Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

June 11, 1957. PRE-BODY EGO TYPES OF (PATHOLOGICAL) MENTAL FUNCTIONING. Augusta Bonnard, M.D.

This paper attempts a comprehension of the quality and type of perceptual-affective functioning in the first six months after birth—an extremely obscure preverbal process. It is postulated that the functions of narcissism and libido and its cathexis are not in dynamic operation from the beginning and that their evolution may be markedly modified by more archaic patterns of affective-mental functioning if these patterns are not properly integrated. Responses to reality antedating the development of the body ego which persist do not lend themselves to investment by narcissistic or object libido except as media of secondary elaboration or of pathological defense. The vicissitudes of these archaic functions may be of paramount importance for abnormal as well as normal mental functioning. For example, many of the most striking or poignant effects of artistic creativity are due to utilization of these archaic functions which have distinctive primary process attributes. We should be more alert to the ubiquity of animism and of anthropomorphism and study the archaic precursors of mechanisms of defense. A fundamental difficulty is that the direct observation of these earliest states are mainly appraised as behavioristic and their interpretation is anthropomorphic. The clinical data are derived from the study of two boys and a man, who showed significant deviations of maturational and affective patterns of response from earliest infancy. These patients were extremely hypermotile almost from birth. The two boys displayed sudden outbreaks of vicious attacks on children, adults, and animals. There was profound anxiety, depression, and lack of orientation as to the meaning and purposes of their bodies and their actions. The hypermotility, which in one patient had the quality of an addiction, belonged to a very primitive state of development, and was partly a defense against a