Bargains, Treaties, and Delusions

Certain patients appear to have no interest or feeling for the analyst and are highly resistant to exploring that apparent void. If these patients stay in treatment, they slowly reveal fixed delusions about themselves and their objects. Patient and analyst discover inner dramas in the form of magical fantasies by which the patient lives. These delusions form mental systems that are either paranoid or masochistic, but always grandiose. Both are a last ditch effort to avoid a sense of annihilation. A tightly woven inner mantra gives them specific guidelines on what to expect from themselves and their objects. These borderline, schizoid, or functional psychotic patients are within the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1946), yet they often exhibit intense depressive anxieties (Klein, 1935) about having injured or destroyed their objects. They seem to have one foot in one psychic region and the other foot in another, while barely managing to cope in either.

Close examination of their fantasies reveals the introjection of a maternal object felt to be demanding, controlling, and manipulative, yet fragile and brittle. The child takes in this object as a way of dealing with its persecutory nature and to save it from the ego's hostility. The ego takes it in with the hope of patching it back together as a more ideal and nurturing object. The child identifies with this threatening presence and a complex psychic reaction occurs. Certain aspects of the object feel seductively powerful and attractive. Other aspects of the object feel frightening and toxic. The object is split into hope-for parts and unwanted portions, and the bad elements are projected out. Because of a breakdown in splitting as the result of a weakened ego without sufficient good objects to rely on, the unwanted parts return.

Klein (1952) has pointed out the inherent link between projection and introjection. She writes, “it seems that the processes underlying projective identification operate already in the earli