Chapter 18 Intrusions

In the first paper in his book Psychotic States, Rosenfeld writes of a patient that her ‘central anxiety was a fantasy of the persecuting analyst forcing himself into her to control her and rob her, not only of her inner possessions, for instance, her babies and her feelings, but her very self’ (Rosenfeld 1947: 22). Persecutory anxieties about an invading analyst, following on the patient’s phantasies of intrusion, is a theme that runs through Rosenfeld’s pioneering papers of the forties, fifties and sixties. He describes the whole syndrome: the infantile anxiety and greed that impels the intrusion, the new identity the patient obtains by this type of projective identification, which carries with it fears of ego-disintegration in addition to anxieties of being trapped in and confused with the object, and how, in order to keep the analyst out, the patient does not speak about events that might arouse interest, withdraws and negates interpretations. If these things are now not new, it is because Rosenfeld, foremost among others, made them familiar.

At the time Rosenfeld was writing these papers Melanie Klein was still alive. ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’, where she named projective identification, appeared in 1946 (Klein 1946), and Envy and Gratitude in 1957 (Klein 1957). These works greatly influenced Rosenfeld, as they did all who followed Klein’s new thinking. It was a time of fertile Kleinian development. Rosenfeld was investigating psychoanalysis as a treatment for schizophrenic and severe borderline patients, as were others, notably Bion and Segal. Bion proposed new hypotheses about the psychotic personality and Segal made the important differentiation between symbols and symbolic equations – both areas in which Rosenfeld also made contributions. He focused on the impairment of the psychotic ego, not from Bion’s angle of the

fragmentation and projection of the ego to form bizarre objects, but from the perspective of the impairment of the ego that results