Psychologist Nancy Shaffer, Ph.D. -- D.C. Dept. Mental Health -- Letter 7/19/2000

TO: Nancy Shaffer, Ph.D.

FROM: Gary Freedman
DATE: July 19, 2000
RE: Notes re: Personality Profile -- Protection Fantasies
_________________________________________

The following notes elaborate the issue fantasies relating to a protector, an issue we have discused at a few previous sessions.

I try to show how the fantasy may arise in at least two different types of personalities, and that the meaning of the fantasy will be sepcific to a particular personality type and is not a fantasy that has meaning in itself.

PERSONALITY I

The following personality profile summarizes the variables of cognition, intrapsychoc fantasy, sigigificant developmental disturbance, and social adjustment found in shamans: faith-healers found in non-Western cultures. The profile resembles my own personality.

While I am not a shaman, the profile is a useful heuristic model that shows how a complex of variables (whose specific features are recognized in Western psychiatry) can operate together in a persobnality, and highlights the role of a particular intrapsycic fantasy in a personality.

COGNITION:

Subject's mental approach is more systematic than most persons. Subject handles objective data "with keener awareness of peculiarities and more selective theoretical interest," which indicates a high reality testing potential.

Subject has an ability to arrive at meaningful and insightful inferences about his social reality, which is based on his ability to perceive, select, and synthesize trivial details relating to his environment. Subject's special cognitive skills confer a deceptively deluded quality to his inferences about his social reality, and give rise to the incorrect perception that subject is paranoid or delusional.

Subject's Rorschach responses, which were unusually detailed and expansive, are consistent with a cognitive style that is associated with high reality testing potential.

PERSONALITY II

The second personality is similar to, even facially-indistinguishable from, the first. The second personlaity is at the low end of the separation-individuation spectrum. In fact, the two personalties reflect two distinct poles of internalized object development. The first personality is struggling with the effects of object loss, the second is struggling with the failure adeuqtaely to separate from the primary care-giver.

COGNITION:

Reality testing is poor. Subject's mental approach is projective and impressionistic, and serves the need to preserve an idealized self-image rather than the need to master the environment through understanding.

Subject has a "jump to conclusions" mental approach, and a low capacity to reserve judgment. At times subject's mental approach has a paranoid or delusional quality. that will

INTRAPSYCHIC FANTASY:

A significant feature of subject's unconscious fantasy system is his peculiar sense of having been chosen for a special relationship with the sacred, as if his being-in-the-world were for the sole purpose of establishing a "cosmic emotional relationship" with an omnipotent protector. While such a relationship is of a primitive order, and similar to the "oceanic" feeling found in borderline states, it represents much more than the wish for fusion with a parental imago. Subject's fantasy system reflects both a regressive pull toward a more need-satisfying relationship, or fusion, but also represents a splitting of the self and object images (as found in the Family Romance fantasy) that complements the infantile shared anxiety system that prevails in narcissistically-regressed groups.

The peculiar fantasy system of subject (and the specific anxiety state that his fantasy system represents) tends to promote his isolation from narcissistically-regressed groups (in whose members an alternative, shared anxiety system prevails). But more: unlike the overtly psychotic individual whose idiosyncratic anxiety states and fantasies simply isolate him from groups, subject's specific anxiety states and associated fantasies complement the infantile shared anxiety system and associated fantasies of the narcissistically-regressed group. Put another way, the regressed state of subject vis-a-vis regressed group members will have the quality of a folie-…-deux. For example, factually-baseless rumors generated by members of a narcissistically-regressed group that subject is potentially homicidal complement and gratify subject's sense of unconscious guilt.

FANTASY:

Subject's fantasy system centers on gaining and preserving an idealized maternal protector, a figure whose imagined presence preserve's subject's narcisssistic integrity by representing to the subject the idealized image of the nurturing, protective primary caretaker.

SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENTAL DISTURBANCE:

In childhood subject responded to failures of maternal empathy as actual loss of the mother, and his ego is structured around his perception of an unreliable, capricious, and unprotecting primary caretaker. Subject is enmeshed in pathological mourning. schizoid detachment, anxiety over future loss and guilt over perceived destruction of the maternal object. Subject experiences internally-generated frustration of needs and dissociated lack of awareness of needs. (p. 185)

SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENTAL DISTURBANCE:

SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT:

Subject tends to be socially-reserved and aloof. His shyness is rooted in guilt. Subject's social withdrawal is attributable in part to a childhood experience of perceived loss or unreliability of emotional satisfaction that derives from developmentally-appropriate close and consistent maternal attachment. (p. 185)

In group situations subject tends to serve as a group-dystonic trouble unit for group members: a repository of forbidden impulses and qualities, a lightening rod of common anxiety.