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Margaret Mahler's rich delineation of the ways in which the human child achieves psychological birth has illuminated the developmental experiences of the oedipal period as well as those of the preoedipal period, and has shed further light on the interplay between them. It is the interplay between these two major organizers of object relations (Mahler, 1975, p. 190) on which this paper focuses. Detailed clinical material from the analysis of a neurotic middle-aged man is offered to show how residues of the symbiotic phase and the subphases of the separation-individuation sequence can affect and resonate with oedipal negotiations, giving a person's neurotic configuration its unique shape. Of special importance in the case to be considered are the long-term effects of the patient's intense and unusually prolonged infantile attachment to his mother, the failure of his father to play an appropriate developmental role, and the pathological impact of repeated exposure to the primal scene during the first 7 years of life.
Mr. Rice is a handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, engaging 40-year-old man, a salesman by vocation. He sought treatment to