Shifting Skins: Love and Breakdown

ABSTRACT

This article extends psychoanalytic theories of “holding” and “psychic skin” to examine the containing function of romantic love. It argues that love can function to organize our inner world, helping our lives feel coherent and protecting us from what feels externally threatening, whether projected elements of our own psyches, the risk of breakdown, or true dangers existing in reality. The containing function of love is looked at through instances where it fails, and loss of love precipitates psychic disintegration. Through clinical examples and studies of two novels, Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, this article proposes that living and loving without illusions of certainty opens possibilities for integrated love with whole and imperfect objects.

Notes

¹ I have a debt of gratitude to my colleague and dear friend Dr. Jenny Marion, for her illuminating reading and editing of this paper.

² In her nonfiction collection Frantumaglia (2016), Elena Ferrante acknowledges the influence of psychoanalytic theory—in particular, the writings of Melanie Klein—on her work.

³ Fifty-five percent of webpage visits last for less than 15 seconds (Haile, 2014).

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Notes on contributors

Sophia Frydman

Sophia Frydman, Ph.D., practices in Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York. She completed her doctoral training at Adelphi University, her predoctoral internship at North Central Bronx Hospital, and her postdoctoral fellowship at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology.