Umiliazione e mortificazione nella fantasia inconscia, R. Schafer

Different in their etymologies, humilation and mortification come together as prominent members of a family of forms of experiencing debasement. Debasement may extend as far as a sense of annihilation associated with fantasies of deserving to die, being made to die, even causing oneself to die. These fantasies and the figurative language and gestures corresponding to them may also imply retention of the power to reverse the process, thereby to regain existence and acceptance through penance and rehabilitation. Mortification and humilation are constituents of dynamic contexts in which opposites meet, so that analysts are able to infer as well the presence of onnipotent fantasies and envious, contemptuous, and persecutory attitudes in just those unfortunates ostensibly leading only debased lives. All of which is understandable in terms of the strategic and tactical defenses characteristic of the primitively narcissistic paranoid-schizoid position as described by Melanie Klein (1946). To the extent that the patient has moved toward the depressive position, a position in which he or she can assume responsibility and feel reparative wishes along with guilt and not merely a desire to placate others to ward off their retaliations, to that extent it will be easier to work through these problems in analysis. In extreme cases, howevere, much analytic time may have to be spent helping the patient move far enough into the depressive position to begin to accomplish this working through. This part of the work requires much analysis of primitive ego functioning as expressed in the transference and felt in the countertransference. In these ways, psychoanalysis may make significant contributions to the development of all those patients, of whom there are so many, who have lived their lives in states of extreme shame and who, upon entering analysis, take on the immense job of change toward greater autonomy, pride, and regulations of self-esteem through truly mutual relations with others in both the internal and external worlds.