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My aim at this time is to deepen the study of symbiosis by undertaking an essay in applied psychoanalysis. I examine a novel of great psychological subdety by Christiane Rochefort, Warrior's Rest (Rochefort, 1958). Although this novel can be studied for its own sake, it also serves to illustrate and apply what I have deduced from clinical work, although it does not specifically include material of a clinical nature. The advantage of choosing a novel is that the material studied is easily accessible for anyone who wishes to compare opinions; another, even stronger reason is that the study of symbiosis involves the analysis of the intercrossing of roles. In clinical material the field would be that of the transference and countertransference, which would therefore have to be limited to what is publishable, with evident impoverishment of the original material and disadvantages in relation to the clarity of the exposition. I was also interested in studying symbiosis that is allowed to follow its course in the interpersonal relation, whereas psychoanalytic therapy is, in this sense, a fundamentally ‘antisymbiotic’ task.
In my previous study on the problem of dependence-independence in relation to processes of projection-introjection, in studying symbiosis as a form of dependence using some clinical material, I made the following observations:
autism and symbiosis are always coexistent, with an absolute, relative or alternating dominance of one of them;
both are narcissistic object relations, the difference being whether the depositary is another person or the subject's own mind;
both are intimately connected to the phenomena of projection-introjection or, more precisely, to a dissociation between projection and introjection, autism and symbiosis being the two extremes of this split;
in symbiosis the projected role coincides with role of the depositary. Strictly speaking, we should refer to symbiosis when we observe a crossed projective identification in which each depositary