Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Heinz Hartmann noted the difficult analytic problem posed by pain of psychic origin and referred to Freud's comments on the differing cathectic conditions determining the experience of pain or anxiety as hard to comprehend. Dr. Hartmann considered that Dr. Spiegel had made remarkable inroads into this difficult area but expressed some reservation about the author's references to a 'base cathectic level' within the self-representation. He also raised the question of what it could mean to postulate that the energies of the object representation turn upon the self-representation. He wondered what ego functions and defenses might correspond, in the psychic context, to the physiologic notion of the stimulus barrier. He concurred in the usefulness of postulating a special center in the psychic apparatus in connection with the development of frustration tolerance but was not convinced that it should be regarded as a primordial ego ideal.

Dr. Victor Rosen questioned the postulates forming the basis of Dr. Spiegel's paper, especially the contention that pain is an affect and not merely a sensation that becomes attached to an affect. To speak of physical pain and of mortification of pride in the same lexical terms is insufficient evidence for an identity. Dr. Rosen did, however, agree that psychic experience of physical pain has