On Symbiotic Omnipotence1

The behavior of three patients during the third and fourth years of their psychoanalysis has vividly proved to me the validity of my recent suggestion (9) that the analytic setting and the transference relationship are our most reliable instruments for reconstructing the nature and function of cumulative trauma in an adult individual.

Though my patients' individual experiences of parental relationships and early family environment could not be more disparate, their behavior in the analytic situation was strikingly similar in terms of affectivity, psychic mechanisms employed and the archaic form of objectrelatedness involved.

All (two males and one female) had sought treatment because they had felt they had reached a stalemate in their development and had lost zest for life and work. All were highly intelligent, sensitive and superficially well organized. They had no clear-cut symptoms, and it would be a distortion to represent them as neurotic. They had achieved academic, professional and social successes but could derive little satisfaction from them. Their private inner life and their social living were utterly disassociated existences.

They came to treatment feeling they had little to lose and perhaps something to gain, that analysis would offer their only chance of finding what was missing or lacking in them. They had the stolid complacency of despair but none of the nagging urgency of internal conflict.

Their histories revealed coherent but static memories going remarkably deeper into childhood than one would suspect—memories which were isolated and vivid. There was an uncanny paucity of personages

other than the select ones throughout their childhood and adolescence, and these were recalled with an acuity that was both objective and pa