Reconstruction of ‘Heroic Solutions’ in Analyses of Borderline Patients: Poverty or Faded Glory?

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate clinical usefulness of reconstruction not only in analyses of neurotic patients but also in therapies of the so-called prestructural personalities in the broader sense, i.e., both in borderline states and narcissistic disorders. The viewpoint of reconstructions described below helps us to re-open and start anew a hypothetically arrested and distorted structuralization by taking into account the narcissistic value of the existing, though from the viewpoint of the demands of present adaptation, unsatisfactory psychic structure of these patients.

Psychoanalytic models of therapy of these states, in particular egopsychology and psychology of the self, agree on the assumption of a defect, lacking of some indispensable part of psyche, which the patient ‘borrows’ from other people, including therapists. Therefore in their analyses, these models do not often employ interpretations inducing structural change by means of judgmentally-selective identifications (Täkhä, 1984b; Blanck & Blanck, 1979) among which reconstructions (most recently Wetzler (1985)) belong. As adequate, they consider empathic explanations (Täkhä, 1984b) which open the way again for prematurely arrested structuralization by means of functionally-selective identifications (Täkhä, 1984a) of the patient with the analyst or, in terms of psychology of the self, through transmuting interpretations leading to transmuting internalisations (Kohut, 1971).

The proponents of ‘ego-building’ procedures (Blanck and Blanck, 1974, 1979) are, however, forced to admit that the efforts of the analyst to get these necessary identificatory processes started anew often meet ‘stubborn and prolonged resistence from the patient's side’ (Täkhä, 1984b).

Where should we look for and how should we formulate this obstacle to treatment? The Blancks (1979) see its source in separation anxiety.