[Between inside and outside: the double orientation of social climbers]

This paper is concerned with patients whose success and prestige aspirations are oddly connected to "failures". At a first glance, these behavioral patterns resemble a form of "failure at success" and have a particular bearing upon the patient's professional field. These patients who have grown up in working-class families, are attempting to escape the social surroundings of their origin and attain higher status through university education. The development of all these patients proceeded under relatively similar conditions: Relatively impermeable boundaries were found to exist between the interior of their families of origin, which were considered to be "morally better", and the social environment, which, distorted through projection, was perceived as "dangerous" and "bad"; the children's social radius of experience was largely limited to the private sphere of the family; as a result, their ego development remained partially impaired. The children were commissioned by their parents to carry out contradictory missions which, on an intra-psychic level, resulted in inconsistent egoideal demands. The children are all the less capable of carrying out the mission of success commissioned by the parents due to the fact that an adequate inner-familial offer of operative modes of identification--in the sense of "this is how it can be done" (Hoffmann, Trimborn, 1979)--is for the most part lacking. This results in narcissitic crises. Particularly in the psychosocial field of their professional lives these patients have developed a unique adjustment pattern which is distinguished by an entanglement of their efforts at professional success and reputation with occupations considered to be of "no avail" but which serve to maintain undissolved infantile object fixations. This adjustment pattern is the more stable the better efforts at success and infantile object fixations can be accommodated for in the same social role.