Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Edith Jacobson agreed with Dr. Peto that the ego has a normal fragmentizing function which is used for the development of thought symbols and thinking. She alluded to Lewin's quotation from William James to the effect that 'to understand life by concept is to arrest its movement, cutting it up into bits with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical herbarium where comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain which of them statically includes the other'. She compared the energic sequences in grieving to Dr. Peto's sequences of thought development. Thus, the image of the lost object is intensely cathected in terms of fantasies of former wish-fulfilment. The image is then divided into highly charged single memories. These may be decathected in stages and reappear as quiet thoughts about the relationship to the lost object accompanied by release of neutralized libido to various ego areas. Inner numbness of the grieving person might correspond to the baby's negative hallucination. While concurring with the clinical inferences in the borderline and psychotic cases cited by Dr. Peto, Dr. Jacobson expressed doubt that the hallucination, introjection, projection, or fragmentation had been persuasively demonstrated for the neurotic patient whose thought development had been postulated as normal.

Dr. Bernard Brodsky felt that stress on the economic point of view had excluded a consideration of adaptational factors essential to thought development. He found Peto's 'fragmentizing function of the ego' close to Linn's 'discriminatory function of the ego' in that both are goal-directed and both are used to explain thought formation. Linn's concept, however, emphasizes that the discriminatory function serves to select from a cluster of psychic processes composing any ongoing event those most adaptive to a particular goal, such as defense or secondary process thinking. Quoting from de Monchy, he remarked on the importance of a content concept c