This paper is an attempt to investigate certain structures of subjectivity laid down in development by processes of pathological accommodation. These emerge when the child is required preemptively to adhere to the needs of its primary objects at the expense of its own psychological distinctness. By repetitive patterning of the child's first reality, an immutable product is created and emerges in the form of fixed belief systems. Systems of pathological accommodation are responses to the trauma of archaic object loss and designed to protect against intolerable pain and existential anxiety. These structures are reactivated in analysis in the context of reciprocal, mutually influencing structures operating unrecognized in both patient and analyst. When they are not addressed, they represent a formidable source of resistance to the analytic process. A review of pathological accommodation in the history of psychoanalysis itself is provided.
A focus on affect integration and its derailments illuminates the complex interrelationships between developmental failure and the formation of psychic conflict, both in childhood and in the psychoanalytic situation. The specific contexts in which conflict takes form are situations in which central affect states of the child cannot be integrated because they fail to evoke the requisite responsiveness from the caregiving surround. Such unintegrated feeling states become the source of enduring inner conflict, because they are experienced as threats to both the person's established psychological organization and to the maintenance of vitally needed ties. In treatment, the emergence of unintegrated affect is resisted for fear that the analyst will replicate the faulty responsiveness of the childhood milieu.Psychoanalytic psychologies of developmental deficit and of psychic conflict are often regarded as antithetical to one another or, at best, as complementary (Kohut, 1977). It is the thesis of this article that the two sets of phenomena are closely interrelated and that inner conflict always becomes structuralized in the context of specific developmental derailment. Before pursuing this argument, however, we wish to clarify some central concepts.We use Kohut's (1971Kohut's ( , 1977 term self object to designate a class of psychological functions pertaining to the maintenance, restoration, and transformation of self-experience. Thus, the term selfobject, when used in accord with its strictly psychoanalytic meaning, does not refer to an environmental entity or caregiving agent. Rather, it refers to an object experienced subjec-Requests for reprints should be sent to Robert D.
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