Defences of the Self and Envy of Oneself

In his Beautiful, concise paper ‘Defences of the self’, Michael Fordham described a defence structure seen in transference psychosis in which the analyst's goodness and his helpful functions are turned bad by the patient. The patient may see the analytic interpretations as the result of the psychopathology of the analyst's infantile part and proceed to nullify them right down the line. Fordham wrote:

Perverse destructive aims dominate the picture: the attack on what is good and the conversion of good into bad objects and vice versa, the delusion that the analyst is concealing himself and depriving the patient of himself, that he is ill or is himself so pathological and infantile that he needs the patient for his emotional survival; all these can be prominent features of the transference (FORDHAM 1).

He thought this to represent a total defence, a form of negative therapeutic reaction in which analysis is effectively blocked, and all interventions are annihilated. He went on to suggest that the patients involved seem, as a rule, to have developed little self feeling, and want to empty themselves into the analyst who threatens them with his ‘not-self’ part. This has to be violently defended against.

My thoughts with regard to the slow progress of some analyses reminded me of and led me to re-read ‘Defences of the self’ after some years. There I found in very many respects close descriptions of the patients with whom I was concerned, and of processes in myself as their analyst. I have given much thought to these phenomena and others which have seemed relevant to my patients. I have also been struck by what is perhaps a variation on the theme, in which it is not the outside object, the analyst, the parents or the world beyond but rather the inner object that is being attacked and is under threat of annihilation. In Fordham's schema this corresponds to the ‘self’ part of the analyst, rather than the ‘not-self’ (speaking, of course, from the point of view of the patient). Th