Internet Discussion Forum Summary

There were two major responses to this clinical paper. The first by Joseph Cambray (USA) was appreciative of Dr Covington's presentation of her analysis with her patient ‘Adam’ and the good work described there. He wanted to follow up hints in the paper about the links between Adam's aggressive and erotic impulses, and wondered whether these demonstrated more perverse elements in her patient's character than were apparent in the paper. These hints were to be found in the ‘death row’ dream, in the feel of the transference at the beginning of each week, and in the information about the increasing liveliness of Adam's cat which was, after all, sometimes to be found under the bed covers with him. Cambray was also interested in the role of the body - in the relationship between Adam's harsh superego and his headaches. Following Thomas Ogden's work on the ‘autistic-contiguous position’ (Ogden 1989) - a position ‘prior’ to that of the paranoid-schizoid position - Cambray observed that this state of mind is ‘concerned with maintaining somatic integrity’, as a defence against “nameless dread”, and as such ‘can profoundly yet almost invisibly shape the analytic field’. He suggested that Adam's unconscious mechanized use of the frame, with its rhythm of meetings', could be ‘… an attempt to bump up against something solid to create an autistic surface, a hard edge in order to sustain a basic sense of being’.

His final comments were to the rather neglected place of the superego in Jungian theorizing and he suggested that Covington's paper demonstrates a way of dealing with it clinically, whilst leaving open its place in theory and in particular with regard to this piece of clinical material - its relationship to the anima, and to the body and sexuality.

The second major contribution was by Beverley Zabriskie (USA). She responded to the implicit challenge in Cambray's contribution as to the existence of Jungian (as opposed to Freudian) thinking about the superego and suggested that