I've pointed to how different cultural figures are often composed of more than one transference. For example, the king may show up as both the anal superlative father and the volar stage semi-divine transference.
At the part-ego stage, I've begun to consider the name essence-ego (following the sequence phallic image-ego, anal spirit-ego, volar soul-ego, part-ego essence ego, and auto-erotic body-ego).
Again, I can't say for certain whether it is represented by the part-object (ie. the breast or penis alone) and part-ego is chosen based upon the asperger's like issue of the person needing to present themselves through their essence object (i.e. sharing a bunch of facts, bringing up their obsession with something (dinosaurs, war, religion, etc.), or delight in their own impressions of/association to things.
The ghost is a good example of getting to the essence of the object in the altruistic side of things. At the same time, the ghost often doesn't appear in its ethereal, human shaped form, but often as the poltergeist that affects inanimate things in the house.
The auto-erotic stage and its connection to perceptions in external Space vs. internal Space (phantasy) also has the differentiation of perception concerning animate objects and inanimate things. This is pointed to in the work of Mahler (and earlier Kanner of course) and Tustin:
in one group of
early child psychosis the mother, as
representative of the outside world, never seems to have been perceived
emotionally by the infant, and the first representation of
outer reality,
the mother as a person, as a separate entity, seems
not to be cathected. The mother remains
a part
object, seemingly devoid of specific cathexis and
not distinguished from inanimate objects. This
type of infantile psychosis
was first described by Kanner (1942), (1944), (1949) and given the name of
"Early Infantile Autism." In autistic infantile psychosis there are
no signs of affective awareness of other human
beings. Behavior which would point to affective perception of ministrations coming from the mother—from
the outside world—is absent. In the anamnesis of these children one finds
descriptions of the earliest behavior, which betray that there was no anticipatory
posture at nursing, no reaching-out gestures, and no specific smiling response.
Mahler, M.S. (1952).
On Child Psychosis and Schizophrenia—Autistic and Symbiotic Infantile Psychoses1. Psychoanal.
St. Child, 7:286-305
In working with autistic children, I have gathered hints as to how this restriction of awareness is brought about. For example, I have described their use of ‘autistic objects’ (Tustin, 1981). These are inanimate hard objects which are felt to be part of their bodily sensations. They distract their attention away from the outside world, with its unpredictable human beings. Autistic objects help the child to feel safe and in control.
They are also felt to fill the ‘holes’ through which inimical things could enter. Also, I have described elsewhere such children's resort to what I have called ‘autistic shapes’ (Tustin, 1986). These are whorls of sensations which are also felt to be part of their body. They are soothing and tranquillizing. Both these ‘artifacts’ generate, for most of the time, a bland self-sufficiency in which the child is not aware of those needs which provoke reaching out to other human beings. Instead, in a severe autistic state, the child feels that he is a ‘thing’ surrounded by other ‘things’. He does not feel that he is a flesh-and-blood creature with ordinary human needs. All this results in the picture we have come to associate with autism.
Many readers will know the danger signs in a baby which alert us to the possibility that he or she may be becoming autistic. Such babies avoid looking at themother, and usually also at other people. They do not smile. They do not vocalize. When they are capable of crawling or walking, they do not approach the mother. Usually, they stay motionless where they have been put down. In situations of need or distress, they do not seek comfort from the mother or anyone else. In short, as Fraiberg says, where there should be seeking there is avoidance. In the limited sample of such children who have privileged me with revelations about their state, it has become clear to me that all the above reactions arise from a state of elemental terror arising from the shock, or series of shocks, experienced by these children very early in infancy, in which their ‘going-on-being’ — their very existence — was felt to be threatened. This is the deepest and most fundamental of all terrors. The autistic restriction of awareness had seemed to protect them from awareness of that threatened catastophe. Thus it needs to be modified with extreme caution by workers with insight into its nature and function.Tustin, F. (1988). The ‘black hole’. Free Associations, 1:35-50
As they come out of their autism, autistic children show us that, in fleeting moments of excruciating awareness, they feel that they are 'nothings' surrounded by 'nothingness'. Lacking the feeling of being held firmly in the encircling embrace of caring attention, interest and concern, they have reacted to such threats by surrounding themselves with soft sensation shapes, and by holding on to hard sensation objects—Jane's shell was a good example of this. But these inanimate artefacts are both too hard or too soft. These children need the firm resilience of a human being whose appropriate and sensible responses enable on-going transformations to take place. Also, it is a truism to say that to be able to play, babies need to be played with. (p, 100)
Autistic Objects
Autistic children often carry hard objects around with them, or they try to stick themselves to hard objects. For such children, the hard sensations engendered by these objects are more important than the functions for which the objects were normally intended. Their salient characteristic is that the child feels that they are part of his body. For example, one 6-year-old boy I worked with, used to carry a large key-ring containing many keys. He felt that this was a bodily part which kept him safe. This was the function of the keys so far as he was concerned. They did not have their realistic function related to actual objects in the outside world.
Other children carry toy engines. They do not play with these engines but put them under their pillows to keep them safe. In the same way, some children may carry a toy motor-car clutched tightly in the palm of their hand. This seems to them to be an extra bit to their body which ensures their safety. 'Safety' is the keynote of these hard autistic objects. Objects used in this way are derivatives from part of the child's own body which were originally used as protectors. These were such things as the rolled-up tongue, the screwed-up inside pads of the cheeks, the hard faeces in the anus. Later, outside objects experienced as bodily parts, such as have been described, come to be used as protectors. They are 'me' objects which help the child to feel that he exists, and that his 'going-on-being' is ensured. These 'me' objects shut out distressing flashes of awareness of what is felt to be the dangerous 'not-me', which seems to threaten both their existence and their safety. They are not to be confused with Winnicott's transitional object which is a combination of 'me' and 'not-me' (Winnicott, 1951), and helps to link the two together. The transitional objectis a bridge to the 'not-me', autistic objects are a barrier to it.
