Delusions that will not be Denied

I was moved to write this paper through struggling with patients whose transference projections had the quality of delusions—though the patient was not mad—in that they remained in full force over a long period of time and could not be shifted by interpretation. Michael Fordham's paper, ‘Defences of the self, is relevant to one patient (FORDHAM 3). At a tangent to his account, my discussion of the patient's need to experience his delusion, ‘Transference as a creative illusion’, in the volume on Technique in Jungian analysis, is also appropriate (CANNON 1).

Fordham discusses the nature of the defences and their operation as defined by the psychoanalysts. He refers to defences such as repression, or isolating and undoing, where the affect or source of conflict is split off and repressed. Here it is a question of making conscious what is unconscious; to do this one has to work through a reductive analysis in the usual way, and then the ego can assimilate the material.

Fordham goes on to raise the question of how far reductive analysis is applicable or even possible in certain sorts of defences which he calls defences of the self. These are the defences of a quite different order: they are the defences of a splitting nature with which the Kleinians are concerned. These originate at points where there is hardly a formed ego, but rather one in process of being formed; this is the stage of projective identifications and of highly persecutory systems. These defences are expressed in splitting of the good and bad object, in projective identification and persecutory attacks. Fordham says, ‘In the case of part objects there is no unconsciousness, but rather more or less violent attempts to attack and do away with the bad object.’ It is not the ego defending against unconscious phantasies that need to be made conscious, on the contrary the phantasies are in full swing and quite conscious; it is only their origins which remain unconscious. Because of their overwhelming nature, the