ABSTRACT
In talking of the psychotic part of the personality, to speak of the destructive attacks which the patient makes on anything which is felt to have the function of linking one object with another. This chapter shows the significance of this form of destructive attack in the production of some symptoms met with in borderline psychosis. The prototype for all the links is the primitive breast or penis. The chapter presupposes familiarity with Melanie Klein's descriptions of the infant's fantasies of sadistic attacks upon the breast of the infant's splitting of its objects, of projective identification. It discusses phantasied attacks on the breast as the prototype of all attacks on objects that serve as a link and projective identification as the mechanism employed by the psyche to dispose of the ego fragments produced by its destructiveness. The chapter suggests that Freud's analogy of an archaeological investigation with a psychoanalysis was helpful if it were considered.
