Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Nathaniel Ross spoke of preoedipal phenomena, such as splitting, which result in the inevitable misrepresentation of the whole mother, serving as a kind of way station en route to object constancy and normal postoedipal ambivalence. The brainwasher reactivates an early mode of object-relatedness in which intensified ambivalence ultimately gives way to the even earlier state of splitting. The good and bad representations of object and self which emerge depend upon the fixations originally present in the victim's early development, with particular reference to the subphases of separation-individuation. Many of our youth today, deprived of consistent love and a set of workable, realistic, and worthy values which could be elevated to the status of ideals, succumb to simplistic philosophies offering them the sharp division between "good and bad" characteristics of a subphase of infantile development. The associated regressed affects result in altered states of consciousness and a surrendering of their capacity for rational thinking. Vulnerable to authoritarian forces resembling those of earliest infancy, they become enmeshed in a symbiotic web in which partial fusion with those forces destroys their identity. Dr. Richard Yazmajian suggested that there is a reverberating and reciprocal relationship between object idealization and ego and self-representation development. This facilitates the development of aim inhibited object love as a love relationship develops. The narcissistic vulnerability inherent in falling in love and staying in love relates to the difficulties encountered in analyzing patients with marked narcissistic problems who require pains-taking and lengthy treatment in order to be able to take the "risk" inherent in adult loving. The formation of a stable self-representation is indeed dependent upon resolution of oedipal conflicts, but these conflicts can be successfully resolved only in the crystallizing matrix of an adult love re