Klein and Lacan Meet 21st Century Schizoid Man: Fairy Stories for the Modern Era

Abstract

Melanie Klein invited us into the phenomenology of the schizoid dilemma through her depictions of the paranoid-schizoid position. By inserting his recursive arrows, Bion extended this conceptualization, showing us the folly of believing that we can ever entirely move beyond the frightening fantasies and realities of social exclusion and isolation. The 21st century has brought, along with the explosion of technology, an expulsion from the social order of many children who have found refuge from isolation and humiliation in the more accessible and less terrifying world of media and technological invention. What may look like narcissism can mask a terrible underlying schizoid failure to enter into the human race. This is the realm of fantasy run amok, where desire becomes alien and alienated such that one is haunted and hunted down by its very possibility. In this universe, conceptualizations from Klein, Bion, and Lacan help us to locate the individual who has become caught in a massive psychic retreat such that there is no subject because there are no objects. To illustrate, I describe my work with a young man who is living in a terrible "zombie zone" where people are not real and therefore are incomprehensible and terribly dangerous. The poignancy of his dilemma is heartbreaking. Perhaps that is one lesson we can still take from our old fairy tales: when one's heart can be broken by another's plight, then comes the possibility of a healing, an entry through that piercing of what had been impenetrable.

From a Pictogram to a Symbol: Working with a Transgender Patient in an NHS Gender Clinic Using Piera Aulagnier's Theory of Identity Formation

“…However, the specifics of modern psychological, sociological and ethical considerations, and the gradual change in the understanding of mental health complexities, would make the theory applicable to the understanding of different aspects of the mental functioning with the development of the identity and the recognition of the deep, internal parts of the personal experience in particular. We also have to remember that her theory was developed almost 50 years ago and may not sufficiently reflect the current identity crisis in an era of unprecedented narcissism (Andrade, 2007; Bauman, 2013; Charles, 2014).…”