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The Use of Group Analysis to Resolve a Long-standing Transference
Resistance of Fear of Annihilation
By Leslie Quinn
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| Abstract: |
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This single case study followed the psychoanalytic
treatment of a 44-year-old female patient. Data were gathered from
individual and group sessions over the course of the patient's ninth,
tenth and eleventh years of treatment. Analysis of contacts, repetitive
themes, and transference states revealed that success, emergence, growth
or competence mobilized this patient's unconscious and unacceptable
preverbal oral wish to devour, which the patient believed would, in some
materially measurable way, destroy herself and/or the other. This
aggressive sadism, apparently having been exacerbated by intrauterine
and infant starvation and chastisement, mobilized an extreme, paralyzing
guilt which manifested as masochism and failure. The patient developed
an elaborate, layered defense structure to resist becoming conscious of
her murderously devouring aggression which would result either in
magical annihilation of the other, or in incorporation of the self into
the other; in either case, the ultimate fear was that she would exist
alone. Understanding the perceived dangers in such a transference
relationship illuminated how the primitive oral feelings of engulfment
and annihilating separation invaded the individual treatment modality.
The analyst used group psychoanalysis as an intervention modality to
resolve the patient's long-standing transference resistance. The patient
perceived the treatment group as less toxic and more growth-enhancing
than the individual analytic setting, in which both analysand and
analyst were highly defended. This study argues that the group modality
was helpful in lessening this patient's sense of danger and toxicity
within the transference, thereby resolving the dyad's inability to
progress beyond the pervasive power struggle manifested in a status-quo
resistance.
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