Response by Edoardo Weiss

I was very much interested in the discussants' remarks to my paper. Before revealing my reactions to their stimulating thoughts, I would like to clarify some of my findings in the study of the agoraphobic and claustrophobic afflictions.

In each case we find some individual features in the patient's anxiety experiences, in his defense mechanisms and in the kind of instinctive drives which threaten to break through into his consciousness. In all cases, however, the deepest source of the patient's conflict is rooted in his sexual fixation to the parent of the opposite sex and his panic fear of being abandoned or rejected by the mother. Such abandonment is felt by the patient as an annihilation of his ego. In male patients the castration fear is mostly related to the mother. I agree with Dr. Gehl that the agoraphobic patient has never completely abandoned his symbiotic attachment to the mother.

In some cases the deeply repressed Oedipus conflict leads to various developments of the original instinctive drives, giving rise to homosexual, sadistic and masochistic urges. Satisfaction of such derivative urges, however, does not free the patient from his agoraphobic anxiety. Only the acquired capacity to reach heterosexual satisfaction upon resolution, in the analysis, of his Oedipus conflict can free him from his phobia. Besides, I found in every case of agoraphobia those ego-psychological difficulties on which I elaborated in my monograph and in my paper.

I would also like to mention here that there are some rare cases of agoraphobia which we may call “malignant,” because in them the ego weakness is more pronounced, and the

symbiotic attachment to the mother too tenacious to be overcome through classical treatment. We may say that their ego has not been completely “born” i.e., separated from the ego of the mother. Such conditions may lead to a schizophrenic breakdown. In these cases the orthodox psychoanalytical technique should be modified in the sense of Federn's procedu