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 opens with a question: are new psychotherapeutic concepts and methods needed to understand and work with the depressive and narcissistic issues that permeate contemporary culture? In this paper, she shows how a “deeper analysis of Freud's work” (p. 240) can help us conceptualize and work with such issues.
Using Freud's writings in what she calls his in-between period of 1913 to 1920, the author highlights how current narcissistic issues have a “depressive underside” (p. 249), a melancholia involving loss and sexual de-differentiation. She argues that, with loss, the feminine superego (not just the superego of women, she points out) tends to regress to a primary identification with the mother due to repressed aggression, which is then turned against the self to protect the object. In such a state, the superego is not available to fulfill the role of loving and protecting the ego. The ego is overwhelmed and cannot “recognize itself as subject or as author” (p. 250). There is an overinvestment in appearances, in a defensive manner, and more mature identifications are impossible.
The author provides a clinical example to illustrate these points. The analysand, suffering from trichotillomania, arrives for treatment on the fifteenth anniversary of her symptoms. She is twenty-five years old. We are told that, in a way, she has replaced a brother who died before she was born; maybe her hair-pulling is a sign of her impossible guilt over her brother's death. But as usual, things are not so simple. The analysand was seduced by an older male cousin between the ages of eight and twelve; maybe the hair-pulling is a way to get mother to see that something is wrong, but the mother failed to do so. And then the analysand discloses—with great relief—that she also got some erotic pleasure from