You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author discusses the various phases of the long and difficult analysis of Sylvia, who spent some fifteen years involved in a homosexual relationship. The author believes the patient was using her homosexual impulses as a defense against her fears of dissolution or fragmentation. Though unwilling to venture a pronouncement on the vexing question of whether homosexuality is to be integrated into the group of perversions, she generalizes from her experiences with this and other cases, and considers these patients not “truly” homosexual. She develops the hypothesis of a perverse homosexual defense against fragmented self-representations and feelings of emptiness. Because of the frequent absences of her soldier father, who was either tyrannical or unavailable at home, Sylvia exhibited what Winnicott called primitive agonies, hardly mental or symbolic, developed in the presence of an absent object who was barely perceptible as an object. The patient, in an effort to keep this central core of her personality immobilized, developed an extraordinary vigilance and used all her resources, excelled in memory and creativity, and was quite a successful professional, as well as an adept manipulator of her environment. Still, to deal with these virtually psychotic anxieties, Sylvia resorted to a perverse mechanism rather than a psychotic defense. In spite of considerable progress in Sylvia's analysis and her eventual involvement in a heterosexual relationship, the author regarded the analysis as something of a failure because of the inaccessibility of the inner core of anxiety and the ever-present residual fear of disintegration that she believed the patient retained.