Psychopathology I: Neurotic Psychopathology

Fourth Year Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2020-21, 3rd Trimester — Fridays, 1:45-3:15pm
Charlotte Malkmus, MA LMHC
Michael Pauly, MD

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April 2, 2021 — Triangularity and Relationship to Neurotic Character

[35 pages]

32 pages

The Oedipal situation has long been regarded as the developmental triangular space allowing the child to work out conflict with two parents.

Winnicott, in this chapter, stresses that the depressive position in emotional development is an achievement, reached as early as the second half of the first year. He describes the mother’s holding of the situation over time as enabling the baby to work through coexisting love and hate (think affect tolerance, tolerance of ambivalence). He states that he wishes he could rename this position as the “stage of concern” rather than the “depressive position” given the need to delineate it from clinical depression. Attainment of the depressive position (repression-based defenses, concern for the other) helps to distinguish patients from more primitive mental organizations (paranoid-schizoid position / splitting-based defenses, concern for the self).

Britton presents his idea that the observed link between the child’s parents forms the “closure of the Oedipal triangle” and generates a relational triangular space, which if handled well makes possible a “third position” in the mind of the child. It provides a developmental hypothesis for the conditions allowing for the development of an observing ego, reflective capacity, and tolerance of separateness / exclusion that are consistent with neurotic mental organization and healthy relationships. The model can similarly be used to understand the conditions leading to narcissistic and borderline characters (and hysterical/histrionic) and the transference-countertransferential experience one has working with these patients.

Auchincloss E.; Samberg, E. (2012), “Oedipus Complex”, in Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, pp180-183

Winnicott, D.W. (1954). Ch 21, “The Depressive Position in Normal Development” in Collected Papers, pp262-277.

Britton, R. (2004). Subjectivity, Objectivity, and Triangular Space. Psychoanal Q., 73(1):47-61.