ABSTRACT
As result of being linked with the object at different levels of psychic integration, the unconscious wish constitutes psychic reality from within, rendered possible by primary identification first creating the frame for dealing with elementary drive phenomena on the wish-level. But this configuration may collapse with fatal consequences. If the unconscious wish as the carrier of psychic functioning fails, the individual must confront a radical psychic trauma.
An object-directed wish becomes associated in the unconscious with drive-instinctual dangers. Being unable to understand these dangers on a metaphorical level, the child will conceive of them as actual threats. The most delicate task of the psychoanalysis is to reach the Oedipal wishes. Gaining the insight that these wishes and the concomitant drive-instinctual dangers are id-elements from the past makes it possible to understand at a secondary process level that loss and vulnerability constitute an integral part of human life. A new temporal perspective will then be created in the experiential world, indicating a structural integration of psychic functioning.
