Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Martin H. Blum agreed with the authors that there is significant uncertainty regarding the language we use to discuss the fundamental categories in which we group the materials that emerge during analysis. Elaborating on the authors' thesis, Dr. Blum stated that optimal personality function depends on the integration of self schema with the previously sequestered subschemas, and can be seen as "the integration and harmonization of the mild multiple personality disorders from which every human being suffers." This idea is not as novel as it sounds but was rooted in analytic theory from the very beginning. Dr. Blum traced some of the early roots by going back to Breuer's notion that "affective ideas" can stand in conflict with the "integrated and synthesized conscious personality." The "affective idea" arose during a "hypnoid state" and was part of a "defective sub-personality" which generated such ideas. The analogues of these "affective ideas" in later Freudian theory are the transference thoughts that Freud postulated around 1900 as he was developing the topographic theory. Dr. Blum outlined Freud's development of the structural hypothesis from the topographic, stressing that these transference thoughts were a "system" intermediate between the systems Ucs. and Pcs. These transference thoughts were associatively connected to infantile complexes and to the system Ucs. and were affected by these complexes although appearing to be part of the system Pcs. In this way, they too amounted to a "sub-personality." The transference thoughts of the topographic model became the defensive ego of the structural model of 1923 and essentially comprised a sub-personality, i.e., a personality dominated by defenses against unconscious infantile impulses. Dr. Blum seemed