ABSTRACT
In an aphoristic statement, the quintessentially American psychoanalyst, Harry Stack Sullivan, is known to have said: ‘Beware of smoothly going therapy’. The term ‘disruption has no ‘official’ definition. It does not appear in psychiatric or psychoanalytic glossaries. Observing that certain patients got worse rather than better upon being understood in a correct fashion, Freud came up with the idea that an unconscious feeling of guilt was responsible for this unexpected disturbance. A second dynamics of disruptions involves the patient’s regression due to the dread of facing newer intrapsychic conflicts once the intense, splitting-related issues are resolved. Patients with severe personality disorders often have suffered intense frustrations in childhood. Lack of love, chronic neglect, betrayal, physical and sexual abuse, and abandonment via desertion, divorce, or death often figure prominently in their developmental history. Certain disruptions of treatment are caused by anxiety over having a separate existence of one’s own.
