of these meanings.

According to Freud, helplessness is the prototype of the traumatic situation (Freud, 1926). Freud also suggested that loss of or separation from the object are at the origin of overwhelming anxiety and pain (Perelberg, 2015). One should not limit loss only to physical loss, but mainly to a lack of containing on the part of the object. Survival mechanisms would aim at denying or avoiding helplessness, at the cost of a restricted relation with internal and external reality. Symington sustains that survival as a psychic aim is somehow the opposite of freedom and creativity (Symington, 1999).

Winnicott established another dimension of survival in the frame of the early subject-object relationship. By coining the concept of survival of the object (1969), Winnicott, puts stress “on what the object is like” -that is, on whether it does “retain its character” (Abram & Hjulmand, 1996) and its containing function in the face of destructive attacks (or raw communications of need that may be perceived as destructive attacks) from the subject. Survival of the object would mean that the path for a transitional space and for the gradual acceptance of the object being out of the area of the subject's omnipotent control is open. This type of object survival can of course be a paradigm for therapeutic work with survivors of trauma.

Concerning the role of the an