Federico Garcia Lorca's Yerma: The use of a vitalizing fantasy self-object to survive trauma

Federico Garcia Lorca, one of the 20th century's greatest playwrights, wrote his masterpiece, Yerma, shortly after feeling betrayed and abandoned by his closest friend Salvador Dali. At the same time, he also wrote a poem entitled “When I was Ten” that captured the pain and loneliness he experienced when his family moved from the country, where he was happy and surrounded by loving and admiring friends and family, to the city, where he was lonely and ridiculed in school for his effeminate manner. This temporal association suggests that Lorca was struggling with the same painful affects in adulthood as he had as a child and that he was employing the same coping mechanism he had developed early in his life, that of creating a fantasy that served as a secondary self-object to repair self-fragmentation caused by a rupture in a crucial primary self-object relationship. Through the creation of a play in which different characters give expression to the wide range of conflicting emotions that resulted from the self-object rupture and the ensuing self-fragmentation, the playwright found a narrative that could contain them all and provide reparative self-cohesion.