![Sample our Health and Social Care journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5938/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Health-Social-Care.jpg"})
Abstract
In this article, I discuss certain traits of a personality structure, termed the Automaton Self,Footnote1 that appear to emerge in order to defend the individual from awareness of particular thoughts, feelings and emotions. It is suggested that such defences are deployed following the absence of a basic human need having been met, namely relationships with others, principally the primary caregivers, built on mutual reciprocity, that subsequently facilitate the internalisation of symbolising capacities. Previously, I had discussed these defensive organisations, termed automata states, in relation to individuals who appeared to exhibit borderline personalities (Sweet, A.D. (2010). Automata states and their relation to primitive mechanisms of defence. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 24(2), 101–114). I did this from the perspectives of both object relations and attachment based theoretical modalities. The intra and inter-psychic manifestations of projective identification, indicative of the automaton defensive repertoire based on splitting, were linked to gross environmental impingements that these patients appeared to suffer, during their formative developmental years. In this article, a fuller exploration of the personality structure, termed the Automaton Self, is presented. Attention is given to the defensive functions of the self structure, the meta-psychological foundations of this particular personality organisation and the implications and practicalities for the psychotherapeutic treatment of individuals who appear to display this personality type.
Keywords:
Notes
1. The etymology of the English word automata is related to the sense in which I employ the term to describe dissociated and dis-inhibited states. Auto has its roots in the Greek autos, meaning self, same. The Latin root is actus, an act. The description of a personality structure as an Automaton Self is, in this sense, very closely related to the psychoanalytic concept of pathological narcissism (Kernberg, 1975; Rosenfeld, 1971; Steiner, 1993), as the Automaton Self can be conceptualised in terms of self acting, or self same repetitious patterns of behaviour. The English word automatic is derived from the Greek o – ta – mat ik: literally, working by itself.
2. Patient names have been changed and certain non-essential biographical details have been altered in order to protect anonymity.