Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Irving Sternschein called attention to the need for special technical attention required in proxy evocation in analytic treatment. He did not concur with Dr. Wangh that Anna Freud, in her concept of altruistic surrender, had neglected the active-aggressive components. In the clinical examples cited he regarded the Oedipal, homosexual, scoptophilic, and sadistic determinants

of the psychopathology responsible for the formidable resistance mobilized by the proxy mechanism. As to the maturational phases contributing to the sense of identity, he would add those of later childhood and puberty to those earliest ones stressed by Dr. Wangh.

Dr. David Rubinfine commented on how much the ideas expressed in this paper regarding the tendency to externalize everything unpleasant and to include everything pleasant in the ego (self) were in accord with those of Freud. While agreeing that the behavior pattern described has a narcissistic core, he would add to the genetic fabric the deep preoccupation with object preservation in these patients. Such patients, having experienced severe disturbances in their earliest object relations, especially the persistent danger of object loss with the development of the Oedipal triangle, resort to proxy mechanisms in which aggression is projected onto the proxy parent and hate of the main love object is also deflected from the self toward the proxy parent. This is acted out in later life with spouse and children, and in the transference in analysis. Dr. Rubinfine also questioned whether Anna Freud regards only passive and libidinous aims in 'altruistic surrender', adding that where she deals primarily with problems of instinctual gratification, Dr. Wangh shows how the same mechanisms may be used to preserve object relations.

Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein called Dr. Wangh's paper a fine example of how the study of pathology illuminates normality. Proxy mechanisms and regressions to fixation points are utilized by normal individ