One Envy or Many?: Commentary on Paper by Julie Gerhardt

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Notes

¹ Freud (1917): “In the cases lying within the series a greater or lesser amount of predisposition in the sexual constitution is combined with a lesser or greater amount of detrimental experience in their lives. Their sexual constitution would not have led them into a neurosis if they had not had these experiences, and these experiences would not have had a traumatic effect on them if their libido had been otherwise disposed. In this series I can perhaps allow a certain preponderance in significance to the predisposing factors; but even that admission depends on how far you choose to extend the frontiers of neurotic illness.”

²Compare that with Klein's interpretation of a patient's dream in which the analyst who went away with the two or three petits fours stood not only for the breast which was withheld, but also for the breast which was going to feed itself (Klein, 1957/1975, p. 205).

³Winnicott had a point in coining the expression “good-enough-mother,” which meant also at the same time bad-enough. An ideal mother would according to this theory lend herself to belittle the child by her becoming glorified. A too bad-mother would become a persecutory object. Although the ideal mother ultimately becomes persecutory too. A “good-enough-and-bad-enough-mother” allows the infant to externalize both feelings of love and of hate.

⁴Although Bion likens these processes to the digestive functioning of incorporation and evacuation.

⁵In The Infantile Genital Organization of the Libido: A Supplement to the Theory of Sexuality, Freud (1923) says, “the difference between these two—the ‘infantile genital organization’ and the final genital organization of the adult—constitutes also the main characteristic of the infantile form, namely, that for both sexes in childhood only one kind of genital organ comes into account—the male. The primacy reached is not therefore a primacy of the genital, but of the phallus: (p. 142).

⁶In a footnote Freud (1923) adds, “It has quite correctly been pointed out that the child acquires the idea of a narcissistic wound or deprivation of a part of its body by the experience of the loss of the nipple after suckling and of the daily production of its fæces, even already by its separation from the womb of the mother at birth. Nevertheless, the castration complex should be a term reserved for the occasion when the idea of such deprivations comes to be associated with the loss of the male organ” (p. 144), meaning the phallus.

⁷Although Freud declared a primary narcissistic phase in infantile development he gave hints here and there of believing in early object relations. For instance in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Freud, 1926) he says, “the child's biological situation as a foetus is replaced for it by a psychical object-relation to its mother” (p. 138)

⁸Against the excessive keenness of getting the perfect attunement (the perfect pitch, I like to call it) there is Winnicott (1971) who wrote, “I think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding.” By this he meant that disillusionment of narcissistic unity plays an important role in both infantile development and therapeutic processes to bring the self towards the creation of a transitional space. Also Glover (1931) indicated that even inexact interpretations may have therapeutical effect. If this were so, we should think of an other factor in the equation by which some patients are more able than others to make the best of a bad job … and of life.