ABSTRACT
Ogden, Minton and Pain write: A defensive action, such as freezing or fighting, becomes a generalized response to perceived threat, causing traumatized clients to feel that they cannot cope with everyday challenges. This chapter explores how these primitive mammalian defences of fight, flight, freeze, and collapse, as well as the ongoing hypervigilance that is a result of the trauma, underlie, and form the essential core of, narcissistic, schizoid, borderline, hysteric, and obsessional personality organisations. The fight response can be seen to be the primitive response that underlies, and becomes elaborated into, a narcissistic personality organisation. Similarly a flight response can be seen to be the essence of a schizoid personality organisation. Here, the individual avoids and denies difficult experience, limiting their own experience and view of themselves and remaining closed off from painful core experience and the effect of others. At heart of anxious and obsessional personality organisations lies the hypervigilance with which the individual is always scanning for threat.
