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This paper was read at the 23rd International Psycho-Analytical Congress, Stockholm, July–August 1963, and it was published in 1964 in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45: 358–363.
In a previous paper (1962) I have described the psycho-analytic process in the case of various patients who exhibited changes in their relationship to external and internal objects after a certain degree of better ego integration. After two years of psycho-analytic treatment in which I interpreted mainly the defenses deriving from persecutory anxiety, these patients reached a state of less tension and more efficiency, followed by the disappearance of the symptoms of which they were most aware. This emotional state, however, was not maintained. The patients were again invaded by persecutory anxiety, and there was a recurrence of inefficiency and a return of symptoms. Accompanying the emotional changes in these patients, I verified that the regressions took place under the pressure of a fantasy that their internal and external objects felt good only when they, the patients, found themselves in some way impaired or inefficient. From the analysis it became clear that the symptoms returned because of the fantasy that they were apportioning certain benefits to their objects. For instance, Mrs. X considered that her becoming efficient and so able to take care of her house and children, made her mother feel useless and her analysis unnecessary, whereas when she felt
incapacitated, her mother (and the analyst) felt more important and the analysis was indispensable. This form of regression, related to the fantasy that through it certain benefits are apportioned to the objects, I call ‘false reparation’. The psychic mechanisms of defense bound to this sort of false reparation imply, in my view, persecutory anxiety related to a more integrated ego suffering from schizoid-paranoid anxiety described by Klein. The patients again feel persecuted, but they now present a certain consideratio