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Volume 10, Number 1
January - June 2006

Defence mechanisms and early levels
Simona Argentieri


SUMMARY

Present-day developments in our discipline, exploration of very early so-called pre-oedipal levels, comparison with pathologies in the narcissistic area, awareness of the perennial coexistence of different, more or less primitive, levels of psychic organization within each individual in normal health as well as in sickness in the continuous interplay of "resignification a posteriori" - all call for a constant review on our part of the classical concepts of psychoanalysis.

This paper re-examines the concept of the mechanism of defence from Freud to our own times; from Anna Freud's defence mechanisms of the ego to E. Gaddini's concept of early defence fantasies in the body. Particular attention is paid to repression both primary as well as secondary, and to denial with the consequent splitting. In this sense, the author puts into focus the theoretic divergences between different schools regarding the conceptualizations of early areas of development and the relative technical consequences on transference interpretation at various interpersonal and intrapsychic levels.