Through the looking glass: On trauma and unreality

In 1938, when discussing disavowal, Freud said: "This behaviour strikes us forcibly as being a turning away from reality - a procedure that we should prefer to reserve for psychosis." (author's italics). The fascinating ambiguity of "we should prefer" informs the thinking in this paper, about a patient who was simultaneously attached to reality, and addicted to switching into a world of unreality which protected her from delusional beliefs originating from traumatic experiences in early childhood. The author describes the rigid, almost unbridgeable split in the patient's ego as deriving from different traumas, creating very different experiences in the transference and countertransference: what she conceptualises as a melancholic cluster, in which the experience of unbearable abandonment comes from the impossibility of repairing a ruined Object; and a schizoid cluster characterised by a delusional transference to the analyst as a schizoid Object, and a threat to existential survival connected to paranoid-schizoid terrors.