Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Gustav Bychowski feels that seduction, which was so important a concept to Freud, reappears in a 'refined' fashion. He noted that there is much ethnological material, particularly in Róheim, pointing to the closeness of the Sphinx and Jocasta. The collective delusions of the witches reflect the ambivalent mother imago; witches are seductive and yet destroy and devour gullible young men. From a clinical point of view Dr. Bychowski's experience confirms that the ego under the impact of such libidinal overstimulation as Dr. Shengold describes is not able to differentiate between ego and nonego. This leads to potentialities for penetration from outside, resulting in persecutory feelings. The easy transition from active to passive, and vice versa, facilitates this. Dr. Bychowski agreed too with the author's emphasis on the narcissistic identification with the mother and the inability to maintain a unified ego identity. The turning against one's self, a most primitive mechanism of the archaic ego, leads to reversal of roles. The child becomes the object of the mother's cannibalism, which can be the core of a paranoid delusion. This structure can remain isolated as the deepest core of a latent psychosis, or a neurosis with a repressed oral nucleus, as Dr. Bychowski illustrated from his own case material. He concluded by asking if reversal were not the main mechanism: 'Is it not the child who originally wants to incorporate the parents?'

Dr. Mark Kanzer noted that psychoanalysis has focused on Oedipal, negative Oedipal, and preoedipal aspects of the Sphinx, to which Dr. Shengold adds the problem of earliest ego-object differentiation. The infantile motility elements are borne out by the agoraphobic behavior of Oedipus, who encounters danger on the highways and must travel with Antigone, the desexualized Sphinx mother with whom he can fuse. Dr. Kanzer pointed out additional infantile memories with preverbal features alluded to in the myth, which