On the metapsychology of schizophrenia.

The author's point of departure is schizophrenic fragmentation, which has been considered here from a drive-economic and structural point of view, starting from Freud's prestructural conceptions and Jacobson's metapsychological formulations. The view is arrived at in the essay that the central psychological mechanism in the schizophrenic disorder is a drive-energetic decathexis of the basic psychic tissue, or the primal representative matrix, which has far-reaching consequences within the entire psychic organization. The basic psychic tissue corresponds to that area of inner reality which, according to Freud, remains beyond the primal repression and is made up of the first representations of the instinctual drive. The entire psychic organization has then been woven out of this representational tissue, binding drive energies in a preliminary way. According to the view put forward here, schizophrenic fragmentation does not primarily represent a disintegration of the psychic macrostructures or a consequence of the ego's resorting to primitive defences but is a consequence of a drive-energetic crisis at the level of the basic psychic tissue. The disorder manifests itself as the disappearance of inner liveliness and as a diffuse dissociation of the entire representional world, which I have characterized as the disappearance of psychic transparence. Its influences naturally also extend to the realm of the more advanced psychic functions and macrostructures and will invalidate in a radical way the person's drive economy. Reference is made in the article to the possibility that the central task of the primal representative matrix may be the creation of lively connexions and a striving for synthesis throughout the entire psychic organization and that the schizophrenic disorder may be intimately related to the decathexis of this function.     

The traumatic roots of containment: the evolution of Bion's metapsychology

W. R. Bion wrote repeatedly about his World War I experiences as a tank officer, thus engaging in historicizing a traumatic emotional experience. A close reading of the many layers in these writings suggests that the war experiences influenced the metapsychology he created. The author argues that haunting questions regarding the ability of the mind to survive trauma led Bion to elaborate on the process of containing emotional experience, and hence to address the lack of an intricate theory of thinking in psychoanalytic metapsychology and to offer a vision of a mind struggling to survive, culminating in the growth of a postmodern consciousness.     

Schopenhauer as the originator of Freudian metapsychology]

The influence of 19th century philosophy on Freud's thought is to this day underestimated in comparison with the influence of the scientific theories. G?dde vindicates Max Horkheimer's proposition that Freud was "in certain respects a successor to Schopenhauer" even though Freud knew Schopenhauer (and Nietzsche) through secondary literature rather than through the original writings.     

The common mirror dream, dreamer, and the dream mirror

From the widely diverse category of so-called mirror dreams, we have differentiated the most frequent, which we have designated the common mirror dream (CMD). It is one in which the dreamer at some point looks into a mirror and reports seeing himself, a part of himself or a distorted though recognizable version of himself. Mirror dreams, including CMDs, are distinctly uncommon. Every dreamer of CMDs in our series had felt enjoined by the mother (in most cases with the father's collusion) not to see and regard her clearly and not to be an accurately reflecting mirror for her. The intensity with which the maternal injunction against accurate visual perception and evaluation was feared was an important distinguishing feature in our patients with CMDs. The essence of the CMD has been hypothesized to be a reciprocal, reverberating, visual-exhibitionistic dyad representative of the mother-child relationship. The dream mirror may represent the wish that the analyst-mother counter a feared parental injunction against accurate visual perception and evaluation so as to correct the distorted perceptions of self and objects and provide visual affirmation of the value and integrity of the self-representation. For some patients, defense against the dangers of castration and loss of maternal love was accomplished by the mirror mechanisms of magically transforming images in the mirror, the ease of creating illusion in the mirror, and a fetishistic mechanism of visually reintrojecting a phallic symbol from the mirror. Our data failed to confirm many of the hypotheses of previous contributors as to specific symbolic meanings of the dream mirror. More relevant than the symbolism of the dream mirror are the many functions of the dream mirror for the dreamer. These are analyzed and discussed.