The Unconscious Need to be an Only Child

While there were many other dynamic factors which played important roles in forming the psychopathology in the cases presented, the unconscious need to be an only child was demonstrated by each patient repeatedly and consistently both in dreams and in free association. In order to gratify this unconscious obsessive need, oral incorporative mechanisms and omnipotent thinking were used by these patients in their futile attempts to obtain this unrealistic goal. They all reacted with intense feelings of guilt toward their cannibalistic and omnipotent drives.

Chronic underlying depressions were present in all of these patients. Fenichel stated: 'A person who is fixated on the state where his self-esteem is regulated by external supplies or a person whose guilt feelings motivate him to regress to this state vitally needs these supplies. He goes through this world in a condition of perpetual greediness. If his narcissistic needs are not satisfied, his self-esteem diminishes to a danger point… Without giving any consideration to the feelings of their fellow men they demand of them an understanding of their own feelings.'2