Haloes, traps and the devil: Delusory cocoons and identification with the exalted ego-ideal

During the period when I was preoccupied with Susan’s alternating profile symbol and seeing it as expressing her problem of how to find the healthy interplay between the states of unity and of separateness, I came to want to use the term manic-depressive swing to describe the movement between the two states. This, however, brought difficulties, I felt, because of the need to sort out the relation of the fused whole-circle state both to what is usually called ‘manic’ and even to what is usually called ‘mania’.