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The ideas that inform this paper historically derive from Freud, Jung, Klein, Bion, Meltzer and Fordham. The core idea for what follows derives from Jung's paper, ‘The psychology of the child archetype’, in which he writes of the possession of the personality by its split-off parts. ‘Now it's an axiom of psychology that when a part of the psyche is split off from consciousness, it is only apparently inactivated. In actual fact it brings about a possession of the personality’ (JUNG 12). That is quite a generalised statement, and I have been concerned with investigating this possession and describing some aspects of it. I follow Fordham in thinking that the psychopathological manifestations of this possession of the personality are the result of actions of the self (FORDHAM 5). That is, they are actions that involve the whole organism and can lead to development; when they do not they are malignant. What is central to this paper is the experience of analysing a patient whose pathological state of mind compelled her to lead a choiceless life. By this I mean that whenever she experienced an emotion or feeling, she treated it as a sensation; she would take refuge in sensuality and mindlessness to avoid experiencing emotion. This prison of her mind, a prison with rigid walls, which she spoke about as strict parenting and enacted in her eroticisation of her need for warmth, and in her obsessional and ritual behaviour, punitiveness and arrogance, was an environment in which no development could take place until she came into analysis.
This state of mind is what Meltzer has described as a claustrum (MELTZER 15). The characteristic of the claustrum is that the quality of the emotional experience operating at the level of unconscious phantasy is that of intrusive identification (Ibid.). Intrusive identification is a pathological consequence of projective identification and its motive is the invasion of an alien personality and its body.