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First of all I would like to thank Jay Greenberg and the editors of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly for allowing me to publish my paper alongside comments by two distinguished psychoanalysts. I would also like to thank Dr. Pizer and Dr. Barahona for the close attention they have paid to my article and for their clear and precise observations and suggestions.
Let me start my reply with a short anecdote.
During his time as a clinician at The University Psychological Clinic for Children Fairbairn “asked one child whose mother thrashed her cruelly: ‘Would you like me to find you a new kind Mummy?’ she said: ‘No. I want my own Mummy’ (…). The devil you know is better than the devil you do not, and better than no devil at all.” (H. Guntrip 1986).
Why does Fairbairn’s young patient keep looking for the devil, despite having been offered an alternative experience? Why does Greta, and like her many other patients who were seriously traumatized at a very early age, repeatedly fall under the spell of their original demons? These are the questions that run through my article and to which I feel my analytic work with Greta allows me to sketch some replies.
As I say in my paper, classical psychoanalytic theory has led us to think that it is repetition compulsion that maintains the link with the traumatic object but, as we know, Freud identified a close correlation between repetition compulsion and the death drive. In this sense, no other repetitions can exist apart from “repetitions of death.” The
proposal that I put forward in my article is that there can also exist “repetitions of life”—in other words repetitions inspired by the search of a good object.
In order to develop these ideas and after reading the comments on my paper, I feel it necessary above all to clarify my use of two expressions that I think it is useful to highlight: traumatic holding and traumatic transformational object.
When I speak of traumatic holding I refer to those original experiences of confrontation with