You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I Was Prompted to write this paper after long wrestling with the problem of how to respond to a patient who was struggling with an experience more fearful and nameless than an eruption of great anger. When our son was a baby, and quick to bellow his needs and displeasure, so that I would wonder about my competence as a mother, a friend would cheer me by saying, ‘You are lucky in having an aggressive infant who can kick your shins and let you know when you go wrong: better than a diffident, withdrawn baby whose needs you have to guess’. Now the patients of whom I write did not kick me on the shin, at least not at the crucial point. On the contrary, both had a strong need to have me as close and approving. The one stuck to me like glue, the other invited my collusion in being the good mother.
The two women had personality disorders of a narcissistic kind. Both had a great need to keep me as the good and understanding mother, and a direct expression of anger, as one might find in projection mechanisms within the transference, did not take place. This links with Kohut's concept of the narcissistic personality taking expression in an idealising or a mirror transference which is different from a transference neurosis, in that the patient urgently needs the analyst to mirror himself, his hopes, urges and feelings (KOHUT 4).
Kohut maintains that in such patients very early disturbance in the relation with the mother prevents the development of true internal objects, and so the patient suffers from a severe narcissistic vulnerability. This interferes with the capacity to transform what he terms the idealised object into a sound internal structure: it remains an archaic, i.e. archetypal, experience, not rooted in relation to the external world and so capable of being modified and then internalised. If there has been a disturbance in the mother's function, it becomes difficult for the infant to relate to and internalise an external object. Since the archaic objects are not yet t