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Several clinical cases are presented which show that phobic mechanisms are equated with projection, displacement, and regression. The author feels it is important to make clear that the analyst is acting not only for the patient but also to maintain his professional level. In the beginning the phobic patient may show a hostile transference with distrust and other ingredients which are completely independent of the analyst's attempt to control the patient. In each disease, symptom, or defensive process, the author feels that there should be a key word characterizing it and in phobia the characteristic word is 'evader' of anything new. The first defense mechanism of the primitive phobia is usually the fear of being alone, of being abandoned.
Phobic patients historically attempt to control schizophrenic anxieties with obsessive mechanisms. To evade a topic in the process of psychoanalysis implies not only a phobic mechanism but also a phobic reaction—anxiety and the need to flee. The phobic patient functions with only one part of his ego and that is what will appear in the transference, eliminating or evading the other part of the ego. The author feels that the phobic relationship is schizophrenic because the main mechanism is a dissociation of the ego, the object, the impulses, and the way the patient relates to the object; the analytic situation is by and of itself very similar to the phobic situation because it favors, develops, or creates a regression. The ambivalence following this regression will produce a splitting of the ego and of the object. In other words, the regression in a phobic will change ambivalence into dissociation.