Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Charles Brenner commented that this work is in the broad context of efforts to understand the psychology of the neonate as it applies to

psychoanalytic theory and treatment. He criticized the implicit tendency of such work to emphasize the preoedipal period in neurosogenesis because he feels that this view is not consonant with available clinical data and because observations of such young children are still insufficient. He felt that more clinical material to support some of Dr. Kernberg's dynamic inferences should be presented. Dr. Brenner presented clinical vignettes to illustrate why one should be sceptical of the dynamics of several clinical states that had been presented by Dr. Kernberg in summary form.

Dr. Hartvig Dahl commented that Dr. Kernberg's main model is basically presented in the Seventh Chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud's version has the advantage of stressing the importance of the 'wish', which is untreated by Dr. Kernberg. (The notion of the hallucinatory wish-fulfilment as a prototype of cognitive mechanisms may be confirmed by Helen Keller's memories of her hallucinatory cognitive experiences prior to acquiring verbal abilities.) With this concept, Freud furnished a specific mechanism for cognition in his model whereas Kernberg omits this. This omission may stem from the possibility that the theory of object relations contains a nonspecified cognitive theory; for example, that an individual's introjects may do his thinking for him. Examples are evident in Kernberg's clinical descriptions of borderline patients.

Dr. Dahl noted two major differences in the Kernberg and Freud models. 1. Kernberg's assumption of early 'all good' versus 'all bad' internalized object relations leads to the prototype defense he calls 'splitting' whereas Freud's model of hunger followed by satisfaction implies a model fit by the prototype defense of 'repression'. 2. Kernberg corrects Freud's early emphasis on the infantile reactio