Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

March 21, 1961. ESCAPADES: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF DISSOCIATION OF EGO IDENTITY. Gustav Bychowski, M.D.

Dr. Bychowski discussed a patient who had had several escapades, during which she assumed a partially new identity and lived out a number of early fantasies. However, she maintained continued contact with and awareness of her former identity. In the course of a successful analysis, it was possible to delineate a number of factors contributing to this diffusion of identities. These included a split in her ego ideal between the well-behaved, nonsexual girl that her parents wanted her to be and the more basic, instinct-ridden individual that she felt herself to be. In addition, there were splits in her self-representations, including a picture of herself as a good girl and alternately as a fantasy-ridden girl with many Oedipal strivings. There was also a split in object representations between a good and bad mother, and between a brave and noble and a cowardly father.

Her family history revealed stormy misbehavior and the use of denial by members of the family as she was growing up. Traumas were also significant factors, such as, at age four, the death of a beloved grandmother; at five, severe punishment by mother for masturbating; and at eight, an injury due to her mother's actions. Earlier attempts to escape had occurred during college and just prior to her marriage. Her marriage was happy until her husband became invested with the attributes of her parents. A renewed struggle in the form of escapades, during which she married several other men of lower socioeconomic level, followed.

In discussing the clinical material, Dr. Bychowski pointed out that ego identity is not a fixed event but is a constantly evolving concept within the mental apparatus. The problem of antithetic strivings within a personality is not unique, but the failure of unity requires the pre-existence of several factors, including a split in self and object representations such a