Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Maurice Friend was impressed with Dr. Shengold's pursuit of the development of oral-sadistic drives and with the idea of teething as a partial prototype of trauma. He stressed, however, the in-built ego capacities and those which evolve for adaptation, described by Hartmann and Rapaport, as evidence against an oral passive receptor which, with dentition, may be traced to an upsurge of aggressive drives. He also observed that as teething does not occur only at one time, one might disagree with Dr. Shengold on the timing of trauma. There are several other varieties of traumatic stimuli—fatigue, throat infections, etc. In the human organism there is a tendency to discharge with stimulation, so the baby cries, a function of the oral 'stoma'. With the emphasis on teething, not enough attention is focused upon the state of the ego as aggression arises. Also, ego dissolution is importantly connected to object loss, as shown in Mahler's stages of individuation until two and a half years. The capacities for infantile rage are important ego elements, interrelated with the traumatic effects of teething and the aggressive drive. Dr. Shengold's paper stimulated further thoughts about early and related aspects of the basic undifferentiated state, oral-sadistic libidinal concepts.

Dr. Mark Kanzer felt Dr. Shengold's correlations between undischarged tensions, the feeling of being gnawed or eaten, universal unconscious teething memories, and the rat as symbol were of great interest. Like Dr. Friend, he cautioned against the dangers of the prototype concept and a too one-sided genetic approach. Trauma is a complex economic, adaptive, and functional phenomenon. He felt Dr. Shengold's formulation: 'trauma is a passive cannibalistic experience' invited a converse conclusion. As for the rat as symbol, there are equivalent representations of oral sadism.

Dr. T. C. Sinha felt that to derive cannibalism from teething trauma overemphasized the latter. The cannib