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Joel Shor and Jean Sanville wxplore their vision of the early self and the essential human struggles based on it. They attempt to unite aspects of current work on narcissism and object relations and seem particularly friendly to the “middle group of the British PsychoAnalytic Society”, e.g., Milner, Winnecott and especially Balint. Shor's early work with Marie Coleman Nelson and Alexander Lowen has been assimilated and reworked in a theoretical frame based on Balint's. The authors have taken up the challenge of more thoroughly amplifying the Balintian principle, “progression for the sake of regression.” They are revisionists but, nonetheless, analytic therapists dedicated to exploring new pathways in transference analysis.
The authors insist that the early-most human self oscillates between moment of megalomanic self-sufficiency and absolute fusion. Both of these illusions constitute the basic ideal state, named the “primary illusion,” which forms the basis of all human love. In the author's words:
Supported by a sufficiently perceptive and responsive mother, the baby “experiences” … a non-urgent, smoothly oscillating flow between two states: one-person complete (“Me” secure in all narcissistic supplies), and a two-person relationship (“I-You” in perfect harmony). These oscillations imprint a dialectical model which inspires all subsequent drives for fulfillment and for repair of imperfections, however caused (p. 26).”
This early two-fold ideal experience is inevitably traumatized, defended against and perennially sought. Many of the difficult situations created in life are attempts to provoke the self-repair necessary for re-experiencing ideal states or generating new and beneficial forms of them. Analysis must be sensitive to the ways the patient seeks yet wards off self-repair related to ideal experiencing.
The authors attempt to show the ways individuals attempt to recreate the primary illusion both in pathology and social experimentation. Relationships such as olde