Discussion of Peter L. Giovacchini's Article, Regressed States, Timelessness, and Ego Synthesis

Dr. Giovacchini's paper is very interesting but I find it difficult to discuss because of the lack of clinical material. I would like further elucidation about the case mentioned and also about Dr. Giovacchini's definitions of “identity” and “interpretation.”

First, with regard to the case he describes, I am wondering whether the problem here was that the early state of fusion had not led to a satisfactory differentiation and the establishment of a true identity. This can happen if the mother is unable, because of her own neurosis, to allow her child to become “separate,” in which case the relationship remains a symbiotic one and the child will grow up assuming various roles rather than acquiring a real “self.” Unfortunately, the patient's early background and his possible relationship with his mother in babyhood are not mentioned. From the evidence given, I would deduce that this man had never achieved a true identity of his own but was struggling to accomplish individuation. His comments on the analyst being unanxious when he (the patient) was anxious, could, in this context, have an added meaning to the one given by Dr. Giovacchini. It could be seen as a dawning realization of “separateness,” that is to say, he was beginning to see the analyst as a “not-me” person.

It is difficult to know what was taking place on an unconscious “here-and-now” level in this patient's analysis, for Dr. Giovacchini writes of interpretations without telling us what was being interpreted or what type of interpretation was being made at any given time. With the type of regressed patient Dr. Giovacchini discusses, I would say that the interpretations would need, for the most part, to be “here-and-now” transference interpretations of what the “primitive baby” part of the patient was doing to the primitive mother image or breast in the transference situation. It

seems to me that the value of the regression in this type of case is that the symbiotic tie to the mother can be relived, and t