Über einige klinische Manifestationen des Todestriebes

摘要

Whereas the concept of the death instinct is traditionally connected with attacks on linkings, the author describes a clinical manifestation in which the underlying destructiveness is concealed by a longing for love, uniqueness and infinity. Referring to Steiner’s concept of ”romantic perversion” the paper tries to show that this manifestation implies a distortion of the concepts of space and time which is characteristic for a certain type of borderline pathology. Using clinical material the function of the corresponding defensive organization and the resulting constellations in the transference situation are discussed in detail. Therapeutically, the tendency of those patients to evade the experience of separateness and to take over central elements of their psychic reality into a timeless, romantic universe confronts the analyst with considerable technical difficulties. In order to counteract this tendency to create ”psychic unreality” (Britton), it seems important to registrate carefully and to interprete the underlying destructiveness within the subtle enactments in transference and countertransference.