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A curious phenomenon resides in the treatment of regressed patients. In the unconscious, sometimes insistent, desire to be a baby, there is more an impulse towards death than one towards life. I have come to think about the problem as a severe split between two parts of the personality at odds with each other: a healthy, but largely silenced baby trying to grow and a traumatized baby who wants desperately to retreat inside the mother, and to harbor itself in this inside space forever. What interferes with the impulse towards growth is a belief that any change brings catastrophic separation and abandonment. This film essay on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gives me the opportunity to explore my views about a particular aspect of regression — one which involves idealization as a defense against separation, anxiety, frustration, and loss.
Regressed patients often have early trauma in their histories and do not easily accept the reality of an analytic relationship. Exquisitely sensitive to every nuance of separateness, they fiercely cling to an idealized version of the analyst — which is, of course, a defensive organization. The analyst is expected to be exclusively theirs, never leaving and never subjecting them to agonizing anxieties brought on by space between hours, weekend breaks, vacations, or jealous rivalries with other patients. Any inevitable separation is experienced as desertion. The analyst is felt to turn away coldly; to be completely gone; as good as dead. What comes into play is another early pathological defense: the caricature of a little grown-up, one who needs no one. Protecting themselves from the threat of needing an absent object, these patients are ‘old’ before they have even started to grow up. The movie version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button speaks directly to these observations and to an important psychoanalytic question: how is regression, as a defensive organization against unbearable anxiety, related to the death instinct?
Psycho