You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This small volume is deceptive in its packaging as it contains (in small print much of the time, unfortunately for the eyes) a tremendous quantity of erudite lore beginning with Freud's earliest implications and hints about the importance and meaning of identification in its preliminary conceptions to the central notion of projective identifications and their use in therapy. This is the culminating theme of this book.
This theme is early stated in referring to what Freud called “reminiscences” as “mental representation of the identification with parents displaced and symbolized to give the patient's ego relief from the anxiety created in interpersonal relationships.”
In the course of this wide ranging survey of the literature, including the experimental work of Sarbin and Cantril as well as the conventional psychoanalytic ideas, she pulls together the notion of suggestibility, role playing, fantasy, and defensive identification. She gives Melanie Klein credit for the term projective identification, as a basic dynamic in borderlines.
In developing her thesis further that the borderline patient is characterized by defensive sado-masochistic fantasies involved with denying identifications with parental figures, she explores the role of depression. There is a mild chronic depression that is most persistent in borderline patients. This functions predominantly as an outlet for hostility, partly directed at himself and partly towards the source of hurt and humiliation he has experienced. Wolberg quotes Livingston's recent paper that the masochistic defense against the parent figure may be another expression of the patient's refusal to mourn the early parent. She says, “When we recognize that out of stubbornness and negativism, the patient refuses to mourn the fact that his parent was rejecting and that he missed his parent and wanted him, it enables us to understand the negative transference.”
As part of her thorough study she also makes an excellent and detailed review of the