A Discussion of the Paper by Samuel Atkin on 'A Borderline Case: Ego Synthesis and Cognition'

I should like to begin my discussion by stressing certain similarities in the effects of this patient's defective ego functioning, i.e. her inability to synthesize, on both her object relations and on her own identity, giving particular attention to typical ways in which she represents herself and her objects as well as to the quality and quantity of her instinctual investments in these representations.

Her failure to perceive her objects as realistic, complete persons is very striking. Not only does she frequently distort and misrepresent their characteristics, she also consistently omits many of these, though not always the same ones. Within any given image of the object only similar, homogeneous qualities are included, apparently selected according to her predominant feeling toward the object at that time. Thus she may refer to an object as sexually fascinating, potentially murderous, absolutely adoring or totally despicable, without including these contradictory qualities into any inclusive picture of the object. Perception of contradictory characteristics provokes destruction and disappearance of the current image and the creation of a new, internally cohesive one, immediately accepted as the true representation of the object.

One cannot accurately describe her object relations without taking into account the effect of her fragmentation of time. Her defective capacity for integration is particularly evident in her inability to accept the continuity of time. This failure seems to be used, however, as a power by which she imposes her will on time and on her objects by making the past and the future non-existent, thus permitting her to separate her objects into a disconnected series of part-object images, each of which is then treated separately as though it represented a whole object.

When we look at her ways of representing herself we find exactly the same, not different, patterns. She presents to the analyst—and to herself—a series of discontinuous, interna