Psycho-Analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa. II, 1993.: Two Forms of “Mindlessness” in the Borderline Child. Trevor Lubbe. Pp. 33-57.

Reference is made to Freud's view of the particular effects of trauma upon the personality. Severe trauma is discussed in terms of the piercing of the protective barrier of the psyche, and damage to the “core” of the personality. Borderline symptomatology in childhood can be understood both as a direct reflection of such traumatic damage and as a defensive construction built in response to the traumatization—a new “barrier” erected to defend against the intense anxieties and conflicts in such cases. Typical of this defensive formation is the incapacity to synthesize and integrate emotional experience and the inability of the child to understand what is “inside” and what is “outside,” leading to problems in symbolization, disturbances in object relations, and extreme anxiety states. Faced with unassimilable, intense, meaningless experience, the child defends itself either by dismantling the sensory apparatus itself (infantile psychosis), or by retaining the intense states in the musculature, or in a “second skin” formation (Esther Bick), a defensive layer or barrier whereby the child holds itself together. Two cases are presented in detail to illustrate the notion of damage to the psychological core, and to illustrate the phenomenon of a defensive organization that serves as a compensatory barrier where true psychical containment has not been accomplished and internalized.

The first case, a boy eight years old, has suffered marked abuse and neglect. Through observation and systematic interpretation in the transference, the boy's largely asymbolic psychical world is unveiled. He experiences all satisfactions and