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This English version was originally published in Spanish in the 1956 Revista de Psicoanálisis, 13(4): 430–435. It was translated by Ana Pieczanski for this book.
The work of Ronald Fairbairn, Melanie Klein, and Hanna Segal has, to a great extent, clarified the problem of hysteria. In successive papers on Anxiety Hysteria published since 1953, I have stressed the importance of paranoid-schizoid anxieties and mechanisms underlying phobic structure.
I described the splitting of the Ego, of the objects internal and external, of time and space and how I understand, like Fairbairn, the identity between hysterical and schizoid dissociation.
I also stressed the existence of “two kinds of anxiety” that needed to be kept dissociated, lest integration trigger intense paranoid anxieties, and posited that, particularly in agoraphobia, the primary source of anxiety was the fear of loneliness. In my opinion, this anxiety is always present, irrespective of the manifest expression of the phobia; it is ‘the fundamental phobia’, while the other, the phobia about the outside or open spaces, a defensive organization designed to preserve two spaces, instead of a unified and un-differentiated one: the space of loneliness.
The preservation of these two spaces implies a “distance” between them, a barrier, or, as one of my agoraphobic patients called it: a bastion.
This attempt to create two separate spaces, one “inside” the other “outside”, attempts to blur the experience of an un-differentiated Ego, one
that can not tell the difference between inside and outside, equated with non-existence. In this mindset, the object is only useful insofar as it can be the recipient of projective identifications, becoming a dissociated part of the patient’s self. By creating this separate part of himself, located inside the object, boundaries are attached to the shapeless un-differentiated self, acquiring in this way Shape, a concept that I consider paramount to the understanding of these patients. This is