Marijuana abuse, transitional experience, and the borderline adolescent

Patterns of ego boundary disturbance in neurotic, borderline, and schizophrenic patients.

“…The findings that schizophrenics offered significantly more contamination responses than borderlines or neurotics provides inferential support for the view of most contemporary object relations theorists that schizophrenia involves a developmental impasse in the symbiotic stage with a subsequent impairment in developing a firm boundary between the infant's representation of self and representation of the caretaking object. In contrast, the findings that seriously disturbed, hospitalized borderline patients offered significantly more confabulation responses than the other groups provides independent but inferential corroboration for ModelPs (1968) and Sugarman's (Sugarman & Jaffe, in press;Sugarman &Kurash, 1982) contention that borderline patients demonstrate a developmental arrest at the stage of Winnicott's (1953) transitional object. While the borderline is capable of mentally representing the separateness of self from other, this differentiation is precarious and subject to distortion (excessive affective elaboration), so that the other is experienced as possessing regulatory capacities and emotions that should lie within the self-representation (Sugarman & Jaffe, in press).…”

“…The cognitive foundation for these symptoms and object relational difficulties presumably involve symbolic equations (Segal, 1957(Segal, , 1981 or concrete operational thought (Sugarman & Kurash, 1982) in which inner representations are not distinguished from the reality objects that they represent. In fact, Elkind (1971) reports that at this stage of cognitive egocentrism, primitive mental constructions are preferred and assumed implicitly to be more valid than perceptions.…”

“…are the implications of Blatt's reformulation for the borderline disorders. Elsewhere Sugarman, 1980) the clinical impression Pine, & Bergman, 1975;Sugarman & Jaffee, in press;Sugarman & Kurash, 1982;V/innicott, 1953).…”

“…Elsewhere (Lerner & Lerner, 1980; Sugarman, 1980) the clinical impression that confabulation responses predominate the Rorschach protocols of borderline patients has been reported. The inability to differentiate iner from outer reality; that is, fantasy from reality, is characteristic of the developmental period marked by the predominance of illusion–toddlerhood, during which Winnicott stressed the importance of transitional objects (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975; Sugarman & Jaffee, in press; Sugarman & Kurash, 1982; Winnicott, 1953).…”

The role of the transitional realm as an organizer of analytic process: Transitional organizing experience.

“…The more pathological use of transitional phenomena in attempts to cope with internal self-regulatory problems as seen more concretely in addictions (Krystal & Raskin, 1970;Sugarman & Kurash, 1982;Yorke, 1970); fetishes and perversions (Abrams & Neubauer, 1978;Bak, 1953;Bronstein, 1992;Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1981;Dickes, 1978;Greenacre, 1968Greenacre, , 1969; and psychotic disturbances (in the balance between illusion and reality) such as delusions, hallucinations, and pathological self-object organizations (Giovacchini, 1978;Ogden, 1989;Searles, 1963;Steiner, 1993) have been well described in the clinical literature. In the clinical process, the transitional use of the analyst (Greenson, 1978;Grolnick, 1986;Modell, 1968), transference enactments (Freud, 1914(Freud, /1961dMcLaughlin, 1991;Renik, 1992;Sanville, 1991;Steingart, 1995), dreams (Grolnick, 1978), concrete use of fantasies (Volkan, 1973), and masochistic attachments to symptoms, conflicts, and self-and object representations (Lax, 1989;Novick & Novick, 1996) as noted in the working-through process (Limentani, 1989) underscores the multiplicity of creative, adaptive uses that have been made of the construct of the transitional realm.…”