Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Robert C. Bak spoke of Dr. Greenacre's unceasing efforts to penetrate developmental factors and actual occurrences during the crucial, partly preverbal phase of development that disorganize maturational sequences. He emphasized how Dr. Greenacre maintained continuous harmony between clinical data and conceptual generalizations and differentiated the underlying dynamics in various clinical phenomena. He added that traumatic stimulation detrimental to steady body-image formation may not appear to be dramatic. Prolonged overexposure to the maternal body, or to that of both parents, both for touch and vision, may promote in the boy a sense of weakness, smallness, and fragility of the body image, induce extreme separation anxiety and merging with the maternal body, and delay self-object differentiation. He traced the prephallic phase of fetishism, transvestitism, homosexuality, the impostor and perhaps the swindler, in which the above traumas play an important role, and stressed Dr. Greenacre's contribution to clarifying the preoedipal history of these perversions. Dr. Bak also hoped that specific differences will become discernible in relation to drug addiction, creativity, and compulsive activities that are suspected of being displacements or other vicissitudes of fetishism. As a result of traumatic conditions in the first eighteen months of life, we have to consider the excitation of undifferentiated libido and aggression. Overstimulation of the undifferentiated drives leads to damage in ego development, which in turn may be responsible for both lack of control over the drives and their inadequate differentiation. Beyond the first eighteen months of life, overstimulation leads to increased frustration and excessive rage that cannot be discharged.

Dr. Albert J. Solnit defined traumas as conceptualized by Freud, and stressed consideration of the stimulus or challenge, the individual's tolerance or intolerance of the challenging stimuli, and the s