ABSTRACT
The great American scholar, M. H. Abrams wrote that the romantic writers of two hundred years ago, such as J. W. von Goethe, W. Wordsworth, J. C. F. Holderlin, or P. B. Shelley, undertook to save traditional concepts by reformulating them within a two-term system of subject and object, man and nature. Sigmund Freud suggested that one could venture to resolve religious myths, and transform metaphysics into metapsychology, by the psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious. The doctrine of Justification occupied as central a position in sixteenth century theological debate as did the relationship of the ego to the superego in the mid-twentieth century psychoanalytic “Controversial discussions” in London. The chapter suggests that the problems of containment evident in such personalities are a resultant of two factors: one is the maternal response to infantile projected identification and the other an innate factor in the infant.
