Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

June 8, 1965. REACTIONS TO SEPARATION. (Dr. Rudolph M. Loewenstein's Section of the Kris Study Group.)

Dr. Bernard D. Fine introduced the over-all plan of the two-year study which began with a review of the literature and a tentative definition of separation experience as 'the physical or emotional separation or withdrawl, imagined, anticipated, or actual, of one or more parental figures or surrogates'. Clinical material studied by the group focused on the genesis of the specific vulnerability in later childhood and adult life to special separation reactions. Pathological separation reactions came to be viewed as symptom complexes with diverse causes and no simple correlation could be discerned between adult reactions and childhood separation traumas. Dr. Fine described the nature and vicissitudes of the ego function of object constancy, considered as specially significant in relation to separation reactions. Noted was Mahler's statement that aggression toward the ambivalently loved object is an important, but not the only, interference with the development of this function.

Dr. John McDevitt reported an excerpt from the analysis of a three-year-old girl who developed marked separation anxiety and a fear of being bitten. Analysis of the phobia revealed it as a regressively expressed wish for, and fear of, sexual attack by the patient's previously seductive father. The second aspect of the Oedipal component of the neurosis, the patient's hostility toward her mother, was an accretion to resentments acquired during an already troubled preoedipal period, during which the mother had been in conflict between motherhood and a career. The separation anxieties central to the child's neurosis were aggravated by the parents who frightened her about dangers during their absences. They often left the child stealthily and without warning, thus providing no assistance in achieving active mastery of the anxiety connected with ordinary separations. Development of the ego fu