ABSTRACT
According to the hierarchical view of psychic life, psychopathology consists of relatively maladaptive resort to modes of behavior regulation of archaic origin. Regression to the mode of organization that prevailed during the phases of development when the self-as-structure was in the process of formation is the loss of self-cohesion often experienced subjectively as “fragmentation.” Transference enactments constitute a mode of communication that occupies an intermediate position along the developmental line of communicative skills between a mimetic use of the soma and verbal language. The hierarchical view of psychopathology makes it possible to determine the vectors that lead to the specific choice of particular symptoms.
