ABSTRACT
Thomas Wolfe was breast-fed for his first three and a half years, which led to an excessive reliance on incorporation as a mode of internalization and perpetual struggles with issues of separation-individuation and dependence-independence. With Wolfe’s usage of the mechanism of incorporation being so pervasive, the attendant blurring of ego boundaries and the concomitant faulty delineation of introjects as exemplified by Eugene Gant’s failure to discriminate between individual physical traits would interfere extensively with mourning. Breast-fed until he was three and a half, Wolfe had protracted difficulty in distinguishing self from object representations and chronic problems with separation-individuation and the attainment of genuine autonomy and intimacy, being a lonely, isolated individual for much of his adult life. Wolfe’s impulsivity and self-destructiveness contributed to his death at 37 in that he exposed himself recklessly to a perceptibly dangerous situation, thereby aggravating previously-quiescent pulmonary tuberculosis, complications of which were fatal.
