ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a group of patients who suffer from entrenched narcissistic and phobic defences. Because of this, they find establishing deep emotional contact with other people to be very problematic. A history of early infantile trauma due to a failure of maternal containment and/or maternal impingement is probably implicated, to some extent, in the phobic structuring of the personality. H. Rosenfeld, D. W. Winnicott, and H. Kohut, among many others, have all emphasized the centrality of adverse infantile experiences of impingement in the aetiology of these conditions. Essentially, the patients the chapter describes seem to have had an early phobic response to their primary object, which they experienced as malign. This early difficulty with accepting maternal care appears to have played a significant part in distorting and preventing internalization of a good object and the ego integration one would hope for in normal development.
