ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a psychic position, arrived at in the analyses of certain patients after some years of intensive work, which presented difficulties in analysis and working through and which seemed to contain a strong risk of falling into impasse. The patients appeared to have had an experience of psychic fragmentation at a very early point in development. The frustration of primitive and intense wishes and desires, overwhelming to the early, fragile ego, had led to the defensive strategy of disintegration or fragmentation, either directly of the ego, or indirectly by the launching of a disintegrating attack on the object and then re-introjecting that disintegrated object. The need to avoid the experience of disintegration or fragmentation produces a characteristic defence where the patient’s phantasy is sometimes described as if being “at one” with the analyst. Morgan’s technique is to invite the patient to explore the reality of the phantasy that emerges in the projective identification into the analyst.
