Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

March 28, 1967. DENIAL AND SCREENING OF OBJECT-IMAGES. Alfred J. Siegman, M.D.

The author suggested that the insights of Dr. Edith Jacobson into the problem of differentiating denial from repression and the use of denial against internal perceptions may be extended by examining the nature of the denied percepts, and thus lead to understanding of inflexible transference images encountered in cases with predominantly pregenital pathology. Stereotyped, rigid transference images (screen images) are maintained at the expense of other transference images and their id derivatives and affects. This prevents linking the transference to past and current material.

The transference in a forty-year-old woman consisted of tenacious negativism associated with the fused images of a castrated, ineffectual, depreciated mother and an absent, uncaring father. Her negativism and concomitant object images were defensive. Emergence of a positive transference image threatened her with the awareness of her need to satisfy libidinal longings for definite object-images that had previously been denied. The sexual masochistic impulses could not be analyzed as long as the analyst was endowed with a negative image. A second case illustrated the difficulty of detecting a denied object-image in a nonpsychotic, in whom the substituted image was less crude, stereotyped, or one-sided.

Dr. Siegman postulates that denial is the dominant defense against memories that resist recovery; repression appears to be the major defense when memories are easily recovered. While object-images may be denied and replaced by shifting of regressive self- and object-images, we may also observe the use of genetically later images or more realistic images to screen and deny earlier, more threatening ones. Within the reciprocal interplay of drive and object, the role of the object is of greater importance in early infancy than later when the object can be actively sought and controlled. Although traditionally we des