Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

January 28, 1964. VARIATIONS OF ARCHAIC THINKING IN NEUROTICS, IN BORDERLINES, AND IN SCHIZOPHRENICS. Andrew Peto, M.D.

From observations of neurotics, borderlines, and schizophrenics in regressive phases of the transference, Dr. Peto makes assumptions which, from the economic point of view, describe infantile thought development from primary to secondary process. Following Freud, the author regards the hallucinated image of the non-present need-satisfying object (the milk-giving mother) as the first stage of thought formation; the image is cathected with unneutralized energy derived from an undischarged libidinal wish. In the second stage, the ego by its goal-directed 'fragmentizing function', reduces this image to highly cathected splinters. In the third stage the 'thought splinters' become decathected by a process of archaic denial, seen clinically as negative hallucinations. Finally, a fourth stage occurs in which the fragments reappear, now cathected, as a result of ego maturation. In this stage, thought takes the form of negation, a structured development beyond the phase of denial, which then gives way to intellectual acceptance of the negative event: 'No breast is available for satisfaction'.

A relatively well-integrated twenty-seven-year-old woman with a hysterical character disorder regressed to hallucinatory imagery. This became fragmented and denied before she was able to reintegrate the fragments as abstract thought symbols pertaining to primary objects. Aberrations at the stage of negative hallucination or archaic denial interrupt the normal sequence of thought development and are related to thinking defects. A borderline male patient in his thirties, whose thinking defects took the form of confusion, false analogies and generalizations, had a hallucinatory image of the terrifying psychotic mother which was fragmented and decathected in a regressive phase of transference. However, the stage of negative hallucination of the fragments was not s