Controlling,Avoiding, or Protecting the Object: Three Reactions to the Breakdown of Psychic Retreats

In working psychoanalytically, it is common to encounter patients who need to carefully manage their immediate objects. This is evident in their stories about external life at home, at work, and with friends as well as in how it emerges within the transference. While a frequent theme in many analytic cases, the motives behind this need are varied.

Case material is used to show how these reactions emerge when psychic retreats fail. When unable to find refuge in pathological organizations or psychic retreats, patients are exposed to the worst of paranoid and depressive anxieties with only a fragile foxhole to withdraw into or defend from. In such a precarious psychological state, fantasies of unbearable self and object danger emerge, leading to various forms of acting out, overreliance on projective identification, and perverted images of giving and receiving. These fantasies result in the desire for idealized objects, the drive to resurrect fallen objects, and the need to avoid cruel and attacking objects that have taken over and replaced the sought out ideal.