A World of Illusion: The Creation of a Perverse Solution as a Reaction to Parental Emotional Absence

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Abstract

This presentation describes two patients who responded to parental emotional absence by creating a world of illusion. I demonstrate how parental "not-thereness" substitutes for internal representation of a missing object.

An effective illusory state develops following adolescence and becomes entrenched as an aspect of psychic reality and is subsequently discharged in perverse fantasies and enactments.

I trace how an illusory fantasy object is created to replace the emotionally absent object, who otherwise would be experienced as having abandoned the child. This fantasy object is subsequently enacted as a presence filling the void of emotional absence. The perverse enactment erases the " not-thereness" by a fantasy or enactment, which is changed or disguised in a sexualized interaction and displaced into a different time and place.

This illusion is sustained by an attempt to make the fantasy real and has the function of creating freedom from anxiety of object loss, thereby maintaining a temporary psychic cohesion. Thus the power of illusory psychic reality exerts an organizing effect on the patient's internal structure by creating an illusory presence of an absent object. Once created, this fantasy object serves a powerful defensive function, which opposes the analytic process endangering it to succumbing to a severe negative therapeutic reaction.

In this presentation I shall describe how the creation of a world of illusion was motivated in two of my patients as a reaction to parental emotional absence that began in childhood. These patients, a man and a woman, needed to create an affective illusory state that became entrenched as an aspect of their psychic reality and discharged in fantasies and perverse enactments following adolescence.

Green (1997) has defined absence as something or someone not present, creating "a representation of the absence of representation, which expresses itself as a void, emptiness, futility or meaninglessness. . . . [This psychic state] becomes a [psychic] materialization ... of an absent negative bond" (1074). This negative bond leads to destructive action aimed symbolically at annihilating the object (1082). In my words, this intrapsychic state is experienced as a "not-thereness" that substitutes for the internal representation of a missing object.

Parental emotional absence fosters fantasy formation that compensates for the absent object. I shall trace how an illusory object is created in...