Psychic Retreats Revisited: Binding Primitive Destructiveness, or Securing the Object? A Matter of Emphasis?

Abstract

This paper argues that a potent cause of impasse in analysis/psychotherapy is the fear of annihilation by uncontained affect, and that the ‘retreat’(Steiner 1993) to which the patient has recourse is often prompted by such anxiety rather than by paranoid‐schizoid or depressive anxiety. Such retreats are marked by defensive attempts to occupy the object, to abolish separation, and to avoid emotional links that are feared will bring on the overwhelming affect related to attachment failures from the past. Thus, analysis itself is perceived unconsciously to be the disaster against which the patient is likely to implement an impasse. This approach offers an alternative to the concept of retreat as described by Steiner (ibid.), but is not intended to replace it. Either model may be indicated clinically in different circumstances. The author introduces the theories of Armando Ferrari and Ignacio Matte Blanco, both consonant with Ogden's theory of the autistic‐contiguous position and offering alternative explanations for the clinical phenomena. The technical implications of these considerations are then discussed in relation to some of the clinical material from Steiner's (2000) paper, ‘Containment, enactment and communication’.

‘Maybe You Don't Actually Exist’: Containing Shame and Self‐harm in a School Counselling Service

“…Bick's extension of the container–contained concept in very early life conceptualized ‘the skin functioning as a boundary’ to hold together the parts of the personality, and she argued that this function depends on the ‘introjection of an external object, experienced as capable of fulfilling this function’ (Bick, 1968, p. 55). Carvalho's argument that someone struggling with early containment failures may identify with the uncontaining object as a ‘defence against its loss’ (2002, p. 156) might thus also be seen as finding a counterpart in Bick's conception of second‐skin formation and ‘adhesive identification’ (Bick, 1986, p. 62). That this ‘precarious skin’ position may be one in which containment failures are experienced as attacks may go some way towards explaining why they may engender feelings of shame, as well as a need to defend oneself projectively in acts of shaming.…”

The final challenge: ageing, dying, individuation

“…Matte Blanco (e.g., 1988). argues that the latter requires more definition between objects and psychic contents than is available in strata of deeper symmetry (see Carvalho 2002).…”

The Hours: the ‘as‐if’ personality and problems of loving

“…Carvalho has postulated that in some cases the individual is not retreating from such anxieties but is attempting to occupy the object, abolish separation and thereby avoid the painful affects related to failures of past attachments. 6 Clearly everyone uses such retreats occasionally; it is only those who use them as a permanent place of residence who can be described as suffering from a pathological condition.…”