A Variety of Narcissistic Pathology Stemming from Parental Weakness

Over the past twenty-five years I have published a series of papers which concentrate on what I have called, following nineteenth century literary usage, soul murder. These works describe the effects of actual traumata suffered by children at the hands of crazy, cruel, and unfeeling adults. The former victims (seen in analysis when grown up) seem, by virtue principally of their chronic and fixed defensive reactions to overstimulating experiences, to have been deprived of the capacity for love, for feeling joy, and indeed for feeling any sustained intensity of positive emotion. Their fantasies, conscious and unconscious, are full of sadomasochism and rage. Many of them live out an as-if existence, their emotions inhibited by massive obsessive-compulsive mechanisms, and their identities split into unsynthesized contradictory compartments of functioning (vertical ego splits).

In recent years, seemingly as a consequence of having read some of my writings, a number of people who had memories of childhood abuse and seduction to relate have consulted me. I have also seen a few who had no such memories but appeared to be in search of them. I have now studied three of these would-be victims as analytic patients. All three came from academic backgrounds (some of my papers are centered on literary and historical figures as well as on patients); they had developed passionate intellectual interests which seemed also to serve them as defensive isolation posts guarding against and distancing their varied sexual impulses and their rage. They did indeed, in their character structure, defenses, and symptomatology,