Chapter 13 Ghosts in the Swamp: Some Aspects of Splitting and their Relationship to Parental Losses1

In this chapter, I describe a patient whose extreme withdrawal seems in part to have taken place in response to inadequately mourned losses in her parents’ lives. I address some central aspects of the first three years of her analysis. The patient shows in particular three types of relationship to her objects. The first is a state of idealised retreat in which she starves herself of food and contact with life and fills herself up with books and television. She is in charge of her own supplies. The second, which becomes manifest when she is beginning to emerge from her retreat, consists in desperately clinging to an idealised object whose loss would leave her utterly bereft. This protects her from the third kind of relationship, which is one of persecution, where a damaged object full of ghosts is felt to be preventing her from having a life.

The ghosts represent her parents’ internal objects as well as her own projected feelings. As well as the split between idealised and persecutory objects, a split between sensory and psychic functioning is also employed in her attempts to keep the ghosts at bay. This is reproduced in the analytic relationship, where the patient clings to an adhesive relationship to the analyst as a helpful figure in order to avoid the persecutory elements associated with thoughts and emotions.

Fraiberg et al. (1975) described as ‘ghosts in the nursery’ the frightening figures – remembered or unremembered – from the parents’ childhoods who take up residence in the nursery of their own children and dominate their current relationships. The influence of the ghosts is determined by the extent to which the affects associated with difficult experiences have been repressed and the children – now parents – have dealt with their pain by unconsciously passing on the suffering to the new generation.

Fonagy et al. demonstrate that where the caregiver's own damaging experiences intrude, ‘the fear of the mind of another can have devastating consequences on the em