Expulsion and Sublimation; Handling Internalized Objects

(analysis of a dream)

Abstract

This work shows, through the analysis of a dream and the subjects with which it is related, a section of the analytic treatment of a patient. The latter, a woman who suffered from several hypochondric troubles, conversion symptoms, depressions and difficulties in her sublimations and object relations, expresses a critical moment in her analysis and her life in this dream. Many “beasts” and other elements of the manifest content, express the present state of her internalised objects. The persecutory aspect of the latter was formerly to be seen in the diverse “pains” of the patient, and the dream constitutes the patient’s attempt to drive out these objects and to use them in a sublimation, thus modifying the type of control and of handling used up to that moment. The analysis of the affections of the dream leads us to another theme, which is very important for the patient: the experience of the magic and the wondrous. One gets to understand the feeling of the marvellous in the dream as an elaboration of sinister phantasies in connection with the mother identified with death. One tries to understand the nature and genesis of the persecutors, discovering that, in the patient’s infantile experiences, the splitting process of the mother (with dissociation of the good aspects, placed on the father and the latter’s idealisation) seems to be the origin of many of her difficulties.
One investigates how, for this patient, the sublimation implies, aside from the outdriving of internalised persecutors, their harmonious integration which enables a control over them and the disappearance of their persecutory qualities. This integration is experienced by the patient, in the transference situation, according to the model of analytical work.