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The present paper informally explores ways in which maternal abandonment gestures, especially punitive ones, threaten the integrity of mental and physical self relations and are frequently associated with suicidal urges. By punitive abandonment threats I mean the mother's active use of separation to menace and subdue the child. In certain cases the mother may pack her own or the child's bags and mimic leaving. She may actually leave home or, worse, take the child out and leave him or her in a strange place all alone. The child learns to suppress feelings, lest the mother terrorize the child with the threat of being without her. In the last of the three cases (Dave) presented here, the mother's periodic leaving was not explicitly presented as a punishment, but, we will see, the contextual dynamics had a similar effect.
For present purposes the meaning of mental and physical self must be taken loosely. In phenomenological terms I mean basically what Federn (1953) sought to convey by such terms as “body ego feeling” and “psychic ego feeling.” This involves a felt perception of experiences which vary along the “embodiment-disembodiment” spectrum, e.g., the I-feeling associated with body sensations/emotions and the I-feeling connected with thinking-observing. This felt awareness has been expressed in a number of phenomenological and structural concepts by various psychoanalytic writers. These include Freud's and Greenson's (1967) body ego and observing ego, Jacobson's (1971) mental self and physical self, Kohut's (1971) mind-self and body-self (a “mind-mind” and “body-mind”), Elkin's (1972) body ego and transcendental ego, and Winnicott's (1958, 1971) psyche-soma [“soma”