The dead mother complex is a revelation 启示 of the transference. When the subject presents himself to the analyst for the first time, the symptoms of which he complains are not essentially of a depressive kind. Most of the time these symptoms indicate more or less acute 尖锐的 conflicts with objects who are close. It is not infrequent that a patient spontaneously recounts a personal history where the analyst thinks to himself that here, at a given moment, a childhood depression should or could have been located, of which the subject makes no mention. This depression, which has sometimes appeared sporadically 断断续续的,偶尔 in the clinical history, only breaks into the open in the transference. As for the classic neurotic symptoms, they are present but of secondary value or, even if they are important, the analyst has the feeling that the analysis of their genesis 起源 will not furnish the key to the conflict. On the contrary, the problems pertaining 与...有关 to narcissism are in the foreground 突出的地位where the demands of the ego ideal are considerable, in synergy 协同增效作用 with or in opposition to the superego. The feeling of impotence 无能为力 阳痿 is evident. Impotence to withdraw from a conflictual situation, impotence to love, to make the most of one's talents, to multiply one's assets, or, when this does take place, a profound dissatisfaction with the results.
死寂妈妈情结是移情揭露的一个真相,当该主题自己第一次在分析中呈现的时候,症状——他抱怨的症状本质上不是抑郁之类的东西。大多数时间,这些症状或多或少的和亲近的客体发生激烈的冲突。并非罕见的是,病人自发的重新讲述个人史,这些历史让分析师认为他自己就在哪儿,在一个给定的时刻,应该或能够定位到儿童期的抑郁,而相关的主体又未被提及。这个抑郁,有时候会断断续续的出现在临床史之中,只有在移情中才会打破沉寂而公开化。作为经典的神经症症状,他们被呈现,但是作为次要的价值,即便他们是重要的,分析师依旧会觉得,分析他们的起源不会为主要的冲突提供配置。相反,与自恋有关的问题位居主要的位置,在那里,自我理想化的需要相当的大,或协同于超我,或与超我相对。无能为力的情绪感受是明显的。从冲突的情景中撤回到无能为力,无能去爱,无法最大限度地发挥自己的才能,增加自己的资产,或者当这种情况发生时,对额外的结果非常不满。
When the analysis is underway, the transference will reveal, sometimes quite rapidly but more often after long years of analysis, a singular depression. The analyst has the feeling of a discordance 不可信任度额 between the transference depression -an expression that I am coining on this occasion to oppose it to transference neurosis -and the behaviour outside the analysis where depression does not blow up, because nothing indicates that the entourage 随从 perceives it clearly, which nevertheless does not prevent the people close to him from suffering from the object-relationship that the analysand establishes with them.
分析行进之时,移情就会展现,有时候会很快,但是常年分析后通常是个单一的抑郁。分析师在移情抑郁——一种表现是我杜撰这种场合以反对移情神经症——和抑郁不会爆发的分析外的行为之间体会到了一种不一致的感觉,因为没有迹象表明随行之人清楚觉察之,然而,这并不能阻止那些与他关系密切的人们遭受(分析者和他们建立起来的)客体关系之苦。
It should be noted that the most serious instance is the death ofa child at an early age, as all authors have understood. In particular there is a cause which remains totally hidden, because the manifest signs by which the child could recognize it, and thus gain retrospective knowledge of it, is never possible because it rests on a secret: a miscrriage of the mother, which must be reconstructed by the analysis from minute indications; a hypothetical construction, of course, which renders a coherence to what is expressed in the clinical material, which can be attached to earlier periods of the subject's history.
The transformation in the psychical life, at the moment of the mother's sudden bereavement when she has become abruptly detached from her infant, is experienced by the child as a catastrophe; because, without any warning signal, love has been lost at one blow. One does not need to give a lengthy description of the narcissistic traumatism that this change represents. One must however point out that it constitutes a premature disillusionment and that it carries in its wake, besides the loss of love, the loss of waning, for the baby disposes of no explication to account for what has happened. Of course, being at the centre of the maternal universe, it is clear that he interprets this deception as the consequence of his drives towards the object. This will be especially serious if the complex of the dead mother occurs at the moment when the child discovers the existence of the third person, the father, and that the new attachment should be interpreted by him as the reason for the mother's detachment. In any case, here there is a premature and unstable triangulation. For either, as I have just said, the withdrawal of the mother's love is attributed to the mother's attachment to the father, or this withdrawal will provoke an early and particularly intense attachment to the father, felt to be the saviour (救世主) from the conflict taking place between mother and infant. Now, in reality, the father more often than not does not respond to the child's distress. The subject is thus caught between a dead mother and an inaccessible father, either because the latter is principally preoccupied by the state of the mother, without bringing help to the infant, or because he leaves the mother-child couple to cope with this situation alone.
After the child has attempted in vain to repair the mother who is absorbed by her bereavement, which ha8 made him feel the measure of his impotence, after having experienced the loss of his mother's love and the threat of the loss of the mother herself, and after he has fought against anxiety by various active methods, amongst which agitation, insomnia and nocturnal terrors are indications, the ego will deploy a series of defences of a different kind.
The first and most important is a unique movement with two aspects: the decathexis of the maternal (母亲般的)object and the unconscious identification with the dead mother. The decathexis, which is principally affective, but also representative, constitutes a psychical murder of the object, accomplished without hatred. One will understand that the mother's affliction excludes the emergence of any contingency of hatred susceptible of damaging her image even more.
No instinctual destructiveness is to be inferred from this operation of decathexis of the maternal image. Its result is the constitution of a hole in the texture of object-relations with the mother, which does not prevent the surrounding cathexes from being maintained, just as the mother's bereavement modifies her fundamental attitude with regard to the child, whom she feels incapable of loving, but whom she continues to love just as she continues to take care of him. However, as one says, 'her heart is not in it'.