Beyond the Oral Stage1

The stages that precede the oral organization may be studied through sleep and dreams, in certain psychoses such as Kanner's Infantile Autism (1), and in experiments in prenatal behaviour. In psycho-analytic research the material specially available consists in the regressions that appear upon intense frustrations or difficulties in oral working-through.

Owing to lack of time we cannot present the analysis of a patient where this material was particularly visible. The vicissitudes of her prenatal regression upon meeting with serious difficulties in working-through the oral situation led to a marked intensification of her exhibitionism and scoptophilia. She had adopted three fundamental solutions for facing her oral difficulties, to wit:

• i.Regression to more primitive forms of prenatal incorporation connected with archaic visual perception of internal images.

• ii.Oral acceptance dependent on the unconscious fantasy of a frustrating or toxic breast to which she remains fixated and which conditions her addiction to drugs and alcohol.

• iii.Precocious passage from relationship with the breast to that with the penis with consequent enhancement of masculine identification, etc.

Besides the referred type of clinical material the study of Kanner's Infantile Autism through the analytic approach made by Margaret Mahler (2) and Rodrigué (3) and in our own cases was very useful. The fact stressed by Rodrigué, that the autistic ego was more integrated than the schizophrenic ego, depends on the regression to the prenatal ego, i.e. the autistic ego is prior to the birth trauma. The birth trauma provokes the dissociation of the ego and the consequent schizoparanoid position.

In mythology there is an interesting reference to the prenatal nucleus of the ego and the characteristics of its vision. Such is the legend of Ulysses and the giant Polyphemus, the Cyclops. In the legend of Polyphemus it is essential that Ulysses should blind the giant so as to escape from the cave. In this way