The Experience of Emptiness in Narcissistic and Borderline States: I. Deficiency and Ego Defect Versus Dynamic-Defensive Models

Emptiness has been viewed by many authors from a number of different theoretical perspectives one of which can be broadly described under the categories of libidinal deficiency and defence. Winnicott and Green have taken the fixation point for the deficiency back to the most archaic absolute primary narcissism; whereas Fairbairn and Guntrip speak of a fixation at the oral-incorporative phase and Isaacs, following Klein, view it as arising at the stage of oral sadism or cannibalism (i.e. the depressive position) as well as the earlier paranoid position. All of these authors place the deficiency at different points during the first year or so of life, involving libidinal drives, aims and object.

During the same time period, Winnicott, Bion and Green speak of the absence or deficiency of mnemonic traces or mental representations which link inchoate drive trajectories with cognitive perceptual structures and thus eventually interfere with secondary process verbalizations. Similarly, Giovacchini feels that the primitive level of organization of the self precludes any cognitive-affective need states or feelings, since these patients do not know who they are and thus what they need. Thus all these authors emphasize deficiency during the particular stages of an essentially undifferentiated psyche-soma in which distinct drives, objects, cognitive-perceptual and affective structures are still to develop. Emptiness then is the subjective expression of the intrapsychic state to which it is equivalent, i.e. of missing or absent structure or the introjection of something missing.