Chapter 2 Non Vixit: A Ghost Story1

Freud (1915) discovered that unconsciously we invent ghosts because of our sense of guilt in relation to the dead; our ambivalence turns them into ‘evil demons that have to be dreaded’; the proof of their existence is their persistence in living in our memory. Ghosts are omnipotent internal persecutors, who have the power, through being remembered, of ‘reappearing at any time in cunning and plotting ways’ (Klein 1935). In the paranoid schizoid position, dread of ghosts comes from the fear of retribution. But at the threshold of the depressive position, part of the persecution comes from their power to inflict the terrible pain of guilt.

The subject of this chapter is a particular kind of manic defence against guilt. According to Klein, guilt is unbearable when reparation is felt to be impossible; and unbearable guilt is, by definition, not experienced as guilt but as a persecution. The more damaged the object is felt to be, the more impotent the ego faced with the task of reparation. The dead object, in phantasy murdered by one’s death wishes, comes back to haunt the mind in a tormenting way, since it cannot be made to live again, and cannot entirely die, that is to say, disappear from the internal world. I will suggest that faced with such persecution the ego resorts to extremely drastic defences, which, in severely pathological states, can lead to effectively destroying part of the mind.

Freud’s dream, ‘Non vixit’, is about revenants — ghosts — and the wish to destroy them. I will discuss it here as an illustration of the use of manic defences against persecutory guilt; I will argue that the ‘story’ in the dream, the wishful phantasy, could be used as a model

for the understanding of severely pathological manic defences against depressive affects which are felt to be unbearable.

Persecutory guilt belongs to the threshold of the depressive position, to the critical moment in which the ego, through an awareness of its own destructive feelings and a growing sense of c