Deanimation. A Study of the Communication of Meaning by Transient Expressive Configuration

The investigation of the specific clinical syndrome, here defined and called the deanimation syndrome, leads to the elucidation of a clearly distinguished perceptive function. This is the ego function of intuitively perceiving and communicating with animated beings, of which the environment in part consists. The scrutiny of the perceptive performance therein engaged reveals that in the service of communication there operates an incessant activity of projection, probably induced at a period when the earliest functions that maintain life are also activated. Communication thus emerges as an essential,

at present, irreducible quality of the animated state, experienced in the adult as a strong feeling of belonging, and in the archaic unbounded primeval experience of the infant as symbiotic fusion with the mother. In the course of maturation, the projective activity undergoes partial repressions at three clearly defined developmental stages: the ego boundary consolidation, the primal-scene fantasy, and the repressions of the passing of the Oedipal phase. Pathological distortion of these partial repressions is responsible for prepsychotic experiences of deanimation as well as for anal-sadistic deanimation phenomena. These are disruptive of human communication, since they destroy identification and deface the human image. Normally, however, if the first two stages are concluded in a reality-adapted libidinal balance, then the Oedipal repressions merely serve to safeguard the advent of the latency period, and the intrapsychic representational idiom of the primary process is replaced by the symbolic representational system of rational thought, by which the secondary process attunes endopsychic imagery to the word representations of language. The rich intuitive animistic relation to the primitive world subsides. The state of close belonging, in which ego boundaries as well as object demarcations are blurred and fluctuating, is gradually replaced by the more distant, objective attitude of knowledge and science: objects emerge detached from their affective and emotional connotations—a process related to the isolation of affect. This process reflects the anthropological and historical development of writing. From its origins in magic pictorial representation and through its progress toward pictographic and ideographic script, writing suffered a deanimation of its own that led to the stereotyped signs and characters of the alphabet (7, p. 62). Thus, the libidinal impulses and projective processes, activated early in life by the mother, are invested, after the passing of the Oedipus complex, in communication by way of rigid stereotyped configurations. These convey meaning by their variation within the limits set by the structure of language. At the conclusion of the latency period, identification