A Problem of Identity in Relation to An Image of A Damaged Mother

In This paper I shall attempt to show how one patient has been able to develop a sense of her own identity over against an image of a damaged mother with whom she had previously been unconsciously identified and how, together with this development, the image has changed. The material in the form of dreams, fantasies, and experiences within the transference represents a transition from hysterical symptoms, where the image or fantasy had been, as it were, acted out or embedded in the physical symptom, to the beginnings of a sense of separateness or inner psychic reality.

My particular interest in presenting this material is that it sheds light on Jung's term primitive or unconscious identity, which he describes as follows: ‘Unconsciousness means non-differentiation. There is as yet no clearly differentiated ego, only events which may belong to me or to another. It is sufficient that somebody should be affected by them’ (1931, C. W.,  17, p.  83). The ‘somebody’ who is going to be affected when a patient is in this state of unconscious identity is, of course, the analyst. Hence the great importance of the analyst's being able to see himself as an object into which the patient unwittingly projects parts of himself.

As the countertransference becomes conscious, the analyst becomes aware of what he has experienced subjectively within himself. He can then use this experience as if he were an object out of which he can make interpretations that help to form a boundary against which and within which the patient is enabled to integrate the parts of himself which he had projected into the analyst. The selected material extends over a period of five years, so that it has been possible to check my earlier interpretations and way of looking at the material against the more recent developments in my patient. I have been impressed particularly by the forward and backward movement of the images and by the way in which my patient has used concrete happenings