Toward a new mind model for the primitive personalities
Robbins, M.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 64: 127-148
1983
ISSN/ISBN: 0020-7578 PMID: 6874231 Document Number: 215312
Most psychoanalytic theories of pathology still employ Freud's neurosis (drive, conflict, defense) model. Material is presented to demonstrate the insufficiency of this model for understanding primitive personality organization. Normal infant development was reviewed to demonstrate more precisely when the neurosis model of the mental apparatus first becomes applicable (around 18 mo.). An epigenetically more primitive mental model was proposed in which the 1st mental representations develop in the context of sensorimotor-affective thinking and adaptively undifferentiated relations with objects. The development of adult primitive personalities is arrested at the stage described by this model, and further pathological development has occurred within the confines of the model. The mental life of the normal infant and the primitive personality consists of discrete nonevocable representations, hardly differentiated from recognition-enactments with a stimulus object. The primitive personality differs from the infant in several respects. He is incapable of representing pleasure at all, and instead is preoccupied with primitive representations of displeasure. Moreover, in his symbiotic relations he lacks the positive representational substrate necessary to develop ambivalent dialogue with his primary object. Therefore the pathway to develop complex, integrated representational configurations such as conflict and ambivalence is blocked. Instead, his symbiotic relations are of 2 kinds. One is based oni the primary relationship and feeds a core identity representation of badness internalized by pathological introjection. The other is based on the capacity to represent strangeness and to project, and seems to reflect a development failure to represent displeasure realistically and maturely.