ABSTRACT
The chapter relates schizophrenic fragmentation to a particular vulnerability of an individual’s psychic regulation. The instinctual dangers inherent to human life may then precipitate a drive-economic emergency at the elementary level of psychic experience; that is, a decathexis of the primal representative matrix consisting of the first representatives of the instinctual drive. The disorder manifests itself as a loss of inner vitality and a diffuse fragmentation of the entire representational world, which the author characterises as the loss of psychic transparency. Instead of normal psychic representation, the drive-instinctual processes will then be channelled through a short circuit, as it were, approximating the somatic process and depleting an individual’s vital narcissistic resources. The author compares this phenomenon with the shattering of a windscreen that, after having been fragmented, may keep its contour, but lose its essential functional property, namely transparency. The case history presented in this chapter provides the key to the understanding of the primary narcissism as a vital resource for an individual’s psychic survival.
