“So Unoriginal a Label” Or a Message in a Bottle? Commentary on Helene Deutsch's “Some Forms of Emotional Disturbance and Their Relationship to Schizophrenia”

Saddled with a formidable and largely irrelevant title, Deutsch's 1942 paper has an odd and not altogether pleasant impact on the reader. It simultaneously sets forth and sequesters a set of clinical observations aptly (but “unoriginally,” in Deutsch's view) termed the as-if personality, a concept that has had a permanent, if ill-defined, place in our thinking ever since. The author makes use of a particular construction—“as if”—in which one thing could turn into its opposite (“this is as if it were that”), but in fact both this and that permanently and stably coexist (“this is ‘as if’ it were that, but it's not that; it's both”).

How do we account for the staying power of the vivid clinical descriptions captured by the deceptively simple “as-if” construction, hiding behind the curtain of a relatively obscure paper? Ironically, it is Deutsch's apologetic use of “so unoriginal a label” (p. 326)— that is, the as-if personality—that lifts her ideas out of ready-made psychoanalytic categories and into an entirely original vernacular that has sustained them to this day.1