Chapter 4. The Compartments of the Internal Mother

Although the clinical realizations which gave rise to the conception of the compartmentalization of the internal mother's body go back to the early 1960's, the autism research group that finally produced Explorations in Autism, and particularly to the late Doreen Weddell's work with “Barry”, it was not until twenty years later that the full significance came through to me. Out of clinical work and teaching and the literary companionship of Martha Harris and her daughters the conception of aesthetic conflict arose to alter considerably my view of personality development and the human condition. In between came the various essays collected and organized in Sexual States of Mind where the internal compartmentalization of the internal mother's body, its reference to orifices and the polymorphous nature of adult sexuality, added substance to the formal description.

It is clear that two new ideas which, by gaining clarity, made the descriptions in this present book possible, are Bion's affect theory, plus and minus L, H and K, and the central part in the oscillations Ps↔D, played by the aesthetic conflict. In seeing this as a tormenting uncertainty about the interior qualities of the aesthetic object, it becomes possible to express the idea of ego strength as negative capability. When the dimension strength/weakness becomes thus observable in its operation and not merely construed from its consequences, we seem to move to a new level of precision in clinical observation (and self-scrutiny).

What emerges in the consulting room and in supervisions is a greatly clarified distinction between immaturity and psycho-pathology. On the one hand one can range the manifestations of infantile confusions of both a geographic and zonal nature along with Money-Kyrle's thesis of developmental misconceptions. In contrast to this are the pathological constructions which arise from what Bion calls “lies” or column 2 of the grid, failure of alpha-function perhaps induced by what I have called