Chapter 5. Life in the Claustrum

From the vertex of the Klein/Bion (post-Kleinian) model-of-the-mind, psychopathology can be classified in a way that corresponds well to the purely descriptive classifications of psychiatry. Metapsychological, or rather Extended Metapsychological, classification would divide into neurotic or psychotic disturbances: paranoid-schizoid struggles (Ps↔D), would contrast with structures effected by splitting and projective identification deeply influencing character, sense of identity, capacity for symbol formation, view-of-the-world, concept formation (cognitive development), mood. In this view the schizophrenias must be set aside as life in a world of the delusional system, beyond contact or commerce with psychic reality.

While we catch fleeting glimpses of life in the claustrum from neurotic and normal patients, it is in work with borderline and psychotic states that the interior world is laid out for our inspection at leisure. Without Bion's Theory of Thinking and Theory of Groups, armed only with Freudian mechanics and Kleinian positions, even with the addition of splitting concepts, our description of these mental states lacks power and vividness, and our therapeutic intervention finds little foothold in the massive wall of resistance to change. The technical problems, which led Freud to consider that the Narcissistic Neuroses were beyond the scope of psycho-analysis for want of a capacity to form a transference, will be considered in the next chapter. Melanie Klein's anchoring of the epistemophilic instinct in the baby's interest in the interior of the mother's body, and therefore of her mind, has been extensively explored in The Apprehension of Beauty, and some of the qualities of the interior world as an aspect of psychic reality have already been described in Chapters 2 and 3, as derived from psycho-analysis and the insights of artists. These qualities, construed rather than observed, must be differentiated from those directly experienced through projective ident