Autistic Shapes
These arise from soft bodily sensations, such as the flow of urine from the body, or bubbles of spit around the mouth, or spit smeared on to outside objects, or from diarrhoea and vomit. They can also be engendered by holding an outside object loosely, or by pressing gently against it. They are also produced by rocking, spinning, and by hand and body stereotypes. The shapes thus engendered on body surfaces are felt to have no separateness from the subject's body. Nor are they classified shapes related to the actual shape of any particular object. Like autistic objects they are unshared with other people, and are idiosyncratic to the child alone. However, unlike autistic objects which are rigid and static, and whose outlines are definite, hard and unchanging, the outlines of autistic shapes are soft and evanescent. They follow each other in a fluid succession and can seem to be either sticky or slippery. They are 'tactile hallucinations' (Aulangier, 1985), in that they are generated by the subject alone, and have no objective reality in the outside world. Being soothing and calming they are a bodily-generated form of tranquillizer. This information has been conveyed to me by autistic children during three decades of working with them.
When these children first come to see us, objects are not used in terms of their shared common-sense function, but in terms of such children's idiosyncratic manipulations. These are to avoid impingements from the outside world which have been insufferable at the time when they first experienced them. Both autistic objects and autistic shapes are inhibitors and suppressants, and so they stop emotional and cognitive developments.
But why have the object-seeking, shape-making propensities of the human mind been diverted into such unfortunate channels? How is it that the capacity for play has been supplanted by sensation objects and sensation shapes? To understand this, we need to enquire into the origins of psychogenic autism. The first autistic child I had in intensive psychotherapy shed light on this for me. When he was speaking, having been mute at the outset of treatment, this child John, as I have called him, alerted me to what he referred to as 'the black hole with the nasty prick'. It became clear that this had precipitated the autism (Tustin, 1972), 1973).
Tustin, F. (1988). Psychotherapy with Children who Cannot Play. Int. Rev. Psycho-Anal., 15:93-106
I have much evidence which points to the fact that the roots of autistic illness are in the earlier pre-narcissistic state identified by Freud in the following quotation from his paper on Narcissism.
The auto-erotic instincts are there from the very first so there must be something added to autoerotism, a new psychological action, to bring aboutnarcissism (Freud 1914).4
In recent times, the concept of narcissism has been pushed further and further back to earlier and earlier stages, so that some psycho-analytic writers even speak of pre-natal narcissism. Thus, we have lost sight of the pre-narcissistic state distinguished by Freud. It seems to me that this state should be reinstated and studied on its own right, and not confused with narcissism. The psychological development of autistic children has been arrested in this state so that, when their pathological autistic overlay has been lifted, we can get from them some indications of its nature.
Pre-narcissism
Work with autistic children, supplemented by infant observation, indicates that pre-narcissism seems likely to be a psycho-physical state of auto sensuousness in which the child has not yet differentiated his body from that of the mother. Thus, his primal sense of “me-ness” is bound up with feeling merged with his mother. In normal development, this pre-narcissistic, auto-sensuous state enables the newborn infant to recover from the shock of being born, and to make a gradual transition from the watery medium of the womb to being a dweller on dry land with a separate existence of his own. This protective psycho-physical state is not an absolute nor a passive one. There are flickering moments of awareness of bodily separateness, and active forward thrusts of psychological development which culminate in a marked change in the infant's behaviour when he tolerates and begins to cooperate with the “not me”. This has been termed “psychological birth”10 & 20. I suggest that it is in this pre-narcissistic state that the sense of “me-ness” and its accompanying self-confidence is built up. This strengthens the infant to cope with the “not-me”.
Tustin, F. (1983). Thoughts on Autism with Special Reference to a Paper by Melanie Klein. J. Child Psychother., 9:119-131
What interests me in this conception, is the status of the inanimate thing as a fetish object. By this I mean fetish in the religious sense of having a tie to the divine. This would make the encounter with the inanimate thing part of the greater sense of relationship to God, which is often very important with psychotic people.
Another example of the double transference here is seen in the philosopher (the analytical metaphysician to be precise). The part-ego stage, once again, give us an interest in the quality or thingness of things and people in the egoist. The obsessional orientation to details is the issue. However, along with this there can be a backsliding to the auto-erotic stage so that inanimate things alone are the concern of the philosopher. You have here the Forms in the sense of the chairness of a chair and all the interest that analytic metaphysical philosophy showed for things with often a glaring absence of humans. However, it's not just philosophy with this predilection, science and the ability to be in a lab all day working with chemicals, for example, shows a similar stance.
Lastly, although Tustin talks about the autistic objects and shapes, these are seen as secondary and pathological manifestations of intrapsychic relations. One is to the sense of play in children, which is obviously related to phantasy and being able to act it out with toys and this is altruistic and relational. The other is the tie to external things not for their hardness but in a primitive spatial-temporal intelligence.
The importance of these functions in the artistic creation of a novel or in a Einstein-like thought experiment provides a sense for what is at stake at this level of the mind, while secondary defusion would mean the return of phantasy in delusion or a strong disorientation in spatial-temporal terms. (However, altruism often shows introjection and the inability to deal with a de-idealization of the object, so I wonder if this truly points to schizophrenia and cancer as opposites...) (There's also the thought that hallucination is on the egoistic side while delusion is on the egoistic one)
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