ABSTRACT

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The birthmark", the author tells the tale of a young couple wed. "The birthmark" takes psychoanalysts into a psychic world where brittle primitive idealisations protect against the awareness of a broken-down object, a disintegrated object for which more ordinary care is insufficient, and an object beyond repair. Such an object relation aims at the perfect fit of an idealised union. Idealisation for Melanie Klein represents a necessary but transient state in normal development: idealisation is the "safeguard against a retaliating or dead mother and against all bad objects". Self-idealisation is a part of the early need for idealisation, and just like idealisation, protects the ego from the sense of internal persecutors. The presence of idealisation interferes with the building up of a good object inside, as what is required instead is the presence of an ideal figure regarding one's goodness or being an ideal figure oneself.