ABSTRACT
To Wilfred Bion’s assertion that the patient destroys the Ego because it brings him into contact with a frightening reality, Réfabert replies that in truth the Ego is destroyed by the refusal of the environment to accept aggressivity. Like Winnicott, he believes that near the origin drive is unified and the destrudo is only one of its aspects. Freud spoke of a unified drive briefly in 1919, when he put forth the hypothesis of a life-and-death instinct.
Bion speaks of an “innate Oedipal preconception”. Réfabert sees this preconception as the paradoxical potential defining the child and the Oedipus complex.
The mother bestows the gift of a paradoxical foundation by accepting the union of contradictory feelings: love and hate, rhythmic continuity and discontinuity… In the absence of such a paradoxical foundation, the infans finds himself captive of the One, of the same, and attempts to escape the harm inflicted by the union of contradictions.
In analysis, discontinuity of being caused by a deficient environment requires the analyst to withstand storms, acting-out, the frenzy of all or nothing. Bion wrote that the maternal function consists of transforming and “symbolising”, unnamed pains and emotions. When Ferenczi introduced the crucial notion of introjections of “external influences”, these influences were attributed to the mother–baby relation, to the “dual unity”. By so doing, he connected drive with transference.